Nine Chinese cities in the southern part of the nation around the Pearl River Delta are proposed to be merged to create world’s largest mega city at a cost of $300 billion with a population of 42 million.

The new mega city proposed by the Chinese planners under the merger scheme “Turn The Pearl River Delta Into One” will have a 16,000 square mile urban area created that will be 26 times geographically larger than Greater London and twice the size of Wales, The Telegraph reported.

The report said the city will stretch from China’s manufacturing heartland Guangzhou to Shenzhen including Foshan, Dongguan, Zhongshan, Zhuhai, Jiangmen, Huizhou and Zhaoqing, accounting for nearly 10 percent of the Chinese economy.

The infrastructure project to be built over 10 years will link around 150 projects in transport, energy, water and telecommunication networks of the nine cities together with an express rail line connecting the hub with commercial Hong Kong, the paper quoted Ma Xiangming, the chief planner at the Guangdong Rural and Urban Planning Institute and a senior consultant on the project, as saying.

The idea is that when the cities are integrated, the residents can travel around freely and use the health care and other facilities in the different areas, said Xiangming.

The new mega city will help spread industry and jobs more evenly across the region and public services will also be distributed more fairly, he said.

Rail journeys around the urban area will be cut to a maximum of one hour between different city centers helped by the inclusion of 29 rail lines totaling 3,100 miles, the report quoted Xiangming as saying.

Chinese planners believe the project will help in reducing phone bills by 85 percent as also improve conditions of hospitals and schools. The mega city project also expects to address the issue of pollution caused by industrialization around the Pearl River Delta.

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