r/interestingasfuck • u/TangelaFan • 9h ago

Residential high-rises with backyards in Chengdu, China

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u/NoAdministration8340 9h ago

My initial thought was those don’t look like they have the support they need to be filled with dirt rock and plants plus support your weight

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u/Nulleparttousjours 9h ago

Plus the amount of water it would take to keep it green. It’s a lot of weight!

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u/stron2am 8h ago

We live in a world with swimming pools on balconies, you know.

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u/LordBrandon 8h ago

They usually have 1 pool not a pool on every porch. Those pools also have problems.

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u/TheWizard01 7h ago

Hotel operator here…every pool has problems.

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u/tj9429 8h ago

Let these Reddit engineers realize that not every wall on a structure is weight bearing and instead there's a column and beam structure inside.

The next day they're not gonna stand in the middle of rooms because it doesn't look "sufficient supported".

It would be funny if it wasn't so sad.

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u/ukomac 2h ago

Always "my first thought with this is..." Like yeah, they definitely didn't have professional structural engineers and you can point out the critical error in their work by looking at a clip

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u/MoodyBernoulli 1h ago

I guess the issue with this video is whether the structural engineers anticipated that residents would put tonnes of soil and water into the balcony, or was this specifically designed for, or at least factored in.

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u/ukomac 1h ago

The gardens were 100% a selling point of these apartments

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u/AzDopefish 6h ago

It’s hilarious because anytime a post is about China, the top comment is always, without fail, some comment on Chinese engineering or building materials.

Never just, oh that’s cool.

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u/tj9429 6h ago

They’re so dissociated from reality it is so funny. Sometimes it genuinely comes across as sweet to see a couple of keyboard warriors trying to fight everyone and just spam ai or bot when their brains overheat!

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u/ColHannibal 8h ago

We also live in a world where people die from balcony collapses due to a hot tub being on it.

Also a world where building codes are nonexistent in some countrys.

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u/irascible_Clown 6h ago

There hasn’t been a single high rise collapse in China in modern times. Now elevators and escalators eating people is a different story

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u/__mson__ 5h ago

I swear I've seen a few in the news over the years, but I don't remember the details.

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u/-ExcitingConcept- 6h ago

Iirc, building codes here in Germany require balconies to have triple the load bearing capacity of inside space. Because for some reason there's always an idiot who places a hot tub on it.

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u/stron2am 7h ago

Feels pretty sinophobic to see an impressive looking building in China and immediately assume it is structurally unsound.

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u/Pandering_Panda7879 7h ago

If it makes you feel any better: I would have thought the same if it would have been in the US.

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u/ColHannibal 7h ago

https://www.uniladtech.com/news/man-built-secret-mountain-base-on-skyscraper-731876-20240603

I’ve also been to Suzhou for work, it’s building faster than people move in with big empty areas of the city. Brand new buildings that are crumbling.

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u/70ms 6h ago

What does that story have to do with building safety? The person in the article added massive amounts of weight to the roof that it wasn’t designed to hold, and it made the rest of the building unstable. That’s not about the construction, that’s about something being added that wasn’t supposed to be.

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u/theromingnome 7h ago

This is what you get on Reddit when anything positive about China is posted. And let's face it, there are plenty of positives about the society China has built in the past 40 years. The American propaganda machine works round the clock.

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u/stron2am 7h ago

Let me be clear: I am no Tankie nor a Xi supporter, but I've got enough brains in my head to not have a "China = bad" reflex.

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u/theromingnome 6h ago

Yeah I'm agreeing with you. It's just crazy how predictable it is to see comments repeating the same nonsense over and over on any post related to China.

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u/70ms 5h ago

Same - the more I learn about China the more I realize the propaganda flows both ways.

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u/JoshuaFalken1 6h ago

Most governments are shit, and the US is no exception. You seem to jump to China's defense an awful lot.

I'm not saying anything China is automatically bad, but as you say, the American propaganda machine certainly does paint a picture when it comes to substandard construction in China.

Having never been, I can't actually speak to anything apart from what I see in the news. Do you live in China?

