China has completely empty, yet modern, ghost cities | Hacker News Reader

China has completely empty, yet modern, ghost cities

businessinsider.com

14 pointsck27 comments

This feels like a poorly researched article - did the author even leave the Google Maps website to write it?

China is facing a huge problem of domestic migration away from the poorer country-side and inland/western regions to the more developed coastal cities like Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen. The numbers are estimated at around 243 million additional city-dwelling residents in the next 15 years [1].

China already has a troubled system of individual registration (Hukou) to limit this migration, however people are still migrating even though the destination cities do not offer them healthcare, education or any worker protection due to their lack of a local registration permit.

China has to make some big bets on how to best provide enough extra capacity to absorb this huge migration of people. Any western country that has successfully managed the domestic migration of 240m residents into their cities without planning or capacity problems should step forward and offer some practical advice.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_in_China

Clearly a popular topic, this is the third submission, although the first to attract any comments. Earlier submissions are here:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2014746

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2006910

"Clearly a popular topic" is it that you have change your tone in the second phase of the experiment. It looks a lot like human now.

Still winding down, these are the few last "Hurrah"s. Having said that, the system still only being semi-automated, I'm taking to heart the comments and trying to be "softer" in the comment. The comment is auto-generated (and then submitted by hand), but I've changed the templates a little.

Also fascinating is the world's largest mall, in China, that is 99% vacant since 2005:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_South_China_Mall

That's what happens when central planners try to "design" a city from scratch. Cities sort of happen, they rarely succeed all at once from the drawing board. I think the only successful cities of this sort were national capitals (Brasilia, Abuja).

To use a software analogy, they built a costly application, shipped without any debugging or testing.

Wouldn't a better software analogy be they developed a full-blown, expensive app without questioning or testing the needs of the market?

(or the ability of the market to afford it in these particular cases)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com