Shanghai is now the world's most densely populated city, according to Wu Jiang, deputy director of Shanghai's urban planning administration bureau.

JG Ballard, writing in his novel Empire of the Sun about the decadence of the city in the late 1930s, observed that "life in Shanghai was lived wholly within an intense present".

China currently consumes 40% of the world's concrete and 90% of its steel. Much of that is suspended above the heads of Shanghai's pedestrians. At one point in the mid-90s, one quarter of the world's construction cranes were at work there.

None the less, one thinks of the French writer Guy de Maupassant who used to dine at the restaurant at the Eiffel Tower in Paris because it was was the only place where he didn't have to look at the thing.

But if you dream of driving over raised motorways through a shouty neon cityscape where Blade Runner meets Vegas, go to Shanghai and hire a convertible.

The 420m Jingmao Tower (slightly smaller than the 457m Oriental Pearl TV tower which it sits beside in the Pudong district) is an extraordinary skyscraper, arguably the building that gives the lie to Shanghai's silliness of high rises. It is the fourth-tallest building in the world and was designed in a style that quotes traditional Chinese pagoda design while echoing the art deco of Manhattan's most beautiful skyscrapers.

The Jingmao is thus emblematic of the mingling of western and eastern creative forces - something that the city has been good at ever since the British, those lovely people, used their leverage to create millions of opium addicts and compel the Chinese government to open up the city as a treaty port in the 1840s. "Shanghai has always been a hotch potch of east and west," says the Shanghainese architectural historian Lyn Pann. "It is a hybrid, and the Jingmao is a perfect expression of that. Most of the rest of the new stuff is rubbish though."

"Until the moment that Deng changed the rules, Shanghai had been a city frozen in time," says Lyn Pann. "It had been punished by the communists for its capitalistic decadence during the pre-revolutionary era and for being the centre of foreign influences in China."

And so, on the outskirts of Shanghai, connected by new massive motorways and rapid transit railways, 10 new cities, each of one million people and each with 10 satellite towns of 200,000 people, are being built. One, New Harbour City, will have the biggest docks in the world; another, An Ting, will be a huge car-manufacturing city; a third, called Song Jiang, will be a university centre. - Stuart Jeffries, Where Blade Runner meets Las Vegas, The Guardian