Futuristic mega-city where 32m people live – and some 'never see the sun' – The Mirror US
It sounds like the stuff of science-fiction. Megacities where the inhabitants move from home to workplace without ever reaching ground level. Some stuck at the bottom of the ladder never seeing sunlight.
But that urban nightmare is already a reality in one massive municipality. And even though it’s the largest city in the world by population, the chances are that you’ve never heard of it.
A whopping 32 million people live in Chongqing, in Southwestern China. It covers a huge geographical area roughly the size of Austria. With multi-level highways, a monorail system that cuts right through through residential tower blocks, and a skyline studded with brightly lit skyscrapers, Chongqing looks like something straight out of Blade Runner.
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Jackson Lu, a local TikTokker, says that “sunlight is a luxury” for those who live on the city's lower levels. He describes how he lives on the 18th storey of an apartment building, and travels to work by walking down to the 12th floor, where there’s “a subway station that feels like the entrance to a fallout shelter”.
The “subway” is actually a metro monorail system that glides over the city which cuts through residential buildings here and there. When he arrives at his station, Jackson steps out onto the main city square – on the 22nd floor of another giant multi-storey development.
Even Chongqing’s buses operate far above ground level, taking passengers on a rollercoaster ride along narrow “flyovers” that stand on narrow stilts above the city streets. Jackson continued: “Somehow the bus takes me 20 storeys up in the sky.”
Some locals do own private cars, but the roads are a tangle of dizzying overpasses and spiral roads that link upper and lower levels. Multiple layers make up the city – so people living in one of Chongqing’s many residential tower blocks might find themselves perched on top of a giant shopping mall.
It even creates its own weather systems and in September this year an unusually late heatwave, with temperatures ranging between 35-40C, brought Chongqing to a virtual standstill.
The authorities fired some 200 rockets, loaded with silver iodide, in hope of triggering rainfall to cool the baking-hot streets. But they got a little more than they bargained for – a storm of bras and knickers fell across the city.
"I just went out and it suddenly started to rain heavily and underwear fell from the sky,” a resident named Ethele said on Chinese social networking site Weibo.
The so-called "9/2 Chongqing underwear crisis” was blamed on the cloud-seeding initiative triggering wind gusts of over 120mph down the city’s narrow streets and snatching laundry from washing-lines.
It’s just one more bizarre aspect of a city that has grown dramatically in the past few decades: “The story of this Chinese megacity starts and also kind of ends in 1997,” YouTuber PPPeter explained. “Back then Chongqing was just a big city somewhere in South Western China.”
“To boost the economy and make administration smoother Chinese government added three districts of Fuling, Wanxian, and Quanjiang to Chongqing,” he continued. “This step made Chongqing the biggest city proper in the world with a population of 32,000,000 people and the area of 82,403km², which is about the size of Austria.”
