‘China’s Manhattan’ Borrowed Heavily, but the People Have Yet to Arrive | Hacker News Reader

‘China’s Manhattan’ Borrowed Heavily, but the People Have Yet to Arrive

nytimes.com

131 pointsilamont129 comments

I’m not a big fan of centrally planned cities, but this author has it out for China. The original articles about “China’a ghost town” were also not true. A narrative was invented to sell an interesting story about some failure of China... this article is a non-story, and just an attempt to revive a topic parroted since the last decade.

Many of China’s urban districts were centrally planned and sat empty before they were eventually filled, including the famous Pudong district of Shanghai. https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.forbes.com/sites/wadeshepar...

"If you look around, you will think this is a normal city and just assume this is the way it always was, not knowing that 10 years ago people were calling it a ghost city, 20 years ago it was just apartments and villages." https://www.google.com/amp/amp.abc.net.au/article/9912186

Short story is some developments work, others don’t, but investing in real estate is one way for people to park money so people still end up buying up all the properties.

Quoting from Caixing Global, a PRC-based financial news source:

China Investment Network, a business newspaper in Beijing, released a "ghost town index" to determine which cities were, well, the most ghostly. The newspaper devised its index using a government standard that says cities should have 10,000 people per square kilometer. The editors at China Investment Network determined that if a city's ratio of people to area was 0.5 – that is, it was half full – then it is a ghost town. To take the example a step further, if a city had a ratio of .10, then it had one-tenth the population the government thought it deserved. Based on this approach, at least 50 Chinese cities fit the description of "ghost town." (1)

This report is from 2014, so maybe some of those cities were eventually filled ... but surely not all of them.

1. https://www.caixinglobal.com/2014-10-17/graphics-ghost-towns...

By that definition, Chicago, Miami and Philadelphia are "ghost towns" with less than 5,000 people/sqkm

source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_United_States_cities_b...

You can find many sources complaining about this in the US, yes. Real estate speculation, etc. People aren't happy about it, so that description is not unreasonable. Some cities are trying to pass laws to address it (not that those laws seem to work).

The density of construction matters a lot here too. Many US cities like the ones you mention were not planned out and are subject to sprawl.

The number naturally has to be adjusted when trying to define 'ghost town' in America or anywhere else because relatively few places are built to be as dense as 10k/km^2.

Wow, 10,000 per km² sounds crazy ambitious. By those standards, Germany is a ghost land, cities here barely reach those numbers in the densely populated parts, certainly not on average.

Keep in mind they are built out for that density, having comparably much less density (much closer to a German small town) before development.

Berlin has 3,944 inhabitants per km2. If not even that city reaches the standard, I think the criteria must be flawed. My city is the third largest in Mexico and it has less than 3500/km2.

Or maybe we need an article about ghost countries.

Berlin has forests within its borders.

So does Mumbai (the Sanjay Gandhi National Park) and it still supports a density of 73,000 people/sq km.

What? Wikipedia has Mumbai at just 21k/sqkm, and even that seems to be megacity (urban) density, not its metro density, which is only 4,700/sqkm. I assume the national park is in the latter and not the former.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mumbai_Metropolitan_Region

I guess the standards necessarily are different for a city of skyscrapers

Pudong was definitely in that range before it was developed. Chinese densities are completely different from the rest of the word. No one calls a 3500/km2 area a ghost city of it is built for 3500/km2, but if it’s built for 10k/km2 with lots of 30 story apartment blocks, there are a lot of empty units and you can play football in the overbuilt 8 lane streets.

> Wow, 10,000 per km² sounds crazy ambitious. By those standards, Germany is a ghost land, cities here barely reach those numbers in the densely populated parts, certainly not on average.

Yeah, but to get those levels, they fill blocks with dozens of identical 25 story apartment buildings. E.g.: https://pulitzercenter.org/sites/default/files/styles/node_i...

That isn't inherent to getting the density though. You could design them all differently if you wanted.

You could find an example of a row of identical buildings in any country, it doesn't prove anything.

It isn't inherent, but it sure is attention grabbing. In my experience, cookie-cutter construction is far more common, at a far larger scale, and far more obvious in China than in any other country I've visited.

They are usually 32 stories high since that is how far they can go with concrete.

By Chinese standards, most places are barely populated. They are a fifth of the world.

