Which City Builds Skyscrapers the Fastest?

Last week we looked at trends in skyscraper construction speed for New York and Chicago, finding that New York has gotten significantly slower at building skyscrapers over time. Chicago, on the other hand, has declined in speed less steadily, and currently builds skyscrapers much more quickly than New York does.

The obvious next step is to look at skyscraper construction speed around the world. How do modern New York and Chicago compare with other cities, both in the US and abroad? Which cities build skyscrapers the fastest and the slowest today? Let’s take a look.

I started with Wikipedia’s list of 50 largest cities in the world. For each city, I pulled data from the Council on Tall Building and Urban Habitat (CTBUH)'s skyscraper database on every skyscraper completed between 2000-2020 that was taller than 100 meters, had a start and completion date, and had a gross floor area. For most cities this was a small fraction of the total number of skyscrapers in the dataset, so many buildings aren’t included in this dataset.

Some large cities turned out to not have enough data: either they didn’t build enough skyscrapers, or the skyscrapers they did build didn't have the necessary information, or both. For instance, Paris only has a single skyscraper completed in that time period in the database, the Tribunal de Paris building. And because gathering information for the Chinese cities was so time consuming, I stopped after the first six (the five largest plus Hong Kong). [0] And I added several other (mostly American) cities that weren’t in the top 50 but nonetheless seemed interesting. The result was a list of 986 skyscrapers completed in 39 cities around the world. Most of these (~740 of them) were in just four countries: the US (261), China (242), Japan (152), and Canada (89).

Leave a Comment