Day 3: Lingang New City & Yangshan Deep Harbor, Tuesday, June 19, 2012

After dealing with the first impressions of China on the first day, we started our second day with a breakfast on the beautiful terrace of the youth hostel. While digesting, the group enjoyed a short introduction to today’s topic: Urban development projects. This topic was looked at throughout the whole day by visiting and discussing different projects in the Lingang area.

It seemed that the jetlag was still present, since it was deadly silence as everyone was asleep in the bus we took to get to the areas of interest. Our first stop was at the Linggang Management Group.  Everyone asked themselves when he paid the price to enter the multimedia show that followed afterwards, introducing the Lingang area. Unfortunately the marketing manager Lili could not answer all of our questions. To see for ourselves what the Lingang area looked like in the real world, we visited the Lingang Taxfree Export Zone with its large storage halls. It was unbelievable to see this entire (and sometimes still empty) storage place. This encouraged the students’ creativity that ended in ideas to establish a skating park or, if once the area was abandoned, to build some industrial style hipster DINK lofts.

Storage space in the Lingang Logistics Park (Photo: Heike Mayer)

Donghai Bridge to Yangshan Deep-Water Port. It is one of the world`s longest sea bridge.
(Photo: Heike Mayer)

Yangshan Deep-Water Port (Photo: Heike Mayer)

Apparently this port moves 12.5 million TEUs a year (photo: Heike Mayer)

Afterwards we drove over the approximately 30 km long bridge to the Lingang Deepwater Port.  It was very impressive to see the large area with all the cranes and containers and the logistics associated with it. At lunch we really realized that we were near the ocean, since only seafood was served (which was not appreciated by everyone).

Back in Lingang in a subdistrict called Shanghai Lingang Wanxiang, Mr. Xu of the Wanxiang Economic Development Center gave us a short introduction to that specific area which shall become a residential zone within Lingang. We really could not believe, that here such a modern and organized district will be established like it is planned today.  After that we visited the large lake and the city in the middle of Lingang New City. It was quite abandoned but had some nice architecture. We could see that the potential for a big city was there, but where there are no people there is no city (yet).

We finished our day individually back in Shanghai.

Lingang New City: the model that shows lake Dishui and
adjacent residential and industrial development zones. (Photo: Heike Mayer)

New buildings and sidewalks in Lingang already need repair. (Photo: Heike Mayer)

Empy urban landscape in Lingang New City (Photo: Heike Mayer)

Waterfront in Lingang. The city is planned for 800.000 people. (Photo: Heike Mayer)

Gated community in Lingang. (Photo: Heike Mayer)

Housing development in Lingang. (Photo: Heike Mayer)

Our conclusion of today is that Lingang New City has very good infrastructure and also some great buildings, but is not yet filled with people and live. Therefore it will be very interesting to see how the city will develop in future. Will it really be filled with 800’000 people at some point in the future or will it die a lonely death of an abandoned city?

Step count on our pedometer: 11 858

Jonas Studer, Simon Bach