I think both of these positions (its a fake narrative, and "ghost towns abound") have elements of truth. What it is, is impossible to compare.

Given the structure of western governments, and by that I mean nominally liberal democracies, a policy of funding the development of a city prior to their being any economic reason for the city to exist, is not possible. Western forms of government wait for economic pockets to develop, then tax them, and then with the tax revenue improve them to increase their economic potential. Without a tax base there is no mechanism for funding development.

China on the other hand, has a central government with a fiscal policy of borrowing from the central bank to fund the creation of economic zones prior to there being any economic activity. Once that zone exists, it does not enhance the existing zones nearby thus as they grow there is incentive to move their activity to "nearby" zones which are under utilized. This takes time of course and between the time of construction and mass migration, well the zone is under utilized or a "ghost" town.

When China guesses wrong, and the zone never supports additional economic activity, then its a complete write-off. Something a western government could not survive (they would be booted out of office for it) but one that a central government can (and does) survive.

The bottom line is that it is easy to write stories that amaze people who live in one system by playing on the differences of the other system.

A building sitting empty for 5 years is a massive cost even if it’s later filled. This goes beyond time value of money and into the limited lifespan of infrastructure. Ghost cities are a problem with an easy and obvious solution, slow down the rate of construction to more closely match population movement.

>> A building sitting empty for 5 years is a massive cost even if it’s later filled.

Don't look too closely at NYC, Vancouver, london, or any of the other hot markets. Whether for historical preservation scams or investment trickery, it is not unusual for a building to sit empty for many years. Given the effort that it takes to oust tenants, and the length of time necessary for zoning/planning, many owners would rather a building sit empty for years pending redevelopment rather than the hassle of filling it.

Google "Calgary new horizons mall". From the owner/developer's perspective that mall is technically full and, at least for them, profitable.

US national vacancy rate is ~6.9% and NYC sit's well below that at under 4%. Much like the unemployment rate these things don't hit 0% for various reasons. But, that's very different from building a 11th building when your first 10 are all at 90% vacancy.

"Vacancy" is something above a building being empty. Vacancy is a building that has space available that hasn't been filled. It does not cover buildings deliberately left empty by owners. A building waiting years to be demolished and replaced isn't vacant, nor a condo kept only as an investment and never lived in.

That mall in Calgary isn't vacant either. Each store/stall is technically occupied by its owner. There just aren't any flesh and blood people in the mall.

NYC has ~60,000 buildings. Less than 1% of them are deliberately left empty by their owners. It’s a very different situation in a city which can make use of that space as demonstrated by the low vacancy rate.

That mall does have people shopping in it. In terms of retail square footage it’s underutilized but a long way from empty. Good or bad investment they are not building 3 of them next to each other while the first is far from full.

Really, you have some edge cases with people trying to time the market, deal with zoning or lawsuits etc. But, that’s different from seeing 6 empty apartment buildings and saying let’s build another one.

For dense urban areas land cost could exceed building cost. However for ghost cities land cost (defined as an opportunity cost) is low to begin with. While building material may have alternative use, if the labor used to build buildings don't have a lot of alternative use then the true economic cost of building a building may be below the headline cost as well.

> The bottom line is that it is easy to write stories that amaze people who live in one system by playing on the differences of the other system.

I wonder if they do this in China to things in the USA?

I imagine that if they did, it would be just as skewed and critical as the stories from the west about China are. Even so, it would be interesting to find out what is considered to be "amazing" (for whatever connotations that word has) by the Chinese (or at least their "media") about the United States...

I imagine that there might be one difference - the fact that there are probably more Chinese tourists who visit a wider part of the USA than there are USA tourists visiting the non-touristy areas of China. This might give them a different impression (perhaps closer to reality - whether that reality is objectively/subjectively good or bad to them) than the USA does of China (where we see - or are fed - information about them that still has a smell of "the mysterious" or "the exotic" or "the strangeness").

My gut feels that they likely have a far better, and likely more realistic, impression of the United States than we ourselves do - if only because they can be realistic about it without any threat, where we tell/sell ourselves stories to gloss over the difficult to talk/think about parts.

What pains me most about this, as a citizen of the United States, who has never visited China (but would like to some day) - is that I can see these things; maybe not as clearly as someone not immersed in the culture - but they are still very, very apparent to anyone honest with themselves. Yet, it feels like a large majority of my fellow countrymen either don't, or they do and just ignore it (or take advantage of it); either seems a tragedy to me.

