Source: http://designstories.ning.com
TALE OF TWO CITIES: A NEW MODEL? Kilamba, Luanda and Kangbashi, Ordos Panos Coucopoulos Alessandra Gava 17.02.2015
Title image: Kilamba under construction
In this paper we want to demonstrate how two cities in two very distinct socio-economic realities, in two different countries and alas, in two different continents are being planned and built by similar mechanisms, driven by similar financial interests and eloquently manifest a striking disregard for the citizen/user. We will arrive to this point by examining the interests embedded in the planning and construction of two ex novo built cities in Angola and China, while tracking down the relations between these two countries. This paper will examine these two cities as the formation of a new emerging typology of city, the “investment city�, the city as a de-localized product, used as a mere investment product capable of maintaining economic growth but incapable of directly tackling any social, cultural or demographic necessities.
1 (Lampugnani 2010: 32)
I. INTRODUCTION
2 Retrieved from wikipedia
In the course of history, cities have evolved and expanded mainly on necessities stemming from real, tangible problems i.e. growth of population, change of the principal form of economic activity, need of a larger hinterland production area, new satellite cities - providing certain amenities to the primate city. When examining a city and studying its functions, it is imperative to consider its users as an indispensable part of this equation, “[...] Because a city does not grow; it is created by humans. What people do with the city never happens accidentally, but always has a reason of being, as strange and irrational it may seem at times.”1
3 (Agência Angola Press 2008) 4 (Agência Angola Press 2008) 5 (Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa 2013)
Nova Cidade de Kilamba in Angola and Kangbashi-Ordos in China are two cities that were not built to directly serve a necessity of the community for which they were built, but rather to serve a fiscal necessity of the countries to which they belong. We will examine how these two cities are products of an economic exchange with the main recipient/profiteer being China. We will also investigate the mechanisms involved in the construction of said cities and review the similarities they present whilst situated in very different cultural and social contexts. What happens with cities that are being planned and built not for the users but as mere investment capitals? Could this trend lead to a new typology of a city and how viable are these cities? II. THE CONCEPTION
Angola and PRC on the world map Angola
(Source: own elaboration)
Peoples Republic of China
18'498'000
1'350'695'000
14.8/km2
144/km2
$ 139.059 billion
$13.395 trillion
$ 6,484
$9,844
Luanda, Angola
Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China 4.8 million
1'940'653
1'271/km2
22/km2
$ 33 billion
$ 49.83 billion
$ 625
$ 25'239
NOVA CIDADE DE KILAMBA Early 2008, newspaper articles read that the first phase of the Social Housing Project Kilamba Kiaxe had begun successfully, as confirmed by the Angolan Minister of Territorial Administration, Virgilio de Fontes Pereira, representing the President of the Republic, José Eduardo dos Santos. The first phase foresaw the erection of five-, nine- and eleven-storey units in an area of 8 sq km to a total of 20’000 apartments. The project included commercial centers, kindergartens, primary and secondary schools, an administrative area and leisure spaces. Other services implemented included fire stations, police squads and fuel pumps. Finally, 429km of “fully wooded, forming an ecological corridor” road network, according to the Gabinete de Reconstrução Nacional (GRN) were part of the project.3 The project was to be completed in 36 months. The contract of the first phase of this project was signed on November 14, 2007 between the Office of National Reconstruction (GRN) and a major Chinese state-owned investment company, China International Trust and Investment Corp., or Citic. During the construction phase, the estimated price per apartment was about US$ 35’000.4 July 2012 sees the completion of the new housing development Nova Cidade de Kilamba, built 30km south of the city of Luanda, the capital of Angola. A promotion video for Kilamba from real estate agency Delta Angola Imobilaria says the 20-square-mile town has more than 20,000 apartments, 41 schools and 17 health clinics. There are 18'498'000 more than a hundred retail spaces and 750 medium-size apartment blocks being 14.8/km2 built, and soon there will be a fast highway access to downtown Luanda; each hous$ 139.059 billion ing block has its own recreational center. The total project of Kilamba was designed 6,484 to accommodate 500,000 people upon its completion, on an area of$ over 54 sq km and included over 100 commercial premises and a dozen schools. The cost was reported as US$3.5 billion, financed by a Chinese credit line and repaid by the Angolan government with oil.2 Designed to be a flagship symbol of Angola’s post-war economic might, it led many to dare to dream of having their own home.5
