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Cities are competing to create the tallest skyscraper, these charts compare the worlds highest. Image: REUTERS/Nicky Loh Stay up to date: Cities and Urbanization License and Republishing World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use. The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum. Global Agenda The Agenda WeeklyA weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda
As you’d expect, 2015 was another bumper year of skyscraper-building. Turns out the men who build buildings (and the handful of women who are allowed to join in) were keen to make them as tall, and therefore phallic, as possible. Go figure. The Council on Tall Buildings and Urban Habitat has released some nice stats on where, and what, said men (and women) built last year. CTBUH logs the completion of all skyscrapers over 200m in height, so for the purposes of this piece the folllowing glossary applies:
Got that? Right, let’s go. We finished the most skyscrapers of any year on recordIn total: 106. In 2014, we finished 99; in 2013, 74. Europe got a new tallest buildingMoscow’s OKO tower, standing at 353.6m, became Europe’s tallest building. It also looks a bit like a fork chopped in half:
It beat Europe’s previous winner, Moscow’s Mercury City tower, by around 16m. In 2016, it’ll be knocked off the top spot by the as-yet uncompleted Vostok Tower, also in Moscow. Well done Moscow. Lots of tall buildings. Very manly of you. Content from our partners The world got a new second-tallest buildingThe Shanghai Tower, located in, you guessed it, Shanghai, is finally done. This means it now qualifies, at 632m, as the second-tallest building in the world. Here it is next to two other supertalls in Shanghai’s financial district:
It’s the one on the right. The tall one. Image: Getty. Jakarta was surpisingly prolificJakarta, capital of Indonesia, is frankly underrated. By some metrics it’s the largest city in the world, and it has a truly astonishing traffic problem. It was also the city which completed the most skyscrapers last year, finishing seven in total. Tied in second place were Nanjing, Nanning,and Shenzhen, all Chinese cities with five completions last year. All of our top 100 tallest skyscrapers are now supertallThere are now 100 supertall buildings in the world. This is especially impressive when you consider that, as recently as 2010, the total stood at 50. North America has basically given upThis chart shows how the location of the world’s tallest skyscrapers has shifted over the past century or so. As you can see, only a handful are now located in North America, after its dominance earlier in the century. North America only completed three skyscrapers last year.
Europe, while never exactly a big-hitter, completed eight last year, which is actually an all-time high. China is the undisputed king of skyscrapersIt finished 62 skyscrapers last year. That’s more than one a week. The skyscraper trade has basically recovered from the recessionThis chart shows the tallest building completed each year, and as you can see, there was a real lull in the post-crash years. The Burj Khalifa was completed, but it was also begun before the crash took hold. The Shanghai Tower, meanwhile, is the only megatall building that has been started and completed since the global financial meltdown.
The CTBUH predicts that next year, 135 skyscrapers will be completed, setting another new record. Onwards and upwards, eh. This article is from the CityMetric archive: some formatting and images may not be present. What was the main reason for building skyscrapers?So, why do we need skyscrapers? The simple answer: more room for more workers, or in the residential frame, more residents. In line with rising population density, and advancements in engineering, height limits around the world are being revisited and revised to maximise space for commercial and residential growth.
Why are skyscrapers built in most modern cities?Just like with towers, skyscrapers are built with a specific purpose in mind. Reducing housing costs, to level inequality, and allowing more people to live in city centers are three of the founding reasons that skyscrapers were built. Whether these are still true today depends on where you look.
Why did skyscrapers develop in the late 1800s?Early skyscrapers emerged in the US as a result of economic growth after the Civil War, the financial organization of American businesses, and shortage of land for building. New York had a colonial history and because of that its real estate was broken up into many small parcels of land.
How did the skyscraper impact society?Offering a great deal of opportunity, skyscrapers offered a new realm to citizens, one in which connected businesses with both average New Yorkers and tourists. Skyscrapers also gave New York an architectural identity, as proven through the dynamic change in its skyline.
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