Probably still worse with an authoritarian government manipulating the news. It did not take long after the Huawei arrest scandal for brand new TV channels focused on Canadian news to pop up from nowhere.

The difference being that most Chinese are well aware their news is propaganda.

Fox viewers probably not so much.

They’re aware they’re getting the opinion of the Chinese State, just like Fox News viewers are aware they’re betting the opinion of those who run the Republican Party (and, by proxy, the state)

This build-a-city approach is also probably due to the large rural population in China that have been steadily urbanizing or just moving to the cities for work. So there is some expectance that cities will be filled which does generate false hope and random ghost towns near places of economic activities. Good example in the past is Shenzhen which became big and the other unknown cities built around that time and was grouped with Shenzhen that people have forgotten because they never became big.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization_in_China

Not sure that Milton Keynes "Home of the Roundabout" and the other new towns in the UK don't count.

Well, Milton Keynes was built incrementally as people arrived to fill it, and it and the other new towns definitely had an economic reason to exist - the existing towns couldn't handle increasing urbanisation and the growth of businesses that relied on that. It did end up with rather more light industrial space and slightly more offices than necessary due to the decline of British industry, but nothing like the kind of speculative building described here.

I don't think such mass speculative building would even have been economically possible; if I remember rightly, the housing construction was done by the usual home-building companies who needed to be able to sell off their houses to residents in order to afford the next tranche.

It was very centrally planned in what to day would seem very creepy eg segregated housing for workers, supervisors and executives.

I just googled ghost city china and clicked on a random image which was a cnn article from 2014:

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/china-ordos-ghost-town/ind... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordos_City

Apparently it is no longer a ghost town.

Oh look, the propaganda team has arrived!

You don't seem to be refuting the central claim, but rather accusing the person of being non-genuine, can you point out any flaws with their assertion?

Created an hour go not ring any bells

There's nothing to refute, they posted an article that contradicts their own assertion.

Ordos is kind of the 'original' ghost city, the one that sparked Western curiosity.

There's a lot of reporting about it subsequently.

It looks like folks are indeed moving in, but maybe not at the rate that would make sense.

Ordos was never a ghost city, one of its newly built far out districts, Kangbashi, was. Chinese cities are more like counties that contain multiple municipalities.

Many westerners don’t really understand china’s district system for cities. Ordos City is very old, maybe a couple of thousand years by various names.

Kangbashi is a new remote district (New Town) of Ordos that was built over the last couple of decades and is still very much empty. It is too far away to commute to Ordos’s older more popular districts, and so people don’t want to live there. Many of the apartments have been bought out by speculators, however.

Actually, most of those ghost towns were real, and many are still basically ghost towns (eg Ordos new town district, which might come back when coal is great again; and then we have Tianjin’s financial district, but derelict buildings is nothing new for tianjin).

Speculating on property is a horrible way to go about development. Building a new district in a second or third tier that is then speculatively bought out by rich city investors with the idea that there are lot of millionaire farmers who will relocate there later is just plain idiotic.

While very true, I don't think this criticism is really the important point.

The rapid pace of Chinese urbanisation and economic advance from such a low base has meant China's development has been necessarily highly speculative. There have been huge wins on projects that in the west would look absurd, as well as huge losses.

What you also have to remember is that the state has a huge interest to keep construction happening as its one of the biggest employing industries.

However development is trending now overall towards a more mature western approach. Big developers are more experienced. Unmet demand it not as massive as before. And wages are rising. The ridiculous projects are reducing in pace and being more carefully organised.

Oh, we all are aware that construction is a huge jobs program, and that most of these buildings are going to be torn down after 20-30 years of use, since Chinese construction using concrete and cheap labor necessarily requires overbuilding that makes proper maintenance very expensive. Local governments see this as a feature, since every new building is more GDP, even demolition of the previous building is added GDP they can report to central.

A lot of the speculation will have to fall off. A good old fashioned property bust would do wonders to correct all the distortions in the market, but the central government keeps doubling down on more.

Call me a wowser but I far prefer a country whose big government employment program is building housing and not building armies that are ten times the size of all the largest other armies combined.

