Archinect - News

The booming business of building cities from scratch

2019-07-10T15:22:00-04:00

“We’re in the midst of new cities fever,” says Prof Sarah Moser. The head of the new cities lab at McGill University has documented more than 100 cities that have sprung up across Asia and Africa since the early 2000s for her forthcoming Atlas of New Cities.

The Guardian kicks off its new Cities from scratch series with an overview of noteworthy planned metropolises that are replacing big swaths of desert, jungle, or sea across Asia and Africa.

While some new cities started out ambitiously but had to eventually give up on key features, others took some years to overcome the 'ghost city' label. And there's no shortage of prominent newcomers.

A more optimistic view on China's ghost cities

2016-04-05T13:15:00-04:00

"Foreigners consider [Kangbashi] to be abandoned. Chinese consider the city to be still developing," [photographer Raphael Olivier] explains. "A lot of the early news reports focus on it being a failed, weird place -- but it's also a huge accomplishment and people there are not necessarily unhappy, there is a huge sense of hope. You have to respect that on a certain level."

Other angles on the effects of China's massive urbanization:

A symbol...of the hubris of rampant urbanization

2015-04-10T01:04:00-04:00

Today, the real-estate situation in Ordos has turned macabre. Video billboards along the city’s major roadways display mug shots of fugitive developers who have skipped town, fleeing their debts....In the shadows of the deserted construction sites and vacant hotels, there are people. They are the citizens of Ordos — not the inhabitants of a ghost town, but the pioneers of a novel kind of 21st-century urban life.

Jody Rosen documented The Colossal Strangeness of China’s Most Excellent Tourist City.

Previously 1, 2, 3

'Re-education' campaigns teach China's new ghost city-dwellers how to behave

2014-11-13T15:43:00-05:00

The region of Ordos made headlines in 2010 for the pre-built metropolis that had everything but people. Now, however, Kangbashi city is rapidly filling up with country people who are being encouraged to live in cities and diversify China’s economy. For ageing farmers who’ve spent their whole life on the land, however, becoming “urbanites” is a tall order.

Ordos in 2014 - "Brave City of The Future"

2014-03-05T00:06:00-05:00

Ordos fell away beneath us: a wide, sweeping wasteland of empty towers and silent, disused streets. ...The odd car moved slowly along the main road, where it looped around the centre of Kangbashi to cross the Ordos bridge, and out towards Dongsheng – but for the most part, from this height, Kangbashi looked like a model city; its radical architecture reduced to novelty ornaments, its unfinished towers scattered like broken bricks across a sandpit.

Last year Darmon Richter had a chance to visit Inner Mongolia. He now offers a closer look at the bizarre, ghost metropolis of Ordos.

h/t @sevensixfive

Whatever happened to Ordos100?

2012-10-25T00:41:00-04:00

Whatever happened to Ordos100? is a question MovingCities receive at regular basis. After our embedded stint in 2008, we kept on regular basis tracking its rumors, gossips and attempts to resurrect its intentions. The intentions were rather ego- and megalomaniac – inviting 100 international architects to a Chinese city-under-construction, asking each of the architects to design a 1000m2 villa – while its would-be implementation turned to be surrounded by silence. In order to understand its present state, one great source of on-the-ground intel is Danish anthropologist Michael Ulfstjerne. In "Creative land grabs in Inner Mongolia | The Ordos 100 spectacle revisited" Michael Ulfstjerne writes that he was left with an impression that the whole site had been forgotten. Read more background and links.

Editor's Picks #255

2012-03-19T14:03:00-04:00

For Archinect’s latest Working out of the Box feature, Paul Petrunia interviewed Pinterest Co-Founder Evan Sharp. Will Galloway asked "say shouldn't someone interview paul for this feature too?" to which Paul responded "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain".

For Archinect’s latest Working out of the Box feature, Paul Petrunia interviewed Pinterest Co-Founder Evan Sharp. Will Galloway asked "say shouldn't someone interview paul for this feature too?" to which Paul responded "Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain".

News
Felix Salmon the finance blogger at Reuters reviews MoMA’s Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream exhibit. Therein he wrote "Of course, for an idea to be sustainable, it also has to be realistic. Much of the MoMA show fails that criterion miserably." Steven Ward questioned "he's reviewing a highly speculative ideas-based exhibit at an art museum as if it's a feasibility study?!" and then went on to suggest "this is why it's so hard for innovation and idea-generation activities to gain traction. they're squashed before anything really can be explored fully by those who say 'nah, that won't work' or, worse yet, 'woah, that's elitist/discriminatory/etc'."

The folks from www.wai-architecture.com catalogued ...

Ordos: The biggest ghost town in China

2012-03-17T14:41:00-04:00

In Inner Mongolia a new city stands largely empty. This city, Ordos, suggests that the great Chinese building boom, which did so much to fuel the country's astonishing economic growth, is over. Is a bubble about to burst?

Ordos 100, directed by Ai Weiwei

2012-02-22T17:16:00-05:00

Directed by Ai Weiwei (China, 2012). Official Selection International Film Festival Rotterdam 2012. Ordos 100 is a construction project curated by Herzog & de Meuron and Ai Weiwei. One hundred architects from 27 countries were chosen to participate and each design a 1000-square-meter villa to be built in a new community in Inner Mongolia. The 100 villas would be designed to fit a master plan designed by Ai Weiwei.

China's Real Estate Bubble May Have Just Popped

2012-02-15T01:19:00-05:00

In a few cities, such as coastal Wenzhou and coal-rich Ordos, the collapse in property prices has sparked a full-blown credit crisis, with reports of ruined businessmen leaping off building rooftops; some are fleeing the country.

Prospects just few years ago looked great and China had jobs for everybody who were laid off in American market. But now the wind has changed direction. People who were speculating in Ordos and the like places are no where to be found and the bubble is about to burst.