Shanghai boasts the world’s largest scale model of a city. This enormous 1,000 square feet mini structure fills every inch of the third floor at the Urban Planning Museum
Shanghai has the world’s largest city scale model: 1,000 square feet big
Shanghai (China) is one of the world’s most populated cities with over 18 million people living in the city. And although it’s a city with high buildings and skyscrapers, you need a lot of space to allocate so many people. Would you get a better idea of how big we’re talking if you knew that the city spreads over 6,340.5 square kilometres? You don’t think that’s big? Have you ever been to London?, well, London’s metropolitan area is around 1,577.3 square kilometres big, so now think 5 times bigger than that.
A scale model of the city might help you getting a better idea of it, and you can see a very large one on the third floor of Shanghai’s Urban Planning Museum. You get dizzy just by looking at the scale model, it’s around 93 square meters big, this is something like 1,000 square feet. The scale model covers the whole area of one of the floors in the museum. It’s impossible to fit the entire model in just one photograph.
And there’s a little trick. This is not how Shanghai looks like now, this is Shanghai in 2020, by then all the new skyscrapers would be finished, the ones being built now and the ones that there are still in project. There’s no doubt this is the city of the skyscrapers, since 1990 they’ve built over four thousand, this is an impressive two hundred new skyscrapers a year!
There’s bigger cities than Shanghai, but Shanghai definitely has the world’s largest city scale model.