Europe is beginning to look more and more like a third world compared to East Asian countries.

Not hardly.

Europe is old money, East Asia is new money. New comers to the game will always have the newest equipment, but to say that Europe looks third world is just silly.

http://www.skyscrapercity.com/......php?f=156

Thanks for that! I also knew it was some sort of “ism” but for the life of me could not remember.

BTW, the Burj al Dubai will be something like 2,220.

Well crap…I can’t find the link.

Here it is. It’s from that Time article back in May about the ‘greening of Seoul’. The bit you referred to is here:

“We’ve made people realize that quality of life is important,” he says. “We’ve set a new standard not just for Seoul, but for Korea.” It’s a standard that the rest of Asia can learn from, as its cities slowly wake up to the costs of development. Kim Won Bae of KRIHS tells the story of visiting Shanghai and meeting a Chinese urban planner who had a burning question: how many 100-m-high or taller buildings did Seoul have? “I asked her why she asked that,” he says. “She was still in the age of triumphalism. Seoul was once in that period as well, but we have passed it.”

I laughed about this at the time, as this had been published weeks before. The news about these buildings is nothing new.

Tokyo
Cairo
Barcelona