But it wasn't just a lull. It was the housing bubble bursting, and that emptiness was replicated incommunities around the world as people lost their homes and developers' projects went bust. Christopher Marcinkoski Northwestern area of Ciudad Valdeluz, known as the Miraflores district, in 2014. PNOA The El Caaveral development, shown from above in 2002 and 2012, is located in central Spain. Christopher Marcinkoski Overview of Ciudad Valdeluz, looking to the west-southwest, in 2014. Meant as a community for middle-income families who wanted more space than was availably in nearby Madrid, the development was never finished. One dramatic example of speculative urbanization is Ciudad Valdeluz, about 40 miles from the capital city of Madrid. Construction began in 2006.It was intended to hold 30,000 residents, and included plans for a train station that would link them to the capital, as well as parks, sports centers and schools. 'The feedback that we got was a sense of being stuck, that they were sold a false bill of goods,' Ricardo Espinosa Large andincomplete public spaces throughout the Ensanche de Vallecas development near Madrid, shown in 2014, exacerbates the sense of emptiness and abandonment. 'They are pretty surreal environments,' he'The absence of people helps you understand the scale of the places, even if they're not fully built out. You can see the markings of the roadways or the block structures sort of stretching out into the distance, and you recognize how big these things were intended to be, and that sort of scale makes it more obvious how irrational they were in their undertaking Christopher Marcinkoski An incomplete pedestrian connector between a terminal at Aeropuerto Central Ciudad Real and an unbuilt high-speed train station, 2012. Similarly, millions of euros were poured into constructing new roads. Many were never finished. 'A lot of the infrastructural building ended up being more about nation building than it was about long-term, sustainable planning and building logic, ... and that led, in my mind, a great deal to the housing glut that was produced,' Marcinkoski said.
It's a pressing issue to Marcinkoski, because the financial crisis didn't end speculative urbanization,particularly in rapidly developing countries like China. He's now looking at the phenomenonin Africa's growing cities.
'A lot of the mistakes that we have seen are being replicated' in Africa, Marcinkoski said. 'There's an opportunity there to think about alternative ways where upgrades to settlements and infrastructure could be undertaken in a more rational and more adjustable manner, and not so focused on just the image of modernity, but actually the reality of need.' Kate Abbey-Lambertz covers sustainable cities, housing and inequality. Tips? Feedback? Send anemail or follow her onTwitter. Also on The Huffington Post:
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Spooky Abandoned Places Around The World
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