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Construction activities somewhere in the vast plains of Inner Mongolia (2013) ::
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When I was roaming the web for some original new info about China's unprecedented urbanization drive a while ago, I eventually tripped over a really fascinating academic paper by three Chinese scientists via Motherboard (one of the countless ventures of the Vice Media empire).
The writer of the short piece, entitled 'Meet the Data Scientist Revealing How Big China's "Ghost Cities" Really are', spoke to one of the authors of the recently published study that takes a refreshing novel approach to re-evaluate the long-standing myth of giant new urban agglomerations constructed in a frenzy only to stay largely vacant.
These enormous nearly uninhabited Chinese 'Disney Worlds' or 'ghost cities', as they are commonly called, always seemed to epitomize what's seriously wrong with much of the country's often megalomaniac urban planning projects.
Most prominent among these newly constructed metropolises is one of the main population hubs in Inner Mongolia, the notorious city of Ordos, a location that made headlines in English-language media as early as 2009. A monstrous new development zone, even in the Chinese context, so-called Kangbashi New Area, had been devised and built outside the old city centre of Ordos to accommodate over a million future inhabitants.
The only problem:
The expected masses didn't move in and the small percentage of around 20,000 people (in 2013) who did so were eager to leave again. The futuristic urban planning scheme morphed into a virtually deserted ghost town with half-built or abandoned apartment buildings, empty streets and a plush new airport without any passengers to speak of (for a two-year old reportage about Ordos and Kangbashi, see here; according to more recent accounts, things are beginning to change lately - see below).
The expected masses didn't move in and the small percentage of around 20,000 people (in 2013) who did so were eager to leave again. The futuristic urban planning scheme morphed into a virtually deserted ghost town with half-built or abandoned apartment buildings, empty streets and a plush new airport without any passengers to speak of (for a two-year old reportage about Ordos and Kangbashi, see here; according to more recent accounts, things are beginning to change lately - see below).
For many outside observers, Ordos became the prime example of immense, hastily constructed but largely empty Chinese ghost cities that didn't turn out as wished by overambitious urban planners. For quite some time, the feverish construction of ever-bigger and extravagant urban clusters has been described as utter failure by foreign and, to a lesser extent, Chinese commentators.
But in the last few years, writers and academics have begun to question the conventional wisdom that ghost cities will never turn into glitzy new boomtowns and thrive as economic and cultural hot spots.
A brand-new study by a team of scientists from Baidu Research's Big Data Lab (one of several research facilities of the search engine giant that is co-located in Silicon Valley and Beijing) and Peking University's Institute of Remote Sensing and Geographic Information Systems in Beijing now sheds new light on the long-standing myth of frantically developed but deserted ghost cities all over China.
The three authors Chi Guanghua, Liu Yu and Wu Haishan acknowledge that their findings are only a first step in using big data to better grasp the actual state of proclaimed ghost cities. Nevertheless, the scientists used an impressive amount of location data from Baidu Maps to analyze China's 'lost cities' in some depth.
The abstract of their preliminary study reads:
'Real estate projects are developed excessively in China in this decade. Many new housing districts are built, but they far exceed the actual demand in some cities. These cities with a high housing vacancy rate are called "ghost cities".
The real situation of vacant housing areas in China has not been studied in previous research. This study, using Baidu positioning data presents the spatial distribution of the vacant housing areas in China and classifies cities with a large vacant housing area as cities or tourism sites.
To understand the human dynamic in "ghost cities", we select one city and one tourism sites as cases to analyze the features of human dynamics. This study illustrates the capability of big data in sensing our cities objectively and comprehensively.'
(Chi et al., 12 Nov 2015, arXiv:1510.08505v2 [cs.SI])
In their paper, the authors freely admit that their data corpus is biased (the smartphone users that are covered belong to a certain demographic group that might not be completely representative, for instance). In addition, the concentration on just two case studies and types of cities, Kangbashi New District in Inner Mongolia and the tourist city of Rushan in Shandong province, do not allow sweeping generalizations.
Nevertheless, they might be able to assess the current state of ghost towns more accurately than previous studies. One very interesting finding is that many parts of Kangbashi actually did get well populated over time. Tourist magnet Rushan, on the other hand, apparently still stands largely empty out of season.
The (not peer-reviewed) study concludes:
'For the first time, we use Baidu big data to analyze the real situation of "ghost cities" in China. The features of national spatial scale, long temporal scale, and high precision of Baidu big data make the study of "ghost cities" representative and reliable.
Instead of just counting the number of homes with light at night in certain residential areas as the indicator of "ghost city", Baidu big data can count the population precisely, in real time, and in national scale. A limitation of the data is that it cannot represent the real demography of a city because not all people are Baidu users.
However, with the ubiquity of smart mobile phones, Baidu users occupy the most proportion of the whole population. Moreover, the quality of residential area POIs will affect our results. We make a series of processing to make sure that the POIs are reliable. Baidu big data bring opportunities to objectively understand the status or even reasons of "ghost cities."
Based on the Baidu positioning data and residential area POI data, we design an algorithm to discover the vacant housing areas.
The results discovered the specific location of vacant housing areas, which can help government make smarter and more reasonable decisions. Our results provide the real situation of the so called "ghost cities" in China.
Cities with a large vacant housing area are mostly second-tier and third-tier cities. East provinces have more proportion of cities with vacant housing areas.
We also distinguish the tourism sites and cities. Based on Baidu positioning data, we discover the human dynamic in cities with a large vacant housing area to help better understand the situation in "ghost cities."'
(Chi et al., 12 Nov 2015, arXiv:1510.08505v2 [cs.SI])
If you want to immerse yourselves some more into research methodology, the two sets of data used, the case studies or some figures, feel free to download the full paper 'Ghost Cities Analysis Based on Positioning Data in China' by Chi et al. (don't worry, only 14 pages!) that is available at arXiv.org right here.
By the way, twenty case studies of actual or proclaimed ghost cities in different parts of the country are presented on the very nice interactive web site of Baidu's Big Data Lab. You also can switch between map and satellite views (in Chinese, see here).
And in case you want to learn more about the intriguing phenomenon of Chinese ghost cities and the myths surrounding it - albeit in a less scientific way - try the new book 'Ghost Cities of China' (Zed Books / Amazon) by travel writer Wade Shepard or visit his extensive blog Vagabond Journey.
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