![]() The difference, however, is that modern urban developments in China have an unprecedented scale and speed. Most countries have experienced a similar development phase at some point where roads and buildings for new cities were being built in locations that lacked the population to fill them. Guillaume Payen/LightRocket/Getty Images Inhabitants of Tianducheng playing basketball in front of an Eiffel Tower replica. Despite all their efforts, Kangbashi's skyscrapers and residential buildings remain as empty as its streets. "Once there are more people and businesses, the city will be more lively."īut the district that was planned to house more than one million people currently houses less than 100,000, and it is still less than halfway toward the district's goal of housing 300,000 people by 2020. "This is a good place, with modern buildings, grand plazas and many tourist attractions," Yang Xiaolong, a security guard working in one of Kangbashi's new office buildings, told the South China Morning Post. The hope was that these facilities would attract commuters from nearby Dongsheng and help accommodate the two million residents of Ordos. It includes many of the fixtures one would expect to find in a city once dubbed China's answer to Dubai: colossal plazas, expansive shopping malls, large commercial and residential complexes, and towering government buildings. The 90,000-acre development sits right at the edge of the massive Gobi Desert. It was meant to be a bustling urban district in the city of Ordos in Inner Mongolia, built using profits that were pouring in from the coal industry boom. Getty Images Unfinished developments abound in the Chinese ghost city of Kangbashi. One of the key goals of this urbanization project is to redistribute economic opportunities that have drawn millions of rural inhabitants into coastal cities, but observers believe that the government's overambitious construction plans may have backfired. ![]() The street lamps, expansive parks, and sprawling highrises that dot these ghost cities undoubtedly inspire comparisons to dystopian visions of the future.Īs China continues to experience rapid economic growth, the government has rushed to urbanize massive rural areas. There's no other way to describe a city meant for thousands of people that's just completely empty," explained Samuel Stevenson-Yang, a photographer working to document this modern Chinese phenomenon, in an interview with ABC Australia. "All of them are bizarre, all of them are surreal. The occurrence of these ghost cities across China has, unsurprisingly, attracted significant attention from international observers. Some of these cities have yet to be completed while others are fully functioning metropolises, save for the lack of residents. It is unclear how many of these Chinese ghost cities currently exist, but estimates put the number as high as 50 municipalities. But in China, there is an increasing number of uninhabited "ghost" cities that seem to have been abandoned after years of construction. Extravagant monuments, spacious parks, modern buildings, and interconnected roads would all seem to indicate a bustling metropolis.
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