Empty Streets, Big Dreams
China’s “ghost cities” sound like something from a horror movie, but the reality is less supernatural and more economic. These are not ruined towns swallowed by time; they are often brand-new urban districts filled with apartment towers, shopping malls, wide boulevards, and office blocks that were built faster than people arrived to live in them. Some are partially occupied, some are mostly empty, and a few became famous because they looked so eerily quiet that they seemed to have been staged for a film set. The result is one of the strangest side effects of modern urban growth: cities built for millions, sometimes with only a fraction of that number actually calling them home. The phrase “ghost city” can be misleading, though. In many cases, the buildings are not abandoned in the way a decaying factory town might be abandoned. They are simply underused, vacant, or waiting for future residents. That distinction matters, because China’s urban development has often been a long game: loca...