That's a nation with a very big unused hammer adventuring around the world looking for a nail.

I never said it was “wrong,” just that there were consequences to this kind of thinking. So if you build something that is empty for 15 years, it was useless for half its lifetime, and that is if it was even being maintained while basically derelict; it is highly likely that when the building is actually needed, they will tear it down and start over again.

China will eventually move to a high skilled labor force and these problems will go away. But that is not today.

I've seen some of the massive empty developments myself. Not the city written about here.

I think you can fairly report on a ghost town and call it a ghost town if it is one at the time.... even if it fills later.

And I think you can question later such places later and their debt ... and not "has it out for China".

An article someone doesn't like doesn't mean they "has it out for China".

I visited the city last year, out of curiosity.

Binhai is far from being exceptional from other abandoned "new areas." Even in 20m people Shenzhen, a lot of new skyscrapers are empty.

A girl I tried to date last year was running a chemical company in Ningbo's "new area." I went there too. It blew my mind that her company was occupying a whole floor in a 30 storey building, and was one of only two tenants. And that was only after the local government gave them a $3m endorsement.

The girl latter tearfully admitted to misspelling her age in Tinder by a whopping 3 years, and I moved on :)

What the article underlines well, and say what other don't is that there is a positive feedback loop:

1. Banks are given political directives to dish out loans to all those "new areas"

2. Developers than rent extremely overpriced land from municipalities, and build similarly overpriced highrises/elite hotels/luxury malls

3. A great lot of that real estate is then unloaded, and leased away to no-name municipality's own asset management companies at laughably low rate.

4. Whatever money that was not banged away immediately, ends up in same banks after a few years.

5. On the paper, the value of those skyscrapers goes up!

6. Read Marx and profit...

In essence, the state cashed out a substantial portion of the People Bank of China without anybody noticing as sum on their balance sheet was seemingly not influenced.

The problem of China 20 years ago - a lot of underused rural land

The problem of China now - a lot of underused prime rib real estate

We have a plant/office in Ningbo. It's 5 stories, however only the first floor is used. There is a server room on the second floor. Very odd.

>The girl latter tearfully admitted to misspelling her age in Tinder by a whopping 3 years, and I moved on :)

What a weird thing to include...

The original articles about “China’a ghost town” were also not true.

I've seen news reports on NHK showing Chinese ghost cities. One was a very long (maybe an hour) documentary that also included the ghost villages happening because people are being forced to move to the cities.

Yeah, I watch a few YouTube channels of Americans in China and the ghost towns are still everywhere. Their buildings in general also seems to be of extremely poor quality, but it's one of those topics that's socially unacceptable to discuss.

Here's a recent example: https://youtu.be/XopSDJq6w8E

> but it's one of those topics that's socially unacceptable to discuss.

What? What's the definition for "socially unacceptable" here? I have always seen news articles discussing the poor build quality in China, here are some examples [0][1].

Here's a discussion on Zhihu (Quora copycat) on house build quality too [2].

[0]: https://cj.sina.com.cn/article/detail/2381596945/79395?cid=6...

[1]: https://house.ifeng.com/column/news/jianzhushouming/index.sh...

[2]: https://www.zhihu.com/question/19641156

Wow, you found some discussions on the internet where anyone can find discussions about literally anything. I'm convinced!

> The original articles about “China’a ghost town” were also not true.

They're 100% true and many of them are still ghost towns, unless you listen to the Chinese government (which is desperately trying to convince you otherwise).

>Short story is some developments work, others don’t

This is the key point because the goal of these (over)-ambitious projects never was 100% allocation efficiency. It's much more comparable to the era of America's railroad tycoons than it is to economic development as we're accustomed to.

There's a relatively huge degree of waste, corruption and whatnot, but the goal isn't efficiency, it's effectiveness. Through these projects, even if a portion is ill-conceived, China is able to rapidly urbanise, avoid many of the pitfalls in regions with more incremental approaches, and also builds construction and planning knowledge (this one is very important) and finds a pathway for its export surplus.

It's the same approach China has taken to its tech industry. Is a lot of funding going to bogus projects? Yes, but they can afford it, and even if only a fraction pay off they'll consider it a win. Is it slightly mad to treat building a city like a VC investment? Sure, but then building company towns and new settlements and railroads seemingly randomly through a country was as well. And yet, when it works and it creates one new hub of innovation, it pays a hundred times over.

