The Chinese Dream

Dreaming is not Chinese. By 2020 four hundred million farmers will be living in new cities. The urban middle-class will have doubled in size. The world's biggest pool of one-child consumers will be out shopping. To accommodate these shifts the equivalent of a brand new Eurozone, or 400 mega-cities, is mushrooming in the Chinese countryside. There is barely time to sleep, let alone dream about the future. The Chinese Dream maps what urban China will probably be like in the year 2020, and investigates what alternative scenarios are feasible. It presents both the hopes and hazards China faces. Ignoring star-projects and focusing instead on the new forms of urban reality China is fast producing through countless anonymous development projects, it asks what landscape will result from the largest migration in human history?

And what kind of society will emerge with such flash-urbanization? At the same time that a global energy crisis looms and China's wealth gap is rapidly widening, we question whether China is inevitably reconstructing the American Dream. Through diagrams, facts, essays and interviews the Dynamic City Foundation (DCF) has sketched alternative routes, a conceptual leapfrog in urbanization: a new dream which transcends the current market-driven reality and lands in city forms as yet unseen.

Combining a conceptual approach with in-depth analyses, the Dynamic City Foundation looks to tackle the big questions facing China's cities of today, and sketches routes into their futures.