Ordos Kangbashi is a new city of world-class architecture, extravagant public plazas, international scale stadiums, and seas of crisp new housing that rose up from the barren deserts of China's Inner Mongolia in less than a decade. However, this new city soon found itself showcased in the international spotlight not for all the things it had but for what it was perceived to lack: namely, people, businesses, and the vital innards that make up a real, living city.
Having been called a modern ghost town, a stillborn city, and a failed utopia, Ordos Kangbashi has been the recipient of an ongoing stream of criticism from myriad international media sources. The majority of this coverage has posited the place as a shining example of whatever Chinese financial crisis is the flavor of the day: housing bubbles, municipal debt, over-supply, bankrupt developers, as well as nefarious plots by local officials to artificially boost GDP to get promoted.
The first reports that labeled Ordos’ Kangbashi district a “ghost town” came out in 2009. Both an Al Jazeera reporter as well as a Time Magazine photographer delivered stories which highlighted the lack of people living in the new city, and in the process brought China’s ghost city phenomenon into global consciousness. Neither of these reporters bothered to ask the local government or anyone involved in building the new district about why they observed so many empty buildings, a fact that the city’s administration later pointed out in disgust. Also, what was merely glossed over in these stories was the fact that construction only began a mere six years before -- a scant amount of time for a completely new city for hundreds of thousands of people to be reasonably built and populated.
Apartments in Ordos Kangbashi. Image: Carla Hajjar.
“I think at the time most Western media reported about Kangbashi as a ‘ghost city’ there was indeed very few people here,” an Ordos native surnamed Wang explained. “There were also some misunderstandings; they don't know exactly about the reasons for and the changing steps of Kangbashi. Moreover, sometimes reporters like to make amplifications of facts to attract readers.”
Ordos, a city built for nobody out in the middle of a desert, is a fascinating, chilling story, but it’s simply not true. The real story is perhaps more matter-of-fact, mundane, and less worthy of hype. It consists of a mining boomtown building a new district on a long-term timeline in a period when hundreds of other cities across the China were doing the same thing.
The fact of the matter is that Ordos is a prefecture-level city that has a population in excess of two million. The municipality is divided up into various districts, towns, and sub-cities, the most prominent of which are Dongsheng, the traditional urban core, and Kangbashi, the new city that was built 25 kilometers to the south.
The original plan for Ordos Kangbashi called for a new district for a million people by 2023, roughly 20 years after construction began. However, Kangbashi’s original concept was scaled down to a city for 500,000 during its early phases of development, and later on to 300,000 due to a slowdown caused by a crash in coal prices — Ordos’s main commodity and economic lifeblood.
The idea behind Kangbashi was for it to serve as the prefecture’s new administrative center, and government offices, the best medical facilities, most prominent public buildings, and the best schools were to be moved in from nearby Dongsheng. It was thought that the municipality’s middle and upper class residents, many of whom worked at the above stated institutions, would soon follow, leaving the crowded and grungy old city behind as the new city would be brought to life.
During its first five years of construction, Kangbashi was able to build a complete downtown area — replete with a grandiose government buildings, a world-class museum, an opulent opera house, a library designed to look like a row of books on a shelf, as well as a significant amount of commercial housing — and make it look enough like a city for international reporters to call it a ghost town when “construction site” probably would have been more accurate.
“At the beginning almost nobody moved to Kangbashi since there were just places to work and no communal facilities, so people went back and forth between Kangbashi and Dongsheng every workday,” Wang explained. “It needed time to build this new city, and schools and hospitals were completed two or three years later. That's why the population was very small for those first five years, and this was also the period many media outlets reported Kangbashi as a ghost town.”
“Just as the old saying goes, ‘Rome wasn't built in a day,’" Xing Su, an Ordos native who is currently studying urban planning at the University of Waterloo in Canada, stated. "Due to lack of relevant urban infrastructures and services, Kangbashi had a hard time attracting people in its early years."
My most recent trip to Ordos Kangbashi was three years ago, at the mid-point of the new city’s developmental timeline. I found a place that had a real frontier town feel, which had just finished constructing its core infrastructure and was just starting to attract a budding population. Now it’s perhaps time to take another waypoint on how Kangbashi is progressing.