> I’m not a big fan of centrally planned cities, but this author has it out for China. The original articles about “China’a ghost town” were also not true.

I'm sorry, but this isn't true, and I say this from my own experience repeatedly visiting Dalian over the past seven years. My last trip was 2016.

Dalian's government is heavily promoting the East Harbor district. They've built a lot of skycrapers, a newly built "financial convention center"[0], a Vegas-style musical water fountain, and oddly enough, a small area modeled after old Venetian neighborhood[1] complete with canals and gondolas.

I've visited the East Harbor twice in three years. It's empty. The street lights barely work. The skycrapers are dark or unfinished. The Venetian neighborhood is is blocks of completely empty buildings. Most of these storefronts were clearly never rented, as evidenced by their completely unfinished interiors. Of the ones that were rented, there's closed coffee shop (signs are still in the window), and a closed restaurant. What does exist in this maybe square kilometer or 2 is (and I believe this list is complete), a "western style" international kindergarten / preschool, and a wedding photography studio, and a stand to rent a gondola ride. That's it. You will find as many couples getting their wedding photos taken in this neighborhood as you will tourists. (It's very photogenic neighborhood, especially at night.)

Other parts of the city also have empty apartment buildings, but I want to focus on the East Harbor, because it's a good microcosm of the ghost town phenomena.

At the end of the article, the chief executive the Tianjin Juilliard School is quoted as saying something rather insightful. “I think they are looking at this as a feather in the cap of this new project.” I think he's right. There's a very strong political component to the promotion and construction of these districts. It's a lot like shipping dubious feature all in the quest for showing "impact" at a FAANG.

Dalian's East Harbor is recently reclaimed land, and is being actively promoted (Including by the army showing up and evicting businesses in the middle of the day.[2]), as an alternative to already built and successful Xinghai Square[3] district. Xinghai Square had a fountain, but then it was ordered destroyed, to promote East Harbor. The huabiao in the center of the square, was demolished in the middle of the night. Streetlights are being turned off at night. The neighborhood is being actively sabotaged in an effort to migrate the population to the empty East Harbor district. Why would this happen? Well, the Xinghai was developed by former mayor and Xi Jingping rival, Bo Xilai. (Bo Xilai is now in jail on corruption charges.) The conventional wisdom is that East Harbor's promotion and the destruction of Xinghai is serving two purposes. It shows political fielty by carrying out a damnatio memoriae on a political rival of the new president for life, while also demonstrating the new mayor's economic "impact".

This is what's going on across the country. It's as obvious. It's as obvious as 10 city blocks of empty 50 story buildings.

[0] http://en.yifang.cn/2017/group_new_0224/72.html

[1] http://www.yunnanadventure.com/show/Dalian-builds-%22Orienta...

[2] Yeah, that happened at a rather nice indoor swimming pool / fitness center my in-laws frequented, while they were there.

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinghai_Square

> Many of China’s urban districts were centrally planned and sat empty before they were eventually filled, including the famous Pudong district of Shanghai.

I think it's kind of funny to call pudong an "urban district". It is one, but it feels much more suburban than puxi. It has the skyscrapers, but it's characterized by wider roads, sparser buildings, and much more view of the sky. I think of "urban" as connoting denser buildings.

> they were eventually filled

Which may or may not be true, but what you really want to know is what is the total value of property there vs. the total value of loans issued against it.

If they were only able to fill it by exploiting favorable central bank policies, all they've done is kick the can down the road.

Honestly, I think most American media has it out for China. Which results in the people having it out for China. Which results in like Redditors spamming Tiananmen Square on any thread involving China or even things like Epic Games who merely has investment from China.

I’ve been browsing around satellite view of Chinese cities for a while now. There are hundreds of thousands of high rise apartment complexes without visible activity around them. Literally copy paste buildings surrounded by empty fields. How does this bode for China’s economy? They are all over the place.

I'm curious about your reasons for browsing satellite images of Chinese cities. Are you looking for something in particular?

Curiosity?

I’m interested in the China/global economy and this is one of the many data points.

Thanks for the reply and I hope it's okay if I ask some follow-up questions.

Are you doing some kind of manual sampling or have you automated parts of it? Also, what kinds of objects can be distinguished with the images you use? I assume it might require a bit of practice to reliably recognize certain kinds of structures.

