In 100 years we will be an entirely urban species

Chongqing is a dense and smoky inland city, the heavy-industry, high-rise home to over 30 million people. It is to China what Chicago was to 20th-century America, or Manchester to 19th-century England, and it’s growing at an extraordinary rate. Every day a tide of 1,500 new people washes in to Chongqing. Every day an extra 1.5 million square feet of floor space is constructed for new residents. It’s a vast megalopolis, a megacity of the sort that will soon take over the world.

I met Mr and Mrs Zhang on the day they first arrived in Chongqing from their rural village. It had taken them almost ten years to raise enough money to move and required outrageous sacrifice: a brutal savings regime and years living in a fetid slum far away from their children, who they saw only once a year. On the week I visited them in the sweltering heat of the Sichuan summer, they had pooled together their accumulated cash from years of sweated labour in motorcycle-parts factories, and had paid the full purchase price of 150,000 yuan (£14,000) for a clean and elegant three-bedroom apartment, turning them, legally, into city-dwellers.