The Chinese and the Void

Have you ever wondered what happens to urban megaprojects when developers have ambitions and funds, but there are no buyers and tenants? We'll show you now.

The Chinese seem to know a lot about urban megaprojects like no one else, which look great on paper and amaze the imagination of architectural critics, but ... never come to life.

Would you say that any hipster of the middle lane will be able to dream, draw and make a convincing presentation of the project of a new city today and it is not necessary to go to China? But the projects in question differ favorably from their "paper" brothers of varying degrees of elaboration — these cities are really built. But somehow it didn't work out with the residents…

The heroes of the photo project of Chicago resident Kai Sammer were three ghost towns - "Chinese Manhattan" Yujiapu Financial District, "Chinese Venice" Meixi Lake and "The best city for tourism" Ordos.

Ordos is really popular with tourists — but precisely as a ghost town. The millionaire is inhabited by barely three to five percent, and that by the efforts of the state, which not without difficulty relocated rural residents to an empty metropolis.

Ordos has museums, theaters, a stadium, a race track, even its own analogue of Disneyland. Everyone except the townspeople. They probably wouldn't have gathered a queue for Serov here either.

"Chinese Manhattan" is also amazing: the replica of the New York island was conceived as the largest financial center in the world. But the city was built on the site of a simple fishing village.

The scope of the project was given a serious one — it has its own Rockefeller Center, and even twin towers. The total area of Yujiapu Financial District office centers, according to the project documentation, is nine million square meters.

Alas, the vacancy rate here is one hundred percent. Construction, the completion of which was scheduled for 2019, has been suspended for the time being. A similar fate befell Meixi Lake, a city on the lake, the drawings of which were bypassed by many architectural publications at the time.

Built on impressive projects, conceptual, but — empty. Legends and even conspiracy theories have emerged around such cities in recent years.

According to one of them, cities are empty not because large-scale plans for their development are disconnected from reality, and not because developers did not have enough funds to finish what they started. Proponents of this theory believe that ghost towns are being built in case of a new world War - if real cities are destroyed, the Chinese will not be able to rebuild them, but simply move to ready—made "stand-ins".

Let's leave the version without comments and continue to enjoy the picture. After all, it's not for nothing that three Chinese ghost towns have become participants in the Unborn Cities photo project.

Kai Sammer, the author of the project, very accurately captured the feeling of cities that have gone all the way from thought through paper to real buildings and structures. But they were never born. It's both sad and incredibly beautiful. In its own way.