I wonder how much it has to do with ambitious real-estate / encouraging growth ... and maybe a little communist legacy of building massive blocks of apartments for housing.

Granted when I think of block after block of cookie cutter buildings I think of my travels in eastern Europe, maybe China had that tradition too?

first, china has a population of 1.5b, compared to the US 20. So to get an idea of what the US equivalent of a building project would be, divide it by 5. Now observe as the rents in big US cities have grown unaffordable for a majority of people due to insufficient building, what China is doing is much better. Having too many apartments available for 20 years is good compared to having none.

Too bad those vacant buildings will all be uninhabitable within a couple years thanks to the lack of maintenance.

China has moved 300 million people out of rural poverty, into nearly-first world lifestyles in the past 30 years.

At that rate of development, it would be a failure of planning to not have millions of empty units.

Can you elaborate on your second sentence? Are you referring to the empty rural homes that these people left behind?

I think they are saying that china needs to plan for more and more people moving into its cities. The buildings are empty now but maybe that's better than having a housing shortage in 15 years.

China has a rather unique ability compared to other major economies: they can do whatever they want to, anytime they want to.

If they need to move a million people from a location, they can just make it happen. This isn't San Francisco we're talking about, Chinese authorities can snap their fingers and dictate policy. They can point at an area and that's where the new expansion will go for the city. Zoning problems? Nope, it's all flexible depending on who wants something done.

There's no need to build so far in advance if you're China. They're front-loading economic activity, attempting to pull future returns forward. You can tell because the returns they generate on their debt has plunged drastically over the last decade. If they were still generating the old tremendous growth returns on their borrowing, it'd be a different story, then they'd be feeding growth. Instead, they're stealing from the future (which will have to pay for all of this low value forced expansion).

It's a failure of planning if those new units fall into disrepair before being rented.

Nowhere does it say the buildings are falling into disrepair.

On the other hand, if you would otherwise have high unemployment right now that can productively be channeled into construction that is less expensive to achieve, while you expect a massive influx of people in 15 years with a tight labor market... then it makes perfect economic sense to build out a decade in advance.

I'm not saying this is the case, but there are plenty of reasons why building in advance can make sense.

Chinese construction methods heavily use concrete and cheap low skilled labor, they have to overbuild significantly so that those buildings don’t fall apart. But this also means maintnence is a huge problem, a building that was “new” five years ago will often look very shabby today; if built 10 years ago the concrete is already crumbling in a few places. 20 years...tear it down and rebuild.

There's lot of videos of urban explorers who travel China looking for these places, and many of them are in complete disrepair. Even if you don't trust the CNN/NYT narrative, those are harder to discount.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E8TbOPzpeKc

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wuyRxc99h8

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lL9qfucWqu0

haha that last video has a guy cycling through an indoor marble floor mall and a dog just casually wander in.

This is how you pump up GDP numbers.

Why bother even putting up the buildings.

Can we stop using Manhattan as shorthand for a giant city center? NYC is a cultural world capital, as well as economic hub.

Good luck trying to actually build another one of those. There's a reason why there's only 3-4 in the world and they haven't changed in centuries.

From TFA:

> Welcome to Yujiapu Financial District, which promotes itself as China’s Manhattan...

I've heard people unironically refer to Frankfurt as 'Frankhattan' and it makes me cringe. Be your own identity.

I've heard the name "Mainhattan" being used, because it's located on the river named "Main"

I see... about 20 skyscrapers? More like China's downtown Cincinnati...

It's also 30 miles away from the city center of Tianjin. I can see why no one wants to live there.

Completely agree.

Cities exist because of people/trade/geography, occasionally humans miss a place, or something about the above changes and centrally planning one works.

And the reverse happens too, climate change, technology, and movement of people can all *end a city.

England has this in a microcosm in the north. Huge great cities sprung and died on the change in technology. America is going through the same process with Detroit and rust belt.

What do you consider the other ones?

And I'm guessing the reason is valuable geographical position (in NYC's case it's a major shipping hub for both the Atlantic and the Hudson River) and the network effect. But valuable geography can change over time, and who knows how long the network effect of cities is going to last when we finally start making more jobs remote instead of wasting space and other resources on offices and people are free to live wherever they want.

