Editor Philip Langdon picked up our Price Tags on Shanghai:
[And it does rather look like the air is coming out of the Chinese real-estate balloon.]The essay captures a huge, ambitious city in all its contradictions.
Price devotes somewhat more space to the admirable than the appalling. The errors being made in Shanghai, however, will be glaringly obvious to anyone who knows urban planning and development. After all, many of the mistakes that Shanghai is making are mistakes that North America pioneered.
I’m grateful to Price for this illuminating piece, which grew out of a study tour he took last May. Yet in the end, I’m left in a mood more like (Paul) Krugman’s. To me, the big question is what it will take to get China to see how damaging its modernization program is turning out to be.