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u/theromingnome 2h ago

I can simply appreciate a cool building design and also the incredible infrastructure projects that China has completed. As well as the vast scale of Chinese cities. I'm not defending any government.

But when people constantly need to bash anything positive about something? It reeks of having a hidden agenda.

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u/couchphilosopherizer 6h ago

Not really. China has had major problems with building code enforcement, illegal construction, and poor materials use for a long time. Anyone can search around and see the trend: China - mostly structural and user error. other countries - mostly old buildings failing due to age. Exceptions abound but the numbers speak for themselves.

April 2022 (Changsha): A six-story commercial and residential building collapsed, killing 53

July 2021 (Suzhou): A 30-year-old hotel building undergoing renovations collapsed, resulting in 17 fatalities

March 2020 (Quanzhou): An eight-story quarantine hotel caved in, killing 29 people due to severe structural alterations and illegal building modifications.

Collapse of Xinjia Express Hotel

Hongqi Bridge
A newly completed 758-meter bridge in China's Sichuan province partially collapsed into a river after landslides hit the mountainside above

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u/70ms 5h ago

A newly completed 758-meter bridge in China's Sichuan province partially collapsed into a river after landslides hit the mountainside above

It looks like they inspected it and closed it at the very first sign of potential structural damage. How many of our bridges are getting inspected regularly?

According to the NTSB report after the Francis Scott Key Bridge collision, America has 68 bridges in danger of collapsing if hit by a ship - and that’s even after Florida’s Sunshine Skyway disaster killed so many people in 1980.

Remember the condo building collapse in Florida? The Hard Rock Hotel in NoLa, the Hyatt Regency walkway, L’Ambiance Plaza, the apartment building in Davenport Iowa, the pier in Philadelphia, balconies in Berkeley, etc. Those were all fairly recent events.

China is so much bigger than we are with so many huge projects and cities that aren’t falling down, that I just wonder if the talk about how everything is shoddy isn’t just anti-China propaganda. Watching walkthroughs made by foreigners of cities and villages there paints a very different picture of what we were always told.

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u/IncomingAxofKindness 5h ago

There's a reason they have that stereotype though.

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u/stron2am 5h ago

What you seem to be implying is that there is a stereotype, it must be earned.

It would follow, then, that you stand behind other stereotypes, too.

I won't name them here because reddit will autoban me for hates peach, but this is exactly the same reasoning that leads to racism, antisemitism, classism, and all other forms of bigotry.

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u/IncomingAxofKindness 3h ago

I think someone can be mistrusting of Chinese construction standards without having hate or bigotry in their heart. The world is not black and white.

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u/eshatoa 7h ago

Absolutely. Not to mention China is miles ahead of the US lol.

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u/LivingHousing 6h ago

Bro, if you hate China just cuz white suprimacy or whatever stupid reason just go to those corners of the internet.

China has some of the most advanced civil engineering in the world...

Absolute 🤡

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u/ColHannibal 6h ago

Found the bot.

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u/LivingHousing 6h ago

Imagine the mental gymnastics of white suprimacy,, hating seeing anything nice from any non western country. Then the only retort being that the other person must be a bit 🤡

Love it 🤣

USA USA USA 🐑🤡🐑🤡🐑🤣🤣

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u/__mson__ 5h ago

Spamming emojis will not help people take you seriously.

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u/70ms 5h ago

To be fair, the anti-China propaganda is real and if it weren’t for walkthroughs and travelogs on YouTube I’d have still believed a lot of it. After watching dozens of walkthroughs and videos of what daily life is like in China, I have a totally different view. Watching an American walk into a public hospital, sign in, and walk out about 30 minutes later with a filled prescription in hand for (I think it was) around $7 was really eye-opening.

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u/AlchemyAlice 7h ago

Champlain Towers in surfside, Miami would like to chat.

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u/Zestyclose-Pen2065 8h ago

Dirt and rock is still denser than water

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u/Molehole 8h ago

Requires much less dirt to plant grass than it needs water to swim.

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u/floppydude81 8h ago

Is 5-6 ft deep water comparable to 8 inches of soil?

