The city, about 100km (60 miles) south of Beijing, was designed to reduce population pressure on the capital and speed up development in the surrounding province of Hebei and neighbouring mega-port of Tianjin. The site, which was an open plain dotted by rivers and wetlands and home to a small rural community a decade ago, is now fully connected physically and digitally to the rest of China. Unlike most major cities in China, there are no skyscrapers, underground passes or overhead walkways.
Instead, all its buildings are of medium height and, most unusually for a major city in China, more than 70 per cent of the city is given over to green spaces such as parks and lakes, while every road has cycle lanes running alongside them. But although it has an official population of 1.2 million permanent residents, another striking feature is the relative lack of people out on the streets.
00:54 China’s new megacity Xiongan takes shape near Beijing with residential area ready by summer 2023 In the city’s Rongdong district – which hosts the planned finance district and tech park – most of the street-level commercial spaces remained vacant, waiting for businesses to move in. David Chew, the founder of a Tokyo-based tech start-up, said Xiongan was still flying “under the radar”. “Xiongan is yet to differentiate itself in terms of branding .
.. is Xiongan becoming Beijing 2.
0? It is still unknown for me,” Chew said. However, some businesses such as real estate agents and kind.