Shanghai,like so many people here, Wang Yongxin happily moved into a high-rise apartment in the 1990's, when the construction frenzy seemed to capture this financial center's ambitions to become the next New York or Hong Kong. New skyscrapers always seemed to be rising, and Shanghai's self-esteem rose with them.

Now, though, sitting on a sidewalk bench in the Pudong district, the epicenter of the city's recent building boom, Mr. Wang, a local business owner, is more frustrated than impressed. He frets about traffic, pollution and what many local residents say is the diminishing quality of life. There is even the inconvenient fact that some scientists believe the skyscrapers are causing the city to sink.

One solution, Mr. Wang said, is to stop building skyscrapers. "It would certainly alleviate some of the problems," he said. "There are enough high-rise buildings."

Surprisingly, many officials in Shanghai seem, at least partly, to agree. Sometime in October, the city's urban planning bureau is expected to revise local building laws to limit, if not ban, high-rise development.

If a new law is approved, and the opacity of Chinese politics means nothing is ever certain, it could spell the end to a period in which Shanghai came to symbolize China's roaring economy. Few, if any, cities in the world built as many tall buildings during that period. A planning bureau report says Shanghai now has at least 2,880 buildings of 18 stories or higher, an overwhelming majority of them constructed since the early 1990's.

It was Deng Xiaoping, then China's aging supreme leader, who came to Pudong in 1992 out of frustration with Shanghai's laggard economic growth. He called on local officials to hasten development and "not waver until the job is complete." His words are now on a monument across the street from the Jin Mao Tower, which at 1,381 feet is by some calculations the world's fourth-tallest building. The planned World Financial Center, expected to surpass the twin, 1,483-foot Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, as the world's tallest building, will rise above the monument.

"The whole nation got excited about the development," said Wu Jiang, a former university professor who is now deputy director of Shanghai's planning bureau.

But if Shanghai officials and planners regarded every new building as another step in its march to becoming a leading world city, mundane problems, the sort experienced by so many other places, have arisen. The population density in certain downtown areas exceeds that in Tokyo and New York, according to the planning bureau report. Some downtown areas became so dense with buildings that they became "heat islands," where temperatures rose above surrounding areas, a local institute found.

In a city known for its graceful colonial architecture along the Bund, the skyline ?the pride of local officials ?became more formless as residential towers cropped up in every corner of the city. With increasing frequency, residents are filing complaints based on an obscure law mandating that every home or apartment must receive at least two hours of sunlight a day.

"The interesting thing about Shanghai is that for a variety of reasons it was almost designed from the outside in, as if planners were more concerned with how it looked to the outside world than how it worked from within," said Christopher Choa, who runs the Shanghai office of a New York-based architectural firm, HLW.

Mr. Wu, when he was still a professor, had been critical of city planners, calling for more parks and public spaces and for halting the city's demolition of historic buildings. But when the city government appointed him deputy director of the planning bureau, he said he was convinced that attitudes were changing.

"We still want to encourage all the economic development," he said. "We want people to come here. But on the other side, we want to make our city better."

The other question, of course, is whether the buildings are causing the city to sink. Built on a swamp, Shanghai sank by roughly eight feet from 1921 to 1965, largely because of the draining of groundwater beneath the city. But officials managed to correct the problem and virtually stop the sinking ?for a while. Statistics vary, but the city is again sinking, at roughly a centimeter a year. A study by a local institute said the sinking is worst in the downtown areas with the highest concentration of new buildings.

Still, many local officials and academics say they are not overly alarmed. Tang Yi Qun, a professor of geo-technical engineering at Tongji University, said both Tokyo and Mexico City have worse problems with subsidence.

The debate about curbing development in Shanghai comes as many economists and government officials are expressing concerns that the national real estate market could overheat and threaten China's economy.

For now, though, regardless of what happens with the economy or the building law, cranes will still rise in Shanghai: officials say as many as 2,000 buildings of all sizes have been approved or are already under construction.

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