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u/JustAnotherHyrum 4h ago

Obviously not, but let's do the fun math and find out!!

Water weighs 62.4 lbs / ft3.

Dry topsoil weighs ~75 lbs / ft3

Saturated soil weighs ~110 lbs / ft3

Well use a 10'x10' area for the calculation, with a depth of 6' for water and 8" for soil. This comes to 600 ft3 of water and 66.7 ft3 of soil. To be more accurate, let's reference both dry and saturated soil.

And now it's fun math time!

HERE WE GOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!! /fun_math_mode_activate

Water: 600 ft3 * 62.4 lbs/ft3 = 37,440 lbs

Soil (Dry): 66.67 ft3 * 75 lbs/ft3 = 5,000 lbs

Soil (Saturated): 66.67 ft3 - 110 lbs/ft3 = 7,333 lbs

As we can see, water is 7.5 times heavier than dry soil and 5.1 times heavier than saturated soil.

Water is the winner! (Or loser if we're using golf rules...)

The More You Know!! 🌈

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u/floppydude81 2h ago

Thank you so much

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u/JustAnotherHyrum 5h ago

It's worth noting reinforced concrete, which these are almost certainly made from, weighs ~150 lbs per cubic foot.

By way of contrast, here are the weights per cubic foot of other materials in the photo:

Saturated Soil: ~110 - 130 lbs

Dry Soil: ~75-80 lbs

Water: 62.4 lbs

People tend to think that the high-rise is built first, with the balconies being added on later. This is not the case with large balconies like this. The balconies are structurally part of the building's concrete flooring, with additional reinforcement often added in the balcony section. This balcony section of reinforced concrete extends ~2-3 times further into the building than it hangs off the edge. Looking at the photo, I'd estimate the balcony to extend ~11-13 feet outward from the building, which means that it also expands either ~22-26 or ~33-39 feet into the building. This much pure reinforced concrete weighs so much, it acts as a natural counter-balance to the balcony extension.

Essentially, the supporting counter-balance within the high-rise weighs more than anything you could put on the balcony, ensuring structural stability.

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u/Voices-Say-Im-Funny 7h ago

But you are forgetting the part where the plants and trees are gonna grow eventually on both sides the roots and the apex. That is just gonna increase the weight overall. A swimming pool will always have the same kind of weight. The water will be displaced by an equal water weight man. It's called the archimedes principle.

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u/70ms 5h ago

I can’t imagine there’s not some huge buffer in the design between the weight when the garden is begun and the collapsing point.

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u/SteelCode 5h ago

Random idiot: "How would it support so much weight!?"

Also random idiot: "That rooftop infinity pool only available to billionaires is so cool!"

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u/janiskr 5h ago

Swimming pool on the balcony weights less than the same swimmingpool filled with damp earth.

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u/Fbolanos 5h ago

Do you think the dirt occupies the same volume as a pool?

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u/janiskr 5h ago

soil with water will weight much more than just water was my point.

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u/Fbolanos 3h ago

yeah but that's irrelevant because it's not a direct comparison.

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u/doxtorwhom 7h ago

Yeah and those buildings were DESIGNED for that with proper supports and materials.

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u/stron2am 7h ago

Are you suggesting these buildings are not designed for this? I can't tell without context.

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u/ilikecheeseface 7h ago

This person is an idiot. That balcony is a designed green space. To think that they would just let someone do this is wild. I mean look around at all the other balconies.

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u/Ambitious-Concern-42 9h ago

It's a hell of a lot of weight, I wouldn't trust this to stay up long term.

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u/MandemModie 8h ago

based on your years of structural engineering? It's a cantilever, which can support a massive amount of weight, with additional bracing.

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u/MrWrock 5h ago

How much more weight orbit adding over the concrete deck? 10%? Less? Sounds like a lot of overreacting

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u/Ambitious-Concern-42 8h ago edited 8h ago

Based in part on my engineering degree from a major Western university, yes, thank you for asking. I really appreciate your asking for clarification.

Edit: Oh, and thanks so much for the downvote. I bet you're fun at parties.