Carla Hajjar is an urban design and architecture researcher working on her masters thesis at Tongji University in Shanghai. Her studies focus on comparing property bubbles and the ensuing “ghost town” phenomenon that has arisen in Spain, Angola, and China. She chose Ordos Kangbashi as her Chinese case study and recently found herself treading its vast, wide-open streets.
“I was really surprised because there are people,” Carla explained her initial impression of Kangbashi, “and those people are really friendly and welcoming, they don't look at you like you're a stranger.”
Contrary to some claims that continue to describe Kangbashi with adjectives like “empty,” there is actually a substantial population there. As of now, the new city has a daytime population of 100,000 people — 80% of these are full time residents and the additional 20% continue to commute in daily from Dongsheng for work. This is up 30% from when I was last there three years ago, and means that the place is now roughly one-third full. When we consider that all cities in China have a relatively large amount of vacant apartments — Beijing itself is 25% empty — Kangbashi’s head count isn’t too out of the ordinary for a new city at its stage of development.
Nighttime in Ordos Kangbashi. One of the criteria that was used to deem this place a ghost town was... [+]
It also must be noted that Kangbashi’s seas of unoccupied apartments have mostly all been sold. 80-90% of them have owners. Most of the owned but unoccupied homes were purchased by people from Dongsheng, and are either homes that they plan to move into at some point, give to their children when they get married (30% of all new home sales in China are for an impending marriage), to retire to, or hold onto as long-term investments. Investment options in China are severely limited, and real estate takes on an economic function that’s unparalleled in the West. This is especially true of Ordos, a place where many people became suddenly rich in the coal boom and needed a place to store their excess wealth.
Another reason for occupancy delays is that new apartments in China are not inhabitable for extended periods of time after they appear to be built. 80% of new homes in China are sold pre-sale, often years before the buildings they are located in are fully constructed. Although even after the outer frames of the housing blocks are erected, the interiors of new apartments are usually handed over to new owners as mere concrete shells, lacking all semblance of interior fit-out — so it’s often years more before they’re readied to actually serve as proper domiciles.
Beyond that, an under-reported aspect of China’s housing market is the fact that developers often participate in speculation as well. It is common for them to release new units onto the market in waves, rather than all at once, and to hold back on selling properties if the prices dip too low. This occurred in the more mature sections of Kangbashi north of the Wulanmulun river after the local property market experienced a crash in 2011. The reason why some apartments remain unsold there isn’t because there are no buyers but because the developers are holding onto them in hopes that restricting supply will up the price in the near future.
In all of these instances, the presence of unoccupied homes is less of a calamity and more the result of complex social, political, and economic forces that’s more or less a normal part of China’s particular method of new city building and vitalization. In point, you can’t just show up in a developing Chinese city, take some pictures of empty buildings, and jump to the conclusion that they are harbingers of an impending economic doomsday.
While China can build the husks of new cities with remarkable haste, actually inhabiting them is far more of a long-term endeavor. The “ghost city” critique often denotes little more than the period between the time when a downtown core of a new city is built and the time when it is actually ready for people to begin coming in. While a deluge of people have't necessarily been pouring into Ordos Kangbashi, there has been a steady stream of them coming over the past five or six years. But who exactly are these individuals coming out to this frontier town in the middle of a desert?
“These people, they grew up here, then they went away to university. Some went abroad for two or three years then they come back to be close to their parents,” Hajjar explained. “My best friend here went to Yale. I met people who spent time in the UK, in Canada, in Boston. There is a new generation that is coming back from their studies, they speak English well, they are motivated, and they really want to improve the quality of life in their city.”
The first group of people who made the move from Dongsheng to Kangbashi were the employees of the government offices and state-owned enterprises that were moved in by fiat. Relocation packages, which included significantly discounted housing, tax breaks, and free public transport and utilities were offered to this first wave of inhabitants. Then the government moved in Ordos’ best middle school, which meant that if parent’s wanted their kids to get the best education possible they had to follow along. Many retail and food and beverage businesses, including
If Kangbashi could be called a tragedy it’s not one of urbanization, but urban design. The new city's design is highly-conceptual, and adequately hit on what Ordos’ local officials wanted for their new city. The plan was unabashedly grandiose, larger than life, and spoke of the power of its creators at every turn. It was highly influenced by Soviet design, where, according to Hajjar, “. . . the citizens have to feel really small compared to the city, they have to be afraid of the city. The place of the pedestrian is not that important, it's the importance of the city and of the power of the city [that matters].”