It was the Erie Canal that really made New York -- it allowed shipping into the Great Lakes.

> What do you consider the other ones?

London obviously, but they might be turning inwards with Brexit and losing that status.

The next tier is Tokyo, maybe another Asian capital soon. Paris, Vienna, etc. were part of a Euro-centric world but don't have much relevancy beyond a holiday destination.

London and NYC both create culture from aspects of people from around the world, then export it. I don't see China being able to do this.

NYC only became a cultural and financial center in the last century. The core Western cultural hub has been moving around over the last couple centuries - Vienna, Paris, NYC, now arguably SF. It's not impossible for another to rise in this century. I could easily see two world cultural centers reflecting the divide in underlying cultural polarities (conformism vs. individualism, etc). China as the epicenter for a new pole makes sense, though stifled speech may affect it. Maybe a diverse satellite, like Hong Kong or Bangkok. (I haven't visited Asia so I don't have a good grasp of dynamics there).

San Francisco is not a cultural hub. Cultural products still largely come out of two places: LA and NYC.

edit: anyone downvoting, feel free to defend what makes SF the cultural hub for western civilization.

Technological and social impact. SV owns the west's attention and behavior right now. I do not consider art to be the only cultural artifact. OP in this thread actually included financial impact in its consideration of NYC. Technology is as much a cultural factor as finance.

> Technological and social impact.

That's what makes SF a financial capital. What are its cultural contributions? Hoodies and overpriced coffee?

> SV owns the west's attention and behavior right now

Tech acts to capture and reflect culture, it doesn't create any. Even if it did, having companies based in SF wouldn't make the city itself a cultural capital. Just economic.

It's an ironic claim given how tech has driven out all the creative types out of SF

I feel that you are being overly reductive. My midwestern parents spend half their evenings on Facebook with Netflix on in the background now instead of simply watching cable TV. Society is having huge, diffuse discussions around overuse of phones, internet addiction, political problems of connectivity. Most of the popular personal entertainment apps are based in SV (as is Pixar, if you want to discuss influential art). Culture is not paintings and sculptures, it's the way we behave and interact. Consider that prior to Da Vinci's era, painting primarily was seen as a trade and not an art. With technology uprooting our society piece by piece, I see no reason to consider technology anything but a core cultural driver. SV is currently the center of technology-based culture, for better or worse.

> My midwestern parents spend half their evenings on Facebook with Netflix on in the background now instead of simply watching cable TV.

Then your argument is for LA creating culture, which it does, not SF. "Tech" distributes art created in Hollywood.

> Society is having huge, diffuse discussions around overuse of phones, internet addiction, political problems of connectivity.

Again not culture, digital addiction if anything. The cigarettes of our generation.

> Culture is not paintings and sculptures, it's the way we behave and interact.

Communication tools are just that, tools. Speech, performance, art, music, all creations that have nothing to do with the tech that distributes it.

> SV is currently the center of technology-based culture, for better or worse.

SF/SV captures, repackages, and distributes art/speech in order to sell ads over the top of it all. Why you think that qualifies as creating culture itself, I don't know.

You think i'm wrong? Try watching a Youtube or Facebook original series. When SV tries to actually create something, it's terrible.

I totally disagree with your perspective on this but do not that think we will reach an agreement with further discussion.

Is seems we disagree about what culture actually is, so agreed.

Juicero was invented there, if that doesn't qualify it as a cultural hub, I don't know what will ! /s

Add Rome to your list.

Ngrams of the most-frequently-mentioned cities in print (skewed by an English-heavy corpus) are interesting. An arbitrary listing here, with long-tem smothing (20 years) due to pre-1750 data variaability:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=London%2CParis...

Had Rome in the list but removed it because I felt I was missing one or two in between it and Vienna. Rome and Florence dominated for a long time. Culture also used to be more distributed and heterogeneous prior to industrialization.

Depending on how far back you want to go: Rome, Byzantium and other near-east locations, Cordova and Teledo, Florence and the Italian City-States, Vienna, Paris, London, Amsterdam, ...

The list actually seems fairly small.

Hrm: listing of largest European cities through history 9sortable tables):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_European_citie...

And worldwide:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_largest_cities_through...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_urban_community_siz...