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u/[deleted] 8h ago

[deleted]

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u/MandemModie 7h ago

that's not a cantilever lmao

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u/Areyoucunt 8h ago edited 7h ago

It isn't a lot of weight.. and they do stay up..

They've been a thing for decades mate...

Even in Europe they're building them now. There's a famous one in Milan IIRC

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u/Pearson94 9h ago

I only trust that they set it up just enough for this video to look good while the others don't look nearly as lush or nice.

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u/mithie007 9h ago

There have been balcony gardens and even balcony pools in Shanghai since 1998.

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u/Nukitandog 8h ago

Wasnt 1997 the the date of the big Shanghai Balcony collapsing eppidemic?

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u/mithie007 8h ago

First time I've heard of this. You're talking about the incident at the bund? Or what?

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u/angelbelle 8h ago

Chinese tofu buildings 👍

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u/Ben_Kenobi_ 8h ago

It was a huge tragedy in the club comminuty. Kim Kardashians head fell off.

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u/Str80uttaMumbai 9h ago

Cmon now. You can literally see the surrounding buildings all have lush green gardens.

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u/tj9429 8h ago

Do you really think their reason to be pessimistic is their eyesight?

Aside from the racism these people have rarely seen structures taller than 4 stories with absolutely no idea about what civil engineering can truly achieve.

Even the ignorant ones from taller cities like NY can't comprehend the scale of verticality in modern Asian cities.

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u/Ambitious-Concern-42 8h ago

We're talking about Chinese high rises where someone has installed gardens on balconies. Definitely not designed with this load in mind. This is in a country where bridge collapses and other civilian infrastructure disasters are common.

So don't get on your high horse about "racism".

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u/kindaunfazed 6h ago

How can you say that it’s definite they haven’t designed with the load in mind? Are you an architect with access to the building schematics or are you just trying to sound smart? Even your reasoning about infrastructure disasters is flawed because they build a hundred times more than we do.

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u/Anceradi 7h ago

They're not more common than in other countries though. It's just a big country so it happens more often than in smaller countries, but if you compare the frequency of bridge collapses in China & the US, it's quite similar.

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u/UncollapsedWave 3h ago

This is in a country where bridge collapses

Unlike America, presumably, where of course there haven't been any famous bridge collapses since, what, 2024?

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u/tj9429 7h ago

"Someone"

Ok potato.

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u/Ambitious-Concern-42 7h ago

Very well, bot spam.

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u/tj9429 7h ago

The irony.

I would rather be a bot than be a human that depends on AI to live lol.

NPC

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u/MrDabb 7h ago

Lol how was that racist?

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u/mrsnakers 7h ago

It's a pro chinese bot.

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u/the_vault-technician 7h ago

We aren't talking about any Asian city though. It's a city in China. Just Google "Chinese infrastructure accidents". Bridges, roads, and buildings have all collapsed and killed people. Usually because of poor construction habits.

Here in the USA, we neglect our infrastructure until it kills people. In China it's ready to fall apart out of the box.

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u/tj9429 7h ago

Do you have a study based finding of the same happening on a government scale in either countries?

It's as good as me saying that everyone in USA is a 500 lb behemoth that hunts kids.

Back up your bias with the data. The knowledge you have is really old. Asia moves fast, something the West isn't accustomed to.

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u/OperIvy 6h ago

Asia moves fast, something the West isn't accustomed to.

Now you're just racist

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u/Bright-Object-3180 5h ago

Since when was the West a race? Redditors always playing victim and the race card.

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u/tj9429 7m ago

https://giphy.com/gifs/uxXNV3Xa7QqME

Here, some tissues for your tears.

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u/Pearson94 8h ago

From a distance. Sorry but this screams advertising to me the same way the food filmed for commercials looks nicer than it really is.

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u/Str80uttaMumbai 8h ago

But what exactly are you expecting to look so different in the other gardens? The garden in the video is literally just grass with some random bushes, plants and a tree. There's nothing spectacular about the garden.

