Seeing ghosts: parsing China’s “ghost city” controversy

Woodworth, Max D.; Wallace, Jeremy

doi:10.1080/02723638.2017.1288009

Cited by 74 publications

(41 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…Ordos has hitherto been a resource-based city whose economic growth relies heavily on the state-owned energy industry [25]. For example, the coal output in Ordos grew from 22.9 million tons in 2000 to 630 million tons in 2013 [1]. The resource-driven economic boom has transformed Ordos from a relatively underdeveloped, underurbanized inland region to a high-profile, wealthy city.…”

Section: Background and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our analysis is also a response to the discourses of "ghost cities" produced by the media. The "ghost city" terminology originated from two renowned international media outlets, namely, Al Jazeera and Time magazine, which uncritically presented Kangbashi New Town in Ordos, China, as an exemplar of a ghost city and epitome of uncontrolled and unsustainable methods of new town development [1]. In recent years, so-called "ghost cities" have sprung up in the midst of dramatic new town development projects in China.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Media discourses of ghost cities have so far centred mainly on rapid urban construction driven by local governments in the pursuit of various growth-oriented benefits, usually ending up with scantly populated and largely unoccupied skyscrapers, apartment estates and grandiose squares. As Woodworth and Wallace have argued, a ghost city in the Chinese context consists of "large-scale urban areas, sometimes planned as new towns, featuring an abundance of new built space and appearing to also have extremely low tenancy" [1]. Many academic studies have unproblematically absorbed media discourses of ghost cities to describe the status quo of China's new towns [2], while obfuscating the fact that new towns are ongoing dynamics of change and becoming.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Living in the “Ghost City”: Media Discourses and the Negotiation of Home in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China

2017

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Abstract:Ordos is notoriously represented in media discourses as one of China's principal "ghost cities", with skyscrapers, apartment estates and grandiose squares largely unoccupied. The "ghost city" emerges from massive (over)investment in the urban built environment. Aware that economic and financial sustainability are in question, we nonetheless choose to investigate this issue from the perspective of social sustainability, utilizing a theoretical framework informed by geographies of home. Relatively little analysis has thus far been applied to local residents' everyday practice and agency in making place and home in allegedly "unhomely" ghost cities. This article first examines media discourses and representations of the "ghostly" aspect of the new town in Ordos. It then investigates the ways in which local residents practice and perform their place identity and sense of home in an alleged "ghost city". Our empirical research in Kangbashi New Town demonstrates that the discourse of ghost cities is valid in so far as we take into account the local residents' engagement in a process of home-making from below. This sense of place is created by connecting new and old homes, and constructing an emotionally delineated place identity. We argue that the issue of social sustainability in Ordos is multifaceted, and more nuanced than it has hitherto been represented in media reports.

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Section: Background and Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Living in the “Ghost City”: Media Discourses and the Negotiation of Home in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China

2017

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“…This growth of the urban footprint raises urgent questions about the creation of so-called "extrastructure," or a surfeit of infrastructure and built space (Ansar et al 2016). High vacancy rates, high amounts of property inventory, and a string of failed new town projects labelled "ghost cities" alert us that urban growth in some places has been economically unsustainable (Woodworth and Wallace 2017). Debt is also a major concern for cities, as financing platforms for development projects have generated an astonishing accumulation of financial obligations.…”

Section: Figure 2 the New Central Business District Of Tianjin's Binmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Construction State 2.0 - New towns and the local state in China

Woodworth¹

2019

Regions

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“… A recent exception to these binary temporalities of modernity, and a useful counterposition to modern ruins, can be seen in recent geographical attention to the “ruins” produced by hypermobile and financialised capital. See, for example, Woodworth and Wallace (), Sorace and Hurst () on “ghost cities” in China, and O'Callaghan et al. () and Kitchin et al.…”

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confidence: 99%

Decommissioned places: Ruins, endurance and care at the end of the first nuclear age

Dawney

2019

Trans Inst British Geog

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This paper argues for a geography of deindustrialising places as spaces of inhabitation and endurance, rather than one based on narratives of progres, decline and ruination. Ruins have long been a concern for geographers, yet the material remains of modernity's grand schemes feed easily into ways of seeing and knowing deindustrialised spaces that can efface the practices through which lives and worlds are made in the present. Drawing on fieldwork in the former Soviet atomgrad of Visaginas, Lithuania, the paper both acknowledges and pulls back from the draw of the ruin. Moving away from the ruin‐temporalities of progress and decline, it offers an account of ongoing practices and modes of habitation in spaces defined by ruination. A reflexive acknowledgement of our contaminated role in making sense of such spaces allows us to be both enchanted by grand narratives of hubris and decline and to see other stories – stories of living on, of endurance, and of making lives in places circumscribed as futureless by political and economic regimes. As such, the paper offers an alternative geography of places that are decommissioned from above, paying attention to the care, commitment, makeshift practices and aesthetic projects through which their inhabitants live on. Engaging this approach through a series of small stories based on ethnographic and collaborative fieldwork alongside two photographers in Visaginas, I posit that the material and subjective remains of the dreams of the first nuclear age give rise to emergent forms of life that stand in excess to narratives of progress and decline. The ruins of Soviet nuclear modernity here operate as containers for practices of endurance and living on through changing relations of power and capital, rather than objects of melancholic loss, and as raw materials through which to forge ways of living in spaces characterised as surplus to requirement.

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Seeing ghosts: parsing China’s “ghost city” controversy

Cited by 74 publications

References 18 publications

Living in the “Ghost City”: Media Discourses and the Negotiation of Home in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China

Living in the “Ghost City”: Media Discourses and the Negotiation of Home in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China

The Construction State 2.0 - New towns and the local state in China

Decommissioned places: Ruins, endurance and care at the end of the first nuclear age

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