The plan called for the city to be oriented with the natural features in the landscape, running parallel with the mountains, with the central park extending from the northwest to the southeast, ending at a series of reservoirs. The government building was place at the “head” of the new city, the central plaza was its “body,” and he housing blocks that extended out to the sides were its “wings.” The idea was not only to create a new city for people to live in but to be awed by. The place was made to be a masterpiece, a trophy on the shelf of the officials who built it.
“It's more urban painting than urban planning,” Hajjar stated.
Now that people are actually living in Kangbashi district, flaws in its design have become obvious. The most prominent fault is simply that the scale of the place is just too large. The streets are 40 meters wide, intersections are nearly a half a kilometer apart. The city has one of the largest public squares on the planet running down the center of it, which is nearly as large as Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. This physically separates people from the places they work at, shops, entertainment facilities, public amenities, as well as each other.
“They had the crazy idea to be as big as Beijing, to look like Beijing, and to have as wide of streets that Beijing has,” Hajjar explained.
It takes a little effort to find the people in Ordos Kangbashi. If you merely walk around the central plaza where the most prominent landmarks are located you are liable to encounter very few people. A steady stream of cars will pass by, but that will be about it. Although if you go over to where the middle school or the $16 million, 400 stall food court is located, you will find yourself in a place that appears fully inhabited. Electric taxis ply the streets here, there are buses full of people, and the McDonald’s and other restaurants are packed with diners.
The emptiness of Kangbashi itself is a deception. What the new district doesn’t really lack is people — it’s population is growing at an acceptable clip for a new Chinese city of its size — but reasons for people to step out of their homes and interact publicly. Hajjar asserts that even if the new district was full, due to this spread out, gargantuan design the place would still appear relatively deserted.
“Another fact is that Kangbashi still looks like a ghost city even now, with 100,000 people here," Wang concurred. "It is still a quiet town, since there are few places for people to hang out, most of them choose to stay at home after work.”
By design, Kangbashi is not a walkable city. As a city official once infamously pointed out, there is no need for anyone to be in the streets because everybody just drives everywhere. Ironically, the public plaza that runs through the core of Kangbashi is so large that it inhibits public gatherings outside of holidays — it would actually take a good part of the day just to walk down it.
“Just to give you an idea,” Hajjar began, “if you are in an apartment and you want to buy milk you have to put on your coat, put on your shoes, go down, take your car, drive two blocks or three blocks and then come back. . . and the blocks here are like 400 or 450 meters.”
“The quality of urban life may be jeopardized by a lack of consideration of street life, just as many cities in North America,” said Xing Su, an Ordos native currently studying urban planning in Canada. “My biggest concern about the design plan of Kangbashi is the vastness of the public space, which seems to me may lose the walkability and comfort of these spaces. Most people still have to drive to these plazas.”
The opera house in Ordos Kangbashi. Image: Carla Hajjar.
This has created a car city, not a ghost city. It is a city of people who drive home from work, pull into their gated apartment complexes, go up into their respective tower, and order most of what they need online, leaving the sidewalks barren and seemingly deserted. While its residents often praise their city as being beautiful, relaxed, and full of friendly people and fresh air, they are also not hesitant to admit that there really isn’t much to do there besides working. The most popular recourse is to drive up to Dongsheng for shopping and entertainment.
Although Kangbashi’s main challenge is currently devising ways to diversify its economy. The place was founded on the back of a single industry, mining, and has been trying to come up with other sources of economic sustenance since the crash in coal a few years ago. Government officials have attempted to make Kangbashi into an epicenter of electric car production, and currently has two plants for this in operation. While a three-floor building was recently opened to offer space for local start-ups. There is also a Hi-tech Development Zone at the edge of town with several 20-30 story towers. Tourism is also high on Ordos’ developmental to-do list, as Kangbashi is China's first city to be deemed a Class 4A attraction, and there are two Class 5A tourist sites nearby. There are also big plans to develop the new city as a national exhibition and athletics hub, with a stadium as large as Beijing's Bird's Nest and even a Formula One track.
“So definitely they are trying to go in the right direction, because trying to attract new ideas is what could save Kangbashi,” Hajjar opined. “The government is putting a lot of money into it. There is green space, there are a lot of flowers, trees, and gardens. There are traffic lights that are working, there are people. For me, this city is trying to wake up, and that is a process.”