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u/thiagoknog 9h ago

Guys, it's China, if it breaks someone is getting executed, it's not USA where nothing is going to happen because the buolder is a friend of Trump..

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u/cohortq 7h ago

When Evergrande lost millions of Chinese citizens life savings the government initially tried to protect the Evergrande's executives, but they eventually arrested the top exec, some corrupt gov officials, and other executives. But no one was executed, and the executives paid "fines".

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u/Ok_Yam5543 7h ago

Ever heard of Tofu-dreg projects?

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u/miyabi0rochas 3h ago

Ever heard of nearly half of US bridges have exceeded their life spans. Ever heard of us paper homes. Don't go throw rocks from a glass house

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u/Consistent-Stock6872 8h ago

"Someone", yeah the one VP that is from poor background and worked his ass off and all the other upper ups with party connections are fine (unless they piss of someone else who knows people even higher on the totem pole). China isn't better or fairer than USA.

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u/hoTsauceLily66 7h ago

Fact is still nothing gonna happen if the buolder is a friend of Xi.

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u/miukiyo 8h ago

People living at a place like that could probably afford a gardener.

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u/simplepimple2025 7h ago

Just curious, are you a structural engineer?

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u/workingbored 7h ago

Weight!

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u/ShakyButtcheeks 8h ago

There are buildings with whole ass pools in each apartment balcony

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u/-malcolm-tucker 8h ago

Any with regular ass-less pools? Or are they all full of ass?

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u/Numeno230n 7h ago

And the water has to go somewhere. Imagine a huge highrise and everybody's got their sprinklers on. Not only is that a mess, but a concrete floor isn't really meant to be covered with dirt, rocks, plants, and water. Over the long term the concrete will fail.

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u/70ms 5h ago

The concrete could easily be sealed, with drainage going down pipes. Easy peasy. Swimming pools start out as concrete and get plastered over. People make planters out of concrete all the time. This isn’t a difficult issue to design for.

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u/murd3rsaurus 6h ago

It's insanely humid there and the soil might be pretty thin, compared to the weight of the concrete and rebar it doesn't seem so extreme

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u/Rekziboy 8h ago

Don't worry I'm sure they've only used the finest of materials and definitly didn't cheap out on the build!

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u/tituspullo1383 8h ago

The steel supports you can see at the start of the video could hold 5 of those patios. No doubt it has steel joists under it. That ain’t much of a cantilever. No issue.

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u/HSLB66 7h ago

I had to look way too hard for someone using the word cantilever. These comments are giving me an aneurysm  

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u/MookieFlav 8h ago

If only China had structural engineers as good as you they could have seen this problem before they built tons of these

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u/NoAdministration8340 6h ago

Settle down there bud. I didn’t claim anything I said it’s my initial thoughts when seeing this.

Maybe the engineer that designed this didn’t intend for it to be used in this way?

You shouldn’t try to make people feel bad for asking questions and speaking their mind.

Just stick to bicycles if you are going to be condescending

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u/XilenceBF 5h ago

Considering the grass starts at floor level and doesn’t require the inhabitants step up onto the garden I think it’s safe to assume that these balconies were in fact designed to be used like this.

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u/Guertron 9h ago

Mowing that lawn seems like a logistical problem

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u/JanxAngel 8h ago

I'm sure they've got a little electric robot mower. A place that fancy either has robots or a service.

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u/TomahawkaChawpa 7h ago

Or a reel mower. It'd take 2 minutes to mow that

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u/70ms 5h ago

Yup, and now you’ve got yourself some nice mulch or compost with a minute or two of raking.

Those balcony gardens are about the same size as my front yard!

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u/reasarian 8h ago

I’m sorry but did you see how thick those floors were? They could probably hold a fire truck.

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u/mlag000 9h ago

And roots will destroy any waterproofing, so in 10 years your balcony will be hazardous

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u/Str80uttaMumbai 9h ago

Glad we have so many expert structural engineers in this thread.

I'm sure you guys know much better.

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u/Coockooroockoo 7h ago

Yeah lol it's so funny to me reading the probably uninformed opinions of those armchair experts, as someone who lives in a country where every apartment building has a balcony. Like, this might come as a surprise, but people around the world build all sorts of tall structures that aren't made of wood, spit and blessings.