Peo
Of course, the penalty for the launching of this project was not low on the local population; a press release dated July 27, 2009, from the Director of non-governmental organization SOS Habitat – Solidarity Action Luis Araùjo, describes: “In the last four Angola and Luanda in numbers: surface, population and GDP (Source: UNdata and wikipedia)
Luanda,Republic Angola of China Peoples
Angola 18'498'000 14.8/km2 $ 139.059 billion $ 6,484
Ordo 4.8 million 1'271/km2 $ 33 billion $ 625
1'350'695'000 144/km2 $13.395 trillion $9,844
days approximately three thousand houses have been demolished and the same estimated number of Angolan families has been forcibly evicted in the (commonly called) Bagdad neighborhood, in the Sector 5 of M’Bonde Chap’u, in the Kilamba Kiaxi municipality of Luanda.6 Considering that the average Angolan family unit consists of five to eight people, SOS Habitat estimates that the demolitions had evicted a minimum of approximately fifteen thousand people from their homes.
6 (AfricaFocus Bulletin, Aug 10, 2009) 7 (Hayes 2013) 8 (Richter 2014) 9 (Richter 2014) 10 (Zhang 2012)
KANGBASHI-ORDOS On the other side of the hemisphere, in a reality very distant to the one of Kilamba, sits the City of Ordos; built for over a million people, the city was designed to be the crowning jewel of Inner Mongolia. Situated near the Ordos Desert in Inner Mongolia, the region boasted a higher GDP than Beijing itself, thus rapidly transformed into an attraction for investors. This financial fervor originated in the vast natural resources of coal and gas lying in the rich subterranean ground of the region. In 2003 a conglomeration of property developers started planning the creation of a new urban center just outside the existing city of Ordos, the Kangbashi New Area. The frenzy derived from the fact that, that same year, the Chinese government started awarding coal rights to mining and real estate development companies that agreed to build housing, office buildings, and roads. The plan was to prepare a thinly populated section of Ordos called Kangbashi for up to 1 million people. And during the build-up between 2003 and 2012 – a period marked by high coal prices – Ordos recorded blistering growth. The city’s GDP rose 15 percent year-on-year to 322 billion Yuan in 2011.7 In 2008 alone coal sales accounted for more than 60% of the city’s GDP and 50% of government revenues. Yet, with coal prices falling in mid2012, hundreds of area mines were affected, leading to a desertification of the local economy. closed down or cut back production Angola More than two thirds of the local minesPeoples Republic of China as of 2012, transforming Ordos into a scenery of complete abandonment. Compa1'350'695'000 18'498'000 nies, jobs and people never 2arrived to fill Kangbashi’s industrial parks and apartment 14.8/km 144/km2 complexes. In addition, central government real estate controls in 2010 decreased $ 139.059 billion $13.395 trillion the speculative investment that encouraged development. And the mining enterprises $ 6,484 $9,844 that stood at the foundation of the local economy witnessed their revenues dwindle 8 in the face of overseas competition and a slowing domestic economy. All in all, an ambitious investment to create a new city, a symbol of prosperity in the Mongolian desert, derailed instantaneously in the aftermath of the mayhem that the financial crisis of 2008 brought about. Doomed to incompletion, this futuristic metropolis now rises empty out of the deserts of northern China. With less than 10% of its buildings ever filled, the rest largely left to decay, abandoned mid-construction, Ordos quickly earned the title of China’s Ghost City.9 Peoples Republic of China Luanda, Angola
PRC and Ordos in numbers: surface, population and GDP
Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China 1'350'695'000
4.8 million 144/km2 1'271/km2 $13.395 trillion $ 33 billion $9,844 $ 625
1'940'653 22/km2 $ 49.83 billion $ 25'239
III. THE ECONOMIC DRIVERS A. NOVA CIDADE DE KILAMBA Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China
FINANCING SCHEME The Angolan government has publicized the satellite town as an example of a clean, safe 1'940'653 and convenient living alternative to the crowded slum-rid2 den districts of Luanda. “It is22/km undoubtedly the country’s largest housing and construc$ 49.83one billion of the largest on the entire continent. But few tion development area, perhaps $ 25'239 can afford to live there.”10 With 68% of the population living below the poverty line and 28% living in extreme poverty, according to the United Nations latest statistics (94,2% living with less than $5 a day according to international poverty standards), buying an apartment in Kilamba is more than 40 years worth of salary even for an average middle-class citizen. Of course, one must note that Kilamba is just one of a series of satellite cities being currently built in the outskirts of Luanda.