Garden cities have never worked and never will work. I'm sure they have their reasons for building these now, but they will be big liabilities for China in 30 years, just like they have been in the US. (Speaking as a fan of Jane Jacobs and someone who works with fine-grained microeconomic data)

Just in case you've reached your article limit http://archive.is/xDydO

Whenever western media tries and portray China as being ridiculous I'm reminded of the 80s or 90s magazine article showing empty highways being built around Beijing when 99% of the population didn't drive a car.

I'm way less worried about brand new empty cities. They fill up eventually. I'd be worried more about people abandoning populated cities. A problem the US is facing now.

>They fill up eventually.

Isn't that the pattern for most real estate speculation problems?

What cities are being abandoned in the US?

Detroit comes to mind

People are steadily flocking from smaller cities to major cities all over the country

Small/mid size cities in the midwest like Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago (though to a lesser extent).

Other "cities" are growing in the sun-belt.

It's complicated because many of the up-and-coming cities are being built with cars in mind and are not very dense. They are "cities" but they are not urban.

Saying those cities are being abandoned, is more than a stretch.

Cincinnati's population has expanded since 2010.

Pittsburgh and Cleveland have both had stable population numbers the last decade. The declines have been very small over that time. As with Cincinnati they did suffer drops for a couple of decades in the past. They're not being abandoned.

Detroit is losing 0.004% per year at this point. There's a reasonable chance the worst is over for Detroit.

Chicago is not being abandoned at all, that's particularly incorrect. Their population has been stable for 30 years, it has seen a small 70k decline (less than 3% decline over three decades doesn't get you in the lesser extent abandoned category at all).

I take your point, abandoned is too far.

As I understand it: it's a bad sign if a city is not growing. If a city's population is steady, but the countries population is increasing that means people are leaving the city. It at least indicates a lack of growth which can be a marker of a weak economy.

Abandoned is too far, but I think it's true that many of these cities are in some form of decline from their historical peak.

"it's a bad sign if a city is not growing" is something taken as true by many people, but I think it is absolutely arbitrary. Maybe the opposite is true for some cities. Other metrics as land value (San Francisco is the obvious example) and media income must be taken into account.

I guess there are people out there that thinks that cities have a healthy population limit and growing beyond that can harm environment around.

The keyword here is "eventually". It all depends on what that time window is. If its a couple of years or so its fine, else businesses and developers have to remain solvent till then and that could have repercussions through the economy on a large scale. That is the only concern.

Ghost towns are only scary if there is a credit collapse and no one can buy them because of the unavailability of bank financing. The central government in China will always make sure there's bank financing because it controls the printing of money.

That's interesting, but I don't know what I'm supposed to take away from it. The article is trying to spin it as negative, but they never get to the point.

In the United States we'd never preemptively build up a city like this, so obviously China is different, but I don't see what the problem is. They have lots of interview with people saying buildings are empty, but nothing official saying it's a problem or that the Chinese government is worried about it. What were the expectations for filling the buildings? Are they behind schedule?

And sure, $4.5-10 trillion in debt sounds bad, but it's less than half of ours in the United States.

My understanding is that the amount of local government debt is pretty high generally in China, but the central government is basically the one backing it all to some extent correct?

So the question is what does the central government choose to do about it?

It's mostly in the banking system. They introduced loan securitization about 5 years ago, and have been walking down the same path the US went in the 90's and 00's.

It will be indeed be interesting to see how they handle a banking system implosion.

On the coast, one hour from Beijing. This is obviously an extremely attractive area. Give it a couple of years and it will be busy and wealthy.

Are there any healthy, major, "planned" cities? It seems to me that the vast majority of successful healthy cities just spring up naturally at a time and place that makes economic sense. Humans tend to gather and live in groups that are either near a resource or in a location that serves as a hub between resources.

irvine, ca

I didn't know that, thanks.

Reading up on it though, it seems like there was already a lot of growth in the region and development happened over the course of decades.

Meanwhile, in major American cities, people sleep on the streets and even middle class people can't afford housing.

It sounds like the construction might have been a big jobs program.

Why not to move government? Move China government to one of these planned cities? That seems to work when doing well.

Western economists have predict China economy would collapse in two decades ago and repeated every year, and their faces been slapped hardly every time. If Yujiapu is called China's Manhattan, there are dozens of bigger Manhattan in China right now and they are doing really good.

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