Chinese Ghost Cities
Exploring the Chinese phenomenon of "ghost cities" and finding out if they have created a modern way to urbanize
ABSTRACT
China is known for many things, including what foreign media has dubbed “ghost cities”. This name is applied to several different examples, such as half finished developments that went bankrupt, but most often it’s a term used to describe full fledged cities that have a nearly non-existent population. While many foreign actors have raised concern over this Chinese practice, claiming they’re building just to feign progress and growth.
In reality these urban developments are usually, but not always, offshoots from already established mega-cities that boast populations in the millions. The purpose of these connected cities is to create more room and housing for an increasing urban population that’s thoughtfully planned and complete with modern features and amenities, rather than attempt to grow the established cities using a piecemeal approach.
China is known for many things - it’s led by the famously controversial communist party (CCP), home to more than a billion people and it’s the second largest economy on the planet. Over the last two decades it’s also been known for building cities for seemingly nobody. Dubbed “ghost cities”, these are full scale metropolises with all of the features and amenities that mark many of the greatest cities around the world - robust and comprehensive public transport infrastructure, row upon row of high rises that accommodate both apartments and businesses, and attractions for both residents and visitors alike. All it seems to be lacking are the people.
It’s important to establish what the term “ghost city” means in the Chinese context. These aren’t the old frontier towns in the American west that have a single row of buildings constituting the entire city. Those towns tended to pop up around economic prospects, such as gold being found, and once the opportunity dried up the people had no reason to stay. When discussing China, people are discussing construction projects that would be more comparable to Dallas, Texas or Philadelphia, Pennsylvania going uninhabited. With that in mind, it raises the question: where is everyone?
Oftentimes these towns and cities are built before anyone is living there. As mentioned previously, China is home to more than a billion people, and they overwhelmingly live in cities. As such China hosts several of the largest cities in the world with housing being in ever increasing demand across the country. So, with more and more people being born or moving to cities, how do you provide enough housing for all of them? There’s just one answer: build more.
This is where the Chinese have taken a novel approach that differs from much of the rest of the world. Instead of taking a massive city, say Beijing, and adding another apartment complex to the existing grid, urban planners will find a location nearby and start planning an entirely new project. These cities act more like subsections of the already existing city rather than a brand new fully autonomous entity. As with most major locations in China, they’ll often be connected to their mother city by a robust rail and bus system, meaning that traveling between the two is relatively seamless.
These fully fledged but yet-to-be-inhabited cities aren’t the only type that people refer to when talking about ghost cities, which has resulted in some confusion and criticism over the years. The less common but much more unfortunate kind occurs when a large construction project was planned and undertaken, but before it was finished was abandoned. This can be due to several reasons but a common one is simply due to the developers running out of money. This can put Chinese homebuyers in a difficult spot. Given the red-hot housing market that’s persisted for years these developers will often sell out their units before construction has even begun. This can leave people destitute without anywhere to live aside from a half finished skeleton of an apartment. In one such example, a family was inhabiting their shell of an apartment that lacked running water, so they would have to join their neighbors on a walk down from the apartment to the one faucet on a nearby street corner that could provide running water. They’d then have to haul this back to use throughout the day for cooking, cleaning and drinking.
While this reality is all too real for many, the fact is it isn’t the most common type of ghost city in China. It’s an ugly remnant of greed run amok, and in an ideal world these apartments would be finished and the people who were taken advantage of would be helped, but it’s not happening in every city in China. Overwhelmingly the ghost cities take the form of the former: meticulously planned urban developments that start as plowed fields and within a few years are glistening metropolises ripe for new residents.
There are many advantages to building a city before you have anyone to live there like China is doing. Because they’re effectively working on a blank canvas and not being forced to contend with already existing buildings, a lot of care and thought can be put into these new developments. Oftentimes you will see like-use buildings being sectioned together to create an ideal environment for whatever purpose you’re aiming for - all of the shining office buildings will be cordoned off in the business park, the warehouses and shipping depot will be tucked away in the industrial zone, and you can put the commerce and entertainment into an aesthetically pleasing and easily accessible section of the city. On top of this Chinese developers are able to effectively utilize the state of the art transit that the country is known for and make the entire city easily accessible from day one.
Furthermore, this ground-up approach can allow cities to be designed with special purposes in mind or to help meet certain goals. One aptly named example of this is the Chinese Medical City (CMC), which is a smaller development off of Taizhou. As the name suggests it has been planned to be a hub for medical research and practice. The guiding thesis behind its planning is that with so many brilliant scientists and doctors in one area, collaboration and progress would take off at an accelerated rate.
The ghost city model isn’t without flaws. As the name implies it takes years for these developments to reach a meaningful population for their size, and that’s if the people do come. In the case of the CMC, one documentary visited it during its nascent years. The investigator found that many of the businesses were being staffed, such as a local Starbucks, but they served practically nobody. It’s not uncommon for these frontrunners to live in isolation in these ghost cities waiting for the population to follow them. Projects of this size are massive investments that will take decades to ever see anything resembling a semblance of a return. It’s possible that these urban offshoots never see the migration they were built for and so just become an exercise in waste at staggering scales.
Furthermore, the land that these cities are built on isn’t always just an uninhabited plot. Frequently small farms or entire villages are forced to move off of their land for the project to begin. While those who are being forced to move are compensated in some way, oftentimes with somewhere new to live, they aren’t necessarily eager to leave. They had established lives, businesses and perhaps generations of family history tying them to where they were living. It’s an unfortunate reality that oftentimes, for urban ambition and progress to manifest, the more rural citizens get pushed out.
I’ve grown up in a town where I’ve seen housing become more and more unobtainable for locals over the course of my life. One reason for this is the constant migration of wealthy outsiders, which is easy to understand. It’s a beautiful location with an attractive climate and many desirable amenities. But it also seems to be caused by the local government impeding the kinds of developments that could help bring down the price of housing. There are laws and ordinances in place that prohibit buildings from exceeding 60 feet in height. A quick walk downtown reveals countless buildings that are only two stories tall at best. The people that live here desperately need more high-density housing that enables them to access what the city has to offer. Instead we get more large, single family houses in subdivisions that increase sprawl and isolation. So any time I research the Chinese system where they start planning from the ground up and with decades of use in mind, it frustrates me.
The Chinese model isn’t perfect, and it wouldn’t work everywhere. It would be one thing for a city like New York, New York or Los Angeles, California to try it. They already have the population and an almost insatiable demand for housing. It likely wouldn’t ever make sense to build a few dozen highrises in small to medium cities. But there’s something to the Chinese ethos of “build what we’ll need in the coming decades”. So far it seems to be working for them. Several of the first ghost cities to garner international attention are now boasting populations measured in the hundreds of thousands, with Pudong being perhaps the most notable amongst them. Pudong is an offshoot of Shanghai and one of the first to don the title “ghost city” by foreign media. After a few decades it now acts as a powerful financial hub known across the world.
Once again: the solution for every town experiencing a housing crisis across America isn’t to throw up a few skyscrapers and call it a day. For many, both because of financial realities and population projections, the piecemeal approach is the most sensible. But the success China has seen over the last few decades with their modern approach to planning and design seems to be massively successful in enabling everyone in China to own a home, where the ownership rates are in excess of 85%. Perhaps it’s time for us to start watching what they’re doing and take some of those lessons and begin reevaluating our own cities.