(Source: UNdata and wikipedia)
11 (Cain 2012) 12 (A. Cain 2014) 13 (A. Cain, Luanda’s post-war land markets: reducing poverty by promoting inclusion 2013) 14 (A. Cain 2014: 3) 15 (A. Cain 2014: 3) 16 (A. Cain 2014: 3)
“Financing urban development in a situation such as Luanda, a city boasting a 76% population living in informal Musseques or slums, which has a low fiscal base, is a severe challenge. This is due partly to the poverty of the majority of the inhabitants. There is a weak taxation regime in general, due partly to a lack of up-to-date cadaster and population census. Thus, financing is required at a scale that even the state cannot afford, rendering partnerships with private sector and international lenders necessary. This is where China comes into play as the principal financer of Angolan reconstruction.”11 This new centralidade, purported to have cost US$ 3.5 billion, was financed through the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China. The China International Fund (CIF), a private group of companies based in Hong Kong that has Angolan, Chinese and other investors, had a dominant role in building Kilamba city. In the early phase of the program, financing also bypassed the state budget. The mode of financing for the new urban centralidades has often been obscured through a mechanism referred to as a form of public–private partnership, where members of the Angolan government executive have become shareholders in their own right, with the private foreign firms carrying out the construction.12 The formal role on the public side of the partnership was the acquisition of land and, when necessary, the removal of existing occupants, which was justified on the legal principal that the state is the owner and manager of all Angolan land. The compulsory acquisition of land for new centralidades, previously occupied by informal settlers, results in the expropriation of assets and savings of the poor.13 CHINA IN ANGOLA
Economic Circle between Angola and China (Source: own elaboration)
Angola, followed by South Africa, Sudan, Nigeria and Egypt are first in the list of primary trading partners with China. China’s engagement in Africa is mainly state-tostate, involving the purchase of extractive resources that are being exchanged with the provision of investment credits for infrastructure and construction. In November 2006 at the Beijing Summit of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) the Africa–China partnership was layed out and ratified by 48 African countries. Chinese export credits and concessional loans are provided for the support of large infrastructure projects and can be accessed by African states and parastatal entities through China’s state-owned and private enterprises.14 High-profile government buildings and national stadiums are often affiliated with China’s infrastructure investments in the continent. The state-to-state nature of these loans and the veiled conditions under which they are settled have often led to criticism in the western media. Having only recently emerged from a 27-year war that left the country covered in shatters of its former self, access to Chinese investment offers a unique opportunity to rebuild national infrastructure. Access to conventional western reconstruction aid was denied to Angola after repeated appeals to the international community due to violation of human rights. In 2004, Angola turned to the Chinese and accepted the offer of a US$ 4 billion credit line that was rolled over several times and is currently worth more than US$ 15 billion.15 Much of the Chinese financing has been used to rebuild the country’s damaged transport infrastructure, a condition necessary for trading partner China to effectively transport goods and people from the war-affected central and eastern provinces to the shipping zones at the country’s ports. However, in seek of political prestige and diplomatic leverage, substantial investments have been made in projects, such as new, over-sized airports and sports stadiums. In the face of growing civic discontent, ten years after the end of the war, with much economic growth but little social development, and with the demographic shift of populations to the cities where 60 per cent of the electorate now lives, administrative and economic challenges constrained the higher levels of governance, prior to the 2008 elections, to make commitments to the development of social housing and basic services. Allan Cain comments on the result of the social projects envisioned by the government: “Rather than investing in in situ urban upgrading or in strategic urban infrastructure geared to slum prevention and land readjustment, quick fix solutions were offered by Chinese and other international investors. There was no adequate preliminary assessment to determine the affordability of land and housing markets or to gauge urban management capacity before these projects, known colloquially as centralidades, were initiated.”16 And here within lies the problem: these infrastructural investments are not being planned and built as real-estate investments, to be profitable, livable and attrac-
