The New York Times reports on a large development recently constructed outside of Ordos, a city in northern China with about 1.5 million people. In an area that is planned to house 300,000, there are currently very few residents:

City leaders, cheered on by aggressive developers, had hoped to turn Ordos into a Chinese version of Dubai — transforming vast plots of the arid, Mongolian steppe into a thriving metropolis. They even invested over $1 billion in their visionary project.

But four years after the city government was transplanted to Kangbashi, and with tens of thousands of houses and dozens of office buildings now completed, the 12-square-mile area has been derided in the state-run newspaper China Daily as a “ghost town” monument to excess and misplaced optimism.

As China’s roaring economy fuels a wild construction boom around the country, critics cite places like Kangbashi as proof of a speculative real estate bubble they warn will eventually pop — sending shock waves through the banking system of a country that for the last two years has been the prime engine of global growth.

I wonder what it would be like to drive through such a large developed area that is basically empty. Such an experience would easily provide a context for a dystopian film. But in this case, the people haven’t been driven off by some odd disease or monster – it is the more prosaic, yet perhaps more potent, issue of economic trouble.

h/t The Infrastructurist