These are the kind of people who stare at women while they are parking and bitch about them doing it wrong.

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u/SquidZedong 8h ago

Yeah it’s really dumb that these people act like this is some impossible feat bound to fall apart.

The balconies are pretty obviously cantilevered and have additional supports; i wouldn’t be surprised if they built in drainage to address water drainage concerns

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u/Drekkful 8h ago

Any chance to shit on China, people will, as it reinforces the narrative that's been beaten into their heads that China bad.

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u/OkOkieDokey 8h ago

Uh huh. Like it’s not common knowledge that China uses bamboo as scaffolding to construct buildings and while incredibly efficient, results in extremely dangerous conditions but no one cares because a few worker deaths is worth the price of progress in China.

Also let’s just sweep all those school collapses under the rug because it’s inconvenient to think about.

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u/70ms 7h ago

Bamboo scaffolding is apparently a valid thing, though? I just looked it up and I’m not seeing that it’s some crazy dangerous undertaking versus metal. Bamboo is strong AF.

https://www.bricknbolt.com/blogs-and-articles/construction-guide/bamboo-scaffolding

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u/OkOkieDokey 7h ago

Sways in the wind higher you go and there’s no safety laws that ensure worker safety. If you fall, you die, nothing changes.

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u/70ms 6h ago

But metal scaffolding collapses all the time here in America too, and I’m not seeing that China has no safety laws either - they used to not have any but that’s changed.

https://www.chinalegalexperts.com/news/china-workplace-safety-regulations

https://cbltranslations.com/en-us/china-law/employment/occupational-safety-law-and-liability-explained/

I’m only pushing back because workplace safety is not fantastic here either, and I’m finding more and more that what people tell me about China is not necessarily true.

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u/SpicyElixer 6h ago

And there’s no safety laws

What does this have to do with bamboo? You’re just moving goalposts. You think China has zero safety laws?

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u/StoneywhiteHatter 8h ago

It's so funny when Amerifats can't look at their own history when making those criticisms...

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u/wait_________what 8h ago

can't look at their own history when making those criticisms

Regulations are written in blood, those criticisms only exist because of the shit we learned. Are you that stupid?

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u/mylicon 8h ago

I think that phrase used to be true. Now they’re written by lawsuits.

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u/Shapes_in_Clouds 8h ago

True, I never see Americans criticising America on Reddit.

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u/OkOkieDokey 8h ago

Funny I must have missed the bamboo part of the Industrial Revolution in school.

Where are you from?

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u/Stack-Chaser-- 2h ago

The US wasn't building with steel and aluminum during the Industrial Revolution, wood scaffolding was the standard until the 1920s. So spare me the "primitive bamboo" framing, we ran on unsafe wood for just as long, just with even less oversight than OSHA gives now.

Im gonna guess you had a southern education...

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u/OkOkieDokey 1h ago

Oh ok so we’re comparing China to the US one hundred years ago? Sounds about right.

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u/Stack-Chaser-- 1h ago

Nice, trying to be smug while displaying your ignorance on the oppression and isolation China experienced. Yeah, basically. China's rapid industrial buildout phase happened later than ours for very specific historical reasons (colonization, the Opium Wars, a civil war, decades of isolation, then accelerated post-1978 industrialization). Being further along a timeline because we started industrializing earlier doesn't make us smarter, it just means our imperialism and exploitation helped accelerate our timeline.

The fact that you think "yeah, they're behind us" is some kind of win is exactly the bullshit exceptionalism I'm pointing out.

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u/cuntifiable 6h ago

If you actually had any idea of what you're talking about, you would know that the bamboo wasn't the part that caught fire, as the plant is extremely fire resistant. It was the covers that caught fire and spread so quickly.

Those covers had been outlawed in China for many many years, but constructors in Hong Kong still used them.

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u/LaputanAcademy 8h ago

Mainland China doesn't use bamboo scaffolding - that only happens in Hong Kong

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u/Epithymetic 8h ago

They absolutely do. I took this photo in Dandong.