tive investment commodities. They are mere exchange commodities between two governments, fulfilling bilateral desires in the highest ranks of governance. With this irrational at first view system, the two partners, China and Angola, trade oil for infrastructure and prestige. China gets oil at a good price (very low, given the “free” wages paid); Angola gets housing units and modern cities, dubbed as “social housing projects”, some publicity and can stretch the truth about being a “developing country”. For the longer term, China gets housing for the thousands of technical people it has sent to Angola to manage their oil, mining, transportation and other industries (a longterm goal of the Chinese in a number of African countries with resources). This logic alone describes how the government of Angola has been able to use financing from Chinese credit facilities to build prestige projects that include support for the publicprivately developed Kilamba city. Despite China receiving oil for the concession loans to Angola, at the end of the day, through the public-private owned companies involved in the construction process of said centralidades, the profit balance tips clearly their way following these transactions. Angola is left with infrastructure boasting a short time-span, high-maintenance costs and without any of the technical know-how to freely iterate this model in other instances.
17 (Yishi 2012) 18 (Richter 2014)
Evidently, the question that arises here is, what commodities are being traded in the case of Ordos? Or what does China have to gain by investing in non-profitable investments within its borders and how does this relate to the investments made in Angola? B. KANGBASHI-ORDOS FINANCING SCHEME In Kangbashi, a large part of the wealth accumulated through the coal industry over the past 10 years has gone to the real estate sector. Money gained from property investment went back into the coal industry or was re-invested in the real estate sector, forming a vicious cycle. So when the local economy cooled, the real estate bubble also burst. Today, the local economy is suffering and the city government is struggling to arrange bank loans, issue bonds and attract private investors to continue growth. The government has fueled the boom through borrowing schemes and by attracting investments, betting that any public money spent on building projects would yield handsome returns in the future in the form of tax receipts. The economic crisis has spilled over into other areas, such as the services sector. Media reports said that local restaurants and the retail sector have been hit hard by the city’s economic problems. However, local officials haven’t abandoned hopes for Ordos’ population of 600,000. Nor have they stopped betting that investment will eventually pay off as government revenues rise. Indeed, Mayor Lian Su said in April 2012 that the city government planned to “do everything possible to expand credit (and) guarantee new loan issues top 50 billion yuan in 2012.”17 Ordos’ implosion stands at one extreme of a national slowdown that a government report on July 15, 2013 signaled would deepen that quarter, with industrial output gains matching the weakest since the 2009 global recession. The challenge for Li’s administration is to assure growth is resilient enough for the world’s second-largest economy to weather busts in local finance and industries ridden by overcapacity.18 So, in the midst of all this economic turmoil and slowdown, a whole city lies empty, vacant of any sign of future residents. The impacts of the economy are directly projected on the city itself with no barrier in between to protect one from the other. This biblical phenomenon that resembles stories of Sodom and Gomorrah, cities devastated in a fortnight when the then opium-based trading economy collapsed, is a reality newly built cities are encountering all the more often. The reason behind this is the use of the city as a form of investment. China is no longer using cities as catalyzers of creating profit through production, research and trade, but rather, cities are becoming the end product. Cities have become the goods that are expected to bring capital appreciation, dividends or interest earnings. This is accomplished through a wellorchestrated scheme involving public companies taking part in the building process from the conception till the final realization. This process consists in master-planned communities being built for the rising middle class of newly formed millionaires that are being bought by investors. City governments, in their attempt to reach their GDP targets, sell land to private developers, who build modern western-style apartments and single-family homes in the case of Kangbashi, or commercial skyscrapers and luxury apartments in other cases, thus keeping the citizens employed through construction. As is, Chinese master planning is a field that depends heavily on economic, political and geographical factors. Drawing on its own experience of building mega-urban projects such as the new city of
Economic Circle between the coalmine owners and the chinese government (Source: own elaboration)
19 (Harvey 2008) 20 (Burgos Càceres und Ear 2013: 44) 21 (Bloomberg News 2010)
