Ecogram IV
CHINA – Supercities and Mega-Migrations: China’s Urban Futures
November 11, 2011 • 10:00AM – 6:00PM
Columbia University, Avery Hall, Wood Auditorium
“Ecogram IV: CHINA – Supercities and Mega-Migrations: China’s Urban Futures” is the third annual conference on the changing landscape of urban spaces, curated by Professor Saskia Sassen, Robert S. Lynd Professor of Sociology, Member of the Committee on Global Thought, Columbia University.
By 2025, China is expected to have 15 super-cities with an average population of 25 million. Europe will have none. This conference assembled scholars and practitioners from a variety of fields to develop a fuller, interdisciplinary view of the migration flows and rapidly transforming spaces that are revolutionizing China. Panels topics included Migrations: Post-Economic Crisis Patterns and Potentials; Super-Cities: Green and Smart?; “The Super City” and the “Right to a Slum”; and Architecture + Environment.
“The annual influx of rural migrants to China’s cities increased from 9 million in 1989, to nearly 30 million a decade later… there were some 25 million migrant workers in China’s cities in the mid-1980s, and about 70 million 10 years later. By 2003, the floating population was double this figure and it remains in the neighborhood of 140 million people-fully 10% of China’s total population.”
-Thomas Campanella, The Concrete Dragon. China’s Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World, 2008
This conference was part of the Signature Research Project Urbanizing Technology: The Mobility Complex.