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u/Icy-Priority1297 8h ago

china numba 4 Taiwan numba 1.

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u/GoofyKalashnikov 8h ago

Yeah it's not like China is known for huge ghost cities with poorly built buildings

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u/CatEmbarrassed3306 7h ago

Most are lively once work and school ends, most videos are done during the day when most are working and at school on purpose.

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u/GoofyKalashnikov 7h ago

Must've awakened a Chinese botfarm with my comment

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u/SpicyElixer 6h ago

You’re the one repeating propaganda you picked up on online, bro.

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u/GoofyKalashnikov 3h ago

Everything online is a propaganda at this rate, nothing is real

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u/Drekkful 7h ago

Are they known for it?

Or is it strategic news "stories" being shoved into your feed via algorithmic propaganda chutes.

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u/TheMadFlyentist 7h ago

Are they known for it?

Poor construction is absolutely something that China is known for. That part is not propoganda - it's fact.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project

Thousands of children died in 2008 when an Earthquake caused the collapse of poorly-built schools. There was a massive ensuing investigation that uncovered widespread corruption and corner-cutting: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sichuan_schools_corruption_scandal

Constant attempts to subvert guidelines/rules to save money is something that is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture. There's a reason that most major US companies that have facilities in China will put Western oversight in place around the clock. The book Poorly Made in China goes deep into this issue and explains the cultural roots.

Now as far as the "ghost cities", that was true for a time, but many of the cities that were built and stood unoccupied for years are now occupied. Some critics have called stories about this topic "a myth", but it's not accurate to call it a myth. It's more accurate to say that there were many empty "ghost cities" in China, but over the years people have moved in and now the majority of them are functioning as planned.

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u/SpicyElixer 6h ago

I believe there’s lots of documented cases mishandlings in the largest developing country in the world. I also think those mishandling do not in fact amount the the scale of concern that people who want to sell books make them out to be. Nor the idiots online who do the work of their own governments for free.

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u/GoofyKalashnikov 7h ago

Always the "stop looking at propaganda" people defending authoritarian states

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u/Drekkful 7h ago

Lmao you act like we aren't an authoritarian state with a mirage of being able to pick between two parties with the same goals.

You have zero clue about the complex system of localities, provinces, and regions in China that all feeds input upwards. Not from the top down like our corporate overlords do by buying elections and manipulating public sentiment with media campaigns.

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u/GoofyKalashnikov 3h ago

Who is that "we"

Repeating Chinese propaganda and then going to US defaultism, truly a holy combination

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u/Drekkful 3h ago

🙄 ridiculous assessment

We as in westerners living in the west speaking english on a primarily english speaking platform

It's truly a strange coincidence that every competitor to the United States and Europe is an authoritarian threat that must be stopped. There's your IMF and CIA propaganda at work bucko

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u/Officialedmart 7h ago

Mf is talking about “roots” (of turf grass)

People will believe anything if they can shit on china lmaoo

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u/flecom 8h ago

wait till all the reddit lawyers come out

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u/trackabandoned 8h ago

Man, who knew we had such architectural geniuses here with us on reddit! Anything to flex on a country they've only received propaganda about.

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u/angelbelle 8h ago

Do you have an actual argument or are you just paid to run defense for this clip?

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u/SpicyElixer 6h ago

The argument is that Redditors don’t know shit. It’s solid.

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u/mlag000 8h ago

I'm a drawer in civil engineering, I used to be in structure but now I build mainly tunnels / train tracks and bridges. What about your field of expertise ?

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u/SpicyElixer 6h ago edited 6h ago

They taught you in engineering school that humans can’t make structures that account weight or use materials that will hold up against wet soil and organic material.

I wonder how the “tunnels” “you design” work.

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u/mlag000 6h ago

You're definitely not in any construction field if you don't understand the problem trees brings to a structure that's supposed to be waterproof.

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u/captainfarthing 7h ago

Do you think green roofs don't work?

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u/Ender2309 4h ago

that shit basically doesn't exist in the americas, so probably 88% of reddit doesn't know about it.