Shenzhen, China has become the epicenter of the neo- urbanization process that is also being strongly promoted in Africa. David Harvey notes that: “China’s influence has become genuinely global, partly through the integration of financial markets that have used their flexibility to debt-finance urban development around the world. Megaurbanization projects first emerged in the Middle East in places such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, mopping up the surplus arising from oil wealth in the most conspicuous, socially unjust and environmentally wasteful ways possible. Immense fortunes have been generated for the financial intermediaries who matched easily accessed financing to surplus housing demand.”19 We will now proceed to investigate the similarities these two cities bear between them on three different levels: urban/architectural, economic and strategic. III. THE SIMILARITIES
Photograph of Kilamba housing district (Source: copyright Joao Carlos retrieved from Flickr.com)
Photograph of housing ditrict
Kangbashi-Ordos
(Source: copyright Michael Christopher Brown for Time Magazine)
URBAN/ARCHITECTURAL What impresses the possible observer and what initially drove us to inquire into the possible similarities Kilamba and Kangbashi could have, is the similarities one notes when looking at photographs of these two districts (see images). Kilamba is situated 30 km south of the city of Luanda, 8o south of the equator on the African continent, while Kangbashi is situated 25 km south of Dongsheng District, the central district of Ordos City, and 39o north of the equator. Nevertheless, when one looks at photographs of these two cities, one cannot help but notice the stylistic and urban similarities they present. They are both satellite cities, built in the wake of great amounts of money flowing into the respective local economies. They were envisioned to serve as new centralities, mainly as housing districts and were constructed far away from the cities they were planned to be part of. Built in the desert, they promote an automobile-oriented urban development, both in terms of connection to the primate cities and in terms of local transportation. The urban pattern in both cases is a rationalized, modular, parceled layout, permitting the future expansion of the districts. A series of other characteristics that are consolidated in a structured whole, are, equally, components of both proposed plans. Such characteristics are the quantitative programming –defining the expected maximum number of inhabitants-, the operational planning –subdividing the city into areas that are identified through their programmatic use: political center, business center and housing in Kangbashi and strictly housing district in Kilamba-, the rational and predominant presence of the road network in space and of course the use of a western style architectural reference in the aesthetic expression of the built form. ECONOMIC Kilamba is the result of an economic transaction between China and Angola; in exchange for oil, China pays off with infrastructure. The whole fiscal scheme behind Kangbashi is not very different: China needs coal for its continuous growth expansion politics and in return for granting mining privileges to corporations, creates growth and maintains its GDP growth rate high by dumping the earns into a real estate plan created to generate growth in itself by attracting private investors. Thus Kangbashi is the result of an intra- China transaction, supported by its need for primary resources. Commenting on the needs of China for primary resources, Burgos Càceres and Ear say: “To satiate this hunger, Beijing is sending its private and public companies to faraway lands and distant points of the globe in a scramble to conquer global resources before others do. This approach has been termed ‘assertively competitive’ and traditional hegemonic powers might view these interventions as aggressive, yet little is said or done about it. While venturing into foreign lands, Chinese companies enjoy unconditional support from their government and from a coordinated foreign policy that promotes, mainly through national oil and mining companies and sovereign wealth funds, the securing of resources in the international energy market.” 20 What we notice here, however, is that the same external politics are applied in the interior of the country in the form of an internal exploitation, where the private investors, the citizens foremost, are being lured into sustaining the government-formed bubble of the real estate market. This being the case, as capital control prevents Chinese nationals from investing overseas and following the poor performance of the stock market, as of 2007, China’s wealthy, in a lack of other alternatives and with bank deposits yielding less than consumer price inflation, switched their focus market from equities to property.21 Apart from serving common financial objectives, the two cities are equally comparable for the target group they were initially designed for: the middle class. Two entire cities were planned and built on the economic potential of a very limited amount of investors that eventually proved incapable of supporting this model. Therefore, both cities remained vastly empty for a series of years, gaining notoriety in popular media for being dubbed as ‘ghost cities’. Recent media shows this situation slowly shifting in
Luanda
Kilamba
Satellite map showing the area of Kilamba and the distance to Luanda 2 km
