China, Haunted By Ghost Cities

World Economic Forum

For decades, China has been engaged in a building boom of a scale that is hard to wrap your mind around. In the last three decades, 260 million people have moved from the countryside to Chinese cities — equivalent to around 80 percent of the population of the U.S. To make room for all of those people, the size of China’s built-up urban areas nearly quintupled between 1984 and 2010.

Much of that development has benefited people’s lives, but some has not. In a breathless rush to boost growth and development, some urban areas have built vast, unused real estate projects — China’s infamous “ghost cities.” These eerie, shining developments are complete except for one thing: people to live in them. More

The above piece used cell phone traffic in China to identify urban centers with no population. Out of 50 cities identified 26 were deemed tourist based (people gather there on weekend, holidays or during the summer) 24 were deemed “ghost cities.”

C-Milk and SerpentZA of ADVChina happened upon a ghost city and decided to ride around the empty streets and unfinished buildings, before being chased off by security. It’s as dystopian as one would expect from a top-down command economy. Watch