The “ghost cities” myth comes from the fact that China plans with a 15-20 year horizon and people in the west have forgotten what forward planning and a healthy economy looks like.
These ghost cities are mostly thriving now and even back in 2015 the myth was being called out as bullshit and myopic, more a symptom of the failure to plan in the west.
I mean, just look at the housing crisis almost all the west is experiencing right now before you chuckle in a self comforting way about ghost cities.
It’s called “planning” mother fucker and the west should have done it too.
Even in grade school when the ghost cities story was making the rounds I remember thinking “this is fucking stupid, this is just a better way of building a city so you don’t have to tear shit back up when people are already living there”
Erecting an entire city in the middle of nowhere is not a good way to make a city. Cities are like living things in that they have to grow and develop overtime. People won’t choose to move to a city with no one else there on the promise that there will be other people there in the future, you’d have to pay people to live there, either directly or through subsidised living costs. It’s much better to let a city grow naturally over time. It doesn’t need to be much time, a couple decades would probably work, but you have to let it expand naturally.
That’s ideal but not necessary, particularly when you’re designing around a massive rural-to-urban migration. It’s the principle behind Soviet city design as well: you know that you’re going to get a massive migration, so you’re not tied down by silly things like “organic growth” because that will never keep up.
I took this almost word for word from a paper (albeit the introduction). I wasn’t just posting something I heard 20 years ago.
Clearly, there is a conundrum where there is overbuilding and “ghost towns” on the one hand, and where millions of migrants and urban poor lack basic housing on the other hand.
If you took my comment to be anything more than just a kind of statement question hybrid then that’s my bad, but I don’t feel there is need for anything more than a correction.
