Mick Hartley

Mine’s bigger than yours! In Incheon, South Korea, they’re planning a pair of new world-beating towers – but they’re not the only ones thinking tall:

On a stretch of reclaimed land, near where Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s forces came ashore during the Korean War, this city will build a towering monument to its rising ambitions: twin skyscrapers reaching 2,013 feet into the sky, higher than the tallest building in the world today.

Developers in neighboring Seoul responded by increasing the height of a skyscraper they were planning by 66 feet. In December, the chief of a Seoul ward announced an even more grandiose plan to erect a 220-story building that, at almost 3,200 feet, would be twice as high as the Sears Tower in Chicago.

Incheon and Seoul are part of one of the biggest booms in tall-building construction since the skyscraper appeared more than a century ago, a rush spreading from established tower magnets like Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Shanghai and Hong Kong to lesser-known cities across fast-rising East Asia and the Persian Gulf.

Awash with cash from South Korea’s economic takeoff, Incheon and Seoul are being joined in the building rush by Busan, which also plans two skyscrapers of more than 100 stories. In the Middle East, Mecca and Doha are building soaring new towers. So are a half dozen lesser-known cities in China, including Tianjin, Guangzhou and Wenzhou. Experts say the next wave of skyscraper proposals could come from economically booming India.

Here’s a comparison with the current high-rises.

Other skyscraping proposals – apart from the Burj Dubai, where they’re not revealing the height until completion in the hope of frustrating possible rivals – include the Shanghai World Financial Centre, the Freedom Tower in New York, the Chicago Spire, the Mubarak al-Kabir Tower in Kuwait, and the Port Tower Complex in Karachi.

Top of the world though is…London! Tower Hamlets, in fact. Populararchitecture have proposed a mile-high tower capable of holding 100,000 people. I wouldn’t hold your breath, mind. Here’s a more realistic summary of what London is actually going to get in terms of new high-rises.