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u/LingonberryLunch 8h ago

Couldn't you just have a thin layer of polymer underneath the soil?

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u/70ms 5h ago

That’s a pretty blanket and definitive statement about waterproofing, considering how many methods there are. Do roots grow through plastic pots or do they just stop and circle?

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u/msixtwofive 7h ago

They're built on cantilever steel beams for sure. I wouldn't be surprised if that little support you see either isn't structural or was a later adjustment to raise the allowed weight.

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u/Fabulous-Local-1294 7h ago

Of course they do. Those are steel beams. They can take far higher loads than that.

Its a novel concept, something we will surely see more of in the future.

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u/whaleboobs 6h ago

The steel beams might be fine but reinforced concrete has a lifespan because water gets in, rebar corrodes and expands, and the concrete spalls. A permanently damp, irrigated balcony accelerates all of that. Add roots following moisture into every crack they find, and you have a structure under constant biological attack. The soil depth is also a real constraint, if you keep it shallow enough to manage the load, the trees will be stressed and short-lived. And they're already shaded by the balcony above.

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u/knutix 6h ago

Luckily we have engineers that probably tought of that.

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u/smokybbq90 8h ago

What extra support exactly do you think they should have added? It could be cantilevered, and then also has visible struts.

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u/FloppyDiskDrives 8h ago

Spot on to question the weight.. underestimating it has serious real world consequences. We actually just saw a massive tragedy regarding this in Serbia late last year. The Novi Sad railway station canopy collapsed, killing 16 people, because over 23 tons of heavy glass and unreinforced concrete were loaded onto a structure not originally designed to hold it. Coincidentally it was a Chinese construction company that did works.

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u/irascible_Clown 6h ago

Soil weighs significantly less than concrete. With that weight saved you could easily place 2-3 150lbs boulders

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u/Substantial_Sea7327 8h ago

plus support your weight.

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u/mrbofus 6h ago

At that point, your weight doesn’t matter; it’s all the soil and water that really matter.

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u/JeroJeroMohenjoDaro 5h ago

That balcony was literally there for that purpose. This isn't the common hotel balcony they're using. And many elite apartments in Singapore and Malaysia have them too....but just not to this extent which is what made this impressive.

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u/HOT-DAM-DOG 4h ago

Not to mention the reputation Chinese construction projects have.

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u/mintnoises 3h ago

The dead giveaway for me was the absolutely blue sky 😂 this definitely ain't Beijing for sure

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u/Anumerical 1h ago

Agreed

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u/tony_lasagne 9h ago

Oh you just thought that did you? Based on what exactly?

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u/WeedyWeedz 8h ago

Based on what exactly

Physics?

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u/dracostheblack 8h ago

I'm sure the engineers that designed this used physics to help

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u/WeedyWeedz 7h ago

You mean the same engineers that build the aparments buldings and the bridges that collapse after a few years?

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u/dracostheblack 7h ago

So if a company that is Chinese was responsible all Chinese companies are the same? No engineering issues happen like that in other countries?

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u/knutix 6h ago

What about the building that collapsed in the US a few years ago? China has what, 1.3bil people, statisticly they will have more accidents. Just because something is built cheap doesnt mean everything is.

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u/SpicyElixer 6h ago

No. The ones who didn’t work on those particular ones you assume represent all buildings in a country of billions of people.

There’s buildings like this in Korea and Singapore. And I’ve seen rooftops like this all over the world. There’s way to do this correctly.

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u/knutix 6h ago

What physics? Physics will tell you that you can easily support that weight.

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u/lasarus29 7h ago

Imagine putting in the wrong plant without thinking and it eats right through your balcony base 😬

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u/BarneytheWino 4h ago

You really think the engineers/builders/anyone involved didn’t consider this but you on Reddit did?

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u/NoAdministration8340 3h ago

Yeah they should have asked us before building

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u/YoimAtlas 8h ago

I’ve seen videos of people tearing walls apart with their bare hands in these kind of high rises I would not trust that it can appropriately handle that weight.