Signal 1: Ghost Cities in China
The last 15 years were the blossom period for real estate development in China, the housing price increased dramatically, and those wealthiest businessmen mostly are real estate agents. However, as China’s economic growth slows down, many “ghost cities” start to show up.
Those “ghost cities” are not similar to Detroit. Detroit used to be prosperity; it went to decay in 2008 during the financial crisis. On the contrary, in this signal, those “ghost cities” are newly built and born to be empty, and refer to certain districts instead of entire cities.
Figure 1 shows the “Ghost Cities” results in Shenyang; it comes from research at MIT. In this research, it defined “ghost cities” as those residential districts which are far to amenities such as groceries, restaurants, etc. In this figure, the more red points, the higher the probability to be “Ghost Cities,” and vice verse. It is significant that nearly all of those “Ghost Cities” are located in the suburb and depends on our experience, they are new properties. Although it is possible that one district is too infant to be well-developed, once we add the variable of built age, it is easy to locate those districts which genuinely stay in a vacant for a long time.
This research employed an indirect method to measure the vitality of a residential district. The actual amount of how many people live in this district is hard to measure, but the amount of amenities nearby is an available open data on google map. A residential community which is far from facilities means this district does not have the demand for necessary living conditions, or at least the population is so less that cannot support sufficient services.
Fig. 1. Xu, W., & Williams, S. (2017, March). Ghost City results in Shenyang [Digital image]. Retrieved September 8, 2018, from http://ghostcities.mit.edu/
