Last week's Shanghai Star (September 25 - October 1) dedicated two News Focus pages to the question: Is Shanghai growing too high, too fast?

Many locals tend to respond in the affirmative, perhaps in the spirit of romantic ruralism that so often possesses modern urban souls.

Yet, interestingly, when local residents are asked directly which part of the city they would most like to live in, most say Puxi, especially the downtown area. In fact, most would probably like to live in exactly those parts of the city that are packed with 40,000 people per square kilometre - and, fortunately, 40,000 per square kilometre can, and do, live there.

Urban density brings with it certain problems, of course, although mostly of a relatively trivial and technical nature - such as congestion, light reduction and geological stress. It should be well within the capabilities of a sophisticated city to solve them, by introducing advanced transport systems, the latest structural engineering techniques, new materials and imaginative urban design.

More positively and significantly, dense cities also optimize the benefits of urbanism in general, maximizing human proximity, communication and mutuality. These factors, far from being narrow technical issues, capture the essense of social evolution and advanced civilization.

The process of urban intensification, packing ever more people ever more tightly together, is almost certainly the single most important driver of historical progress on earth - amounting to something like a cosmic transfomation in the nature of the human species.

Rather than moaning about the soaring, delirious growth of Shanghai, it would be far better to celebrate and foster it. If explicit goals are called for, they should be to double urban intensity within a decade, and in each decade subsequently, mobilizing the swelling pool of social ingenuity in the interests of experimental human collectivity.

Nothing could be more depressingly inappropriate, from this perspective, than appeals to a Tokyo (density 11,800 per sq km) or Paris (density 20,300 per sq km) model - when these cities are proving to be vastly less successful and dynamic than contemporary Shanghai.

Paris is mostly familiar to Shanghainese from the movies, no doubt appearing sophisticated and genteel in comparison to the brash cityscape mushrooming around them. Yet Paris (like Tokyo) is a metrocentre within a basically stagnant society, an architectural museum marooned in sprawling - and increasingly dysfunctional - suburbs.

Paris is spacious because predominantly low-tech 19th century buildings dominate the urban "core" and because the world's first modern totalitarians designed it with the convenience of the national military in mind - clearing space for broad boulevards which were impossible to barricade and easy for armies (in fact, usually German) to march down in order to suppress outbreaks of revolutionary chaos.

The suburbs of Paris are in many cases carefully isolated ghettoes, filled with hostile, unemployed unassimilated immigrants, where drug abuse and religious fanaticism flourish and police enter only in armoured cars.

For those seeking a suburban existence there will always be such spaces, whether comfortable or hellish. But for those drawn to the highest pitch of urban life, density is the key. Pack them in.

starcomment@yahoo.com