Not much doing at the Chenggong Railway Station. (Image by vegafish.)

China might be the most fascinating place on Earth right now, but not only for good reasons. For instance: Pre-planned suburban sprawl has led to massive temporary ghost towns in which gorgeous architecture and spiffy new light rail systems lay unused while bureacratic issues are worked out. The government is hoping to ease the congestion of cities by building nearby suburban centers from scratch and relocating people there. I can’t imagine that artificially undoing population density is a good idea, but that’s the plan. It will definitely lead to a more wasteful use of resources.

Holly Krambeck has written an intriguing piece of reportage on the subject (focusing on the insta-ghost town of Chenggong) for the World Bank site. (I think the excellent Marginal Revolution was the first to point me in the direction of this article, so thank you, you dismal scientists.)  An excerpt:

“In Chenggong, there are more than a hundred-thousand new apartments with no occupants, lush tree-lined streets with no cars, enormous office buildings with no workers, and billboards advertising cold medicine and real estate services–with no one to see them.

As my colleagues and I wandered, on–foot, down the center of Chenggong’s empty 8-lane boulevards and dedicated bus lanes, never seeing a single person, we marveled about the fiscal and political conditions that would have to exist to create something like this.

development of a new light rail system. Upon learning that two stations had already been built in Chenggong, my colleagues and I just had to go see for ourselves–just what does a modern Chinese ghost town really look like? Well, here it is.”