1 mile
(Source: retrieved from Google maps on January 2015 and elaborated by the authors)
Dongsheng
Kangbashi Ordos
Satellite map showing the area of Kangbashi-Ordos and the distance to Dongsheng 2 km
1 mile
(Source: retrieved from Google maps on January 2015 and elaborated by the authors)
Previous Page: Kilamba and Kangbashi Ordos: Overview plan of current state of construction (2014), scale 1:10’000 (Source: own elaboration)
Kilamba: Perspective of a typical housing unit (Source: own elaboration)
Kangbashi Ordos: Perspective of a typical housing unit (Source: own elaboration)
22 (A. Cain 2014: 5) 23 Cain, A (2013b), “Housing finance in Angola�, Centre for Affordable Housing Finance in Africa, available at http:// www.housingfinanceafrica. org/ country/angola/. 24 (Watson 2014) 25 (A. Cain 2014: 6-7) 26 (Redvers 2012) 27 (A. Cain 2014: 1)
the case of Kilamba, but not as much in Kangbashi. STRATEGIC The first phase of the Kilamba city project, was built to accommodate 160,000 people in 20,000 flats, each with a floor area of between 110 and 150 square meters and costing from US$ 120,000 to US$ 200,000. Until early 2013, these apartments remained largely empty and so acquired the status of a ghost town in the international media.22 Most poor Angolans live on the equivalent of less than US$ 2 a day, but the original selling price of a Kilamba flat was unaffordable even for senior civil servants. The state was therefore obliged to step in to save the prestige project. A heavily subsidized rent-to-purchase scheme was introduced, offering three per cent on mortgages, and the cost of the cheapest units was cut from US$ 120,000 to US$ 84,200, which brought apartment ownership within the reach of middle-level civil servants.23 Under similar circumstances, but in a different economic n the wake of a collapsing real estate market, Kangbashi was left grossly deserted, with accounts of up to 90% of the units being empty, 10 years after its creation. To deal with this reality, many plans and policies were conceived from the government, while attempting to control the property bubble in parallel. The main contingency plan that was finally effectuated was to move the seat of the government from Dongsheng to Kangbashi in 2006. However, most government workers still preferred to live in Dongsheng and commute daily, given the low offer of shops, restaurants and other amenities in the new city. The government also tried to put a cap on the number of houses an individual can own as investment property without residing in them.
VI. CURRENT STATE Today in Luanda, the urban fantasy phenomenon has resulted in an oversupply of high-end housing and a dramatic collapse in real estate values in that segment of the market. The state has been obliged to allocate the bulk of its housing budget to subsidies in order to make projects such as the Kilamba centralidade affordable to civil servants. The new, lower market prices are still too high for the poor; bursting the price bubble has not improved the situation of the majority of families living at the bottom of the housing pyramid. Therefore, professor Vanessa Watson, from the African Centre for Cities, recognizes that state spending is likely to be skewed towards support for these new cities and away from meeting the basic services and housing needs of the much larger poor urban populations, as was initially promised by the President, by investing in potentially more sustainable economic and social projects.24 The early experience of Angola in putting its future urbanism into the hands of private developers of foreign interests raises some fundamental questions about the viability of this new urban private sector-driven model. We must ask if the model is financially sustainable without substantial state guarantees of free land, subsidies and even bailouts when all else fails.25 It has been access to Chinese credit, however, that has allowed Angola to become a pioneer of this new urbanism in Africa. If China is adding to its GDP by building empty cities inside its own borders (see City of Ordos, Yujiapu, Wenzhou, Zhengzhou, Tielin and Guiyang) and it is now building empty cities in other continents, surely there are some obscurities in its investment decision-making process or political agendas guided by expediency. An online article from the BBC quotes someone saying that the asking prices of the properties are in line with their cost of construction and the quality of life they offer.26 But if they are wholly out of step with the market in which they are built then access to credit is not the issue, because access to credit is part of the market. Even if the Angolan government were to step in and heavily subsidize sales of the apartments, would the buyers be able to afford to pay for maintenance, upkeep, property taxes? The city likely will be falling apart and in marked decay in 10 years. Effectively, as the apartments were initially too expensive for most of the population, the state has had to draw further funds from its housing budget for a subsidized rent-to-purchase scheme to make the units affordable for middle-level civil servants.27 Clearly, in this top-down equation, the Angolan people get nothing, but no one ever thought they would get anything.
