Word: shanghais
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...With a minimum price of $490,000 for a villa in Thames Town?more spacious digs go for $669,000?Songjiang New Town will be out of reach for many of the lower- and middle-class Shanghai residents whose housing woes these satellite towns were originally intended to address. More than 3 million migrant workers have flooded into Shanghai, and as the city center is torn up for office high-rises, 226,000 people were forced to relocate to suburbia in 2003. But a property bubble has prevented many citizens from finding affordable housing near Shanghai. "Of course, the developers...
...group of farmers eyeing the airy granite-and-glass concoction that will serve as the new town hall, exhibition center and restaurant arcade grumbles that there's no way they will be able to afford to live in their own hometown. But inside the building, Yue Xing, president of Shanghai Highpower-Oct Investment Ltd., one of the developers of Pujiang New Town, defends his urban vision: "We are not judging [future residents] by how much money they have but by their commitment to enjoying a better quality of life. We have to think about how to make Shanghai a green...
...organic communities. The world is littered with failed cities, where urban planners overlooked residents' needs and incomes. In the Brazilian capital of Brasilia, for instance, the sprawling urban center was designed for easy car transport but now teems with slum dwellers too poor to afford even bicycles. As Shanghai tries to address the needs of its own multiplying population, some are worried that the same mistakes could be replicated in the city's planned satellite towns. "Each of these [foreign-themed] towns wants to follow the model of quick development," says Zheng Shilong, a professor at Shanghai's Tongji University...
...Even in Shanghai, most urban planners were against the foreign-themed project when it surfaced five years ago. "None of us supported the idea," says one municipal advisory-committee member. "But we weren't called in to criticize. We were called in to make the proposal work." The idea, after all, was a pet project of Huang Ju, Shanghai's former Communist Party secretary. But since dreaming up his satellite scheme back in 2000, Huang has moved on to Beijing, where he is now a member of China's Cabinet...
...Today, in Shanghai, few in government seem eager to acknowledge this massive suburban undertaking. Over the past two months, three municipal departments declined to comment on the project, a curious silence in a city that is usually keen to burnish its international reputation with its latest, hippest urban scheme. Local papers, which tend to give property developments breathless coverage, have also been remarkably muted in recent months. Ironically, the developers of those foreign-styled suburbs that are already finished report high sales rates for what are, after all, some of Shanghai's most comfortable neighborhoods, even if some of them...