VII. CONCLUSION
28 (60 Minutes 2013)
Nova Cidade de Kilamba in Angola and Kangbashi-Ordos in China comprise two cities built under similar political intentions and through funding derived by government investments, with a vision to house the new middle class that has been developing in these two countries. A new model of a city produced under the demand of financial necessity —as a justified form of investment by the government— and with total disregard for the real-time needs of the future users/investors. As a result these cities slowly drifted to form a new typology of “ghost towns”, remaining vastly void of people, even when publicized as the new, convenient alternatives.
29 (Schulz-Dornburg 2012)
In the absence of a physical client, financial groups take control of real estate companies shifting urban planning into an “urban business”. The same financial crisis that struck in 2008 the performing real estate markets of Russia, USA, GB, Spain and Dubai is now threatening to burst the real estate bubble of countries like Angola and China. This new urban private sector-driven model that neglects relations to any local problems and necessities in the formation process of new cities and is driven only by economic factors is in dire contrast with the nature of the city to evolve as an organism. The problems of this post-Fordism urban development reside in conceiving the city in the terms of a business model, where slogans outweigh ideas, goods outweigh the right to the city, where architecture is perceived as a marketing strategy in a completely epidermic approach of counter-innovation. “These cities are the modern equivalents of building pyramids: it doesn’t really add to the betterment of people’s lives, but it promotes GDP growth” 28, says analyst Gillem Tulloch, commenting on the newly formed ghost towns in China, in an interview to the Time Magazine. From a thermodynamic point of view, the city, being an open and complex system that exchanges information, mass and energy with its surrounding environment, the entropy stemming from such process, in its search for balance between order and disorder, tends towards disorder and can only be lowered by the application of external forces. Thus, it is necessary that a city be in equilibrium with its surroundings in order to obtain desired balance. Cities like Kilamba and Kangbashi could either be an example of an amazing long-term investment or the manifestation of an insane Chinese property bubble. In any case, and time will only prove the sanity or total lack thereof in the planning of these two cities, a great amount of energy is necessary in rendering these cities as part of the local urban tissues, as the y were not conceived, planned or built to serve the surroundings in which they were inserted. Like a body after a transplantation procedure, the foreign organ will initially be rejected (turning into ghost cities) and only in time will it become fully functional and integrated with the rest of the organism. It is the incorrect manner of doing this that we wanted to point out with this paper. In composing this paper and researching for ghost cities and their respective impoact on the local economies, we came across a photographic project of Julia Schulz-Dornburg. In her project to document abandoned housing around Spain, speculative developments that were abandoned after the burst of the property bubble of 2007-2008, she writes: “The buildings pictured here are not the detritus of some apocalyptic natural event – like Pompeii after Vesuvius – but of human greed: destroyed by the very economic system that engendered them. The literal and metaphorical hollowness of these human endeavors perfectly echo the closing line of T.S. Elliot’s 1925 poem The Hollow Men: “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper.”” 29 This is the flaw we see in the urban development process of the two cities analyzed and compared within their very distinct socio-economic realities, belonging to two different countries and alas, situated in two different continents, that have yet been planned and built by similar mechanisms, driven by similar financial interests and eloquently manifest a striking disregard for the citizen/user. And we ask ourselves, future architects, is this the planning of the future we want?
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