Season 2 / Economic
Opening Scene
James books a flight to Inner Mongolia.
He saw a photo online: a massive empty plaza, a futuristic skyline, zero people. A city built for a million that houses a fraction of that. Sixteen lanes of highway with no cars.
He arrives. The traffic lights change for nobody. A street vendor waves from across an empty boulevard.
He's not the first to come here looking for the absence. That's the whole point now.
Origin
From ambition to absence
I’ve been diving into the history of "planned cities" lately, and it’s honestly wilder than I thought. It turns out that building a city before anyone actually lives there is a super old idea.
Take Washington D.C. as an example. It was designed way back in 1791 for a nation that had barely even started yet. Then there’s Brasília, which was basically dropped into the middle of the Brazilian jungle in the 50s just to move the country’s focus inland.
Even Canberra exists only because Sydney and Melbourne couldn't stop arguing over which one was more important. Can you imagine building a whole capital just to end a fight?
Most of those early projects were born out of political needs. Some became success stories, but many others really struggled to feel like real places. However, things took a weird turn in the 2000s.
Governments and developers started building because they wanted to. It became all about ambition.
The logic was simple: "Build it, and they will come." But as it turns out, things aren't always that easy. In a lot of cases, the people just never showed up.
The Phenomenon
The most famous example of this has to be Kangbashi in China. It’s honestly hard to wrap your head around.
They built this futuristic district in less than a decade, designed for over a million people. It has massive boulevards, a crazy-looking museum, and luxury apartments. The government dropped over $1 billion on it. For years, only about 30,000 people actually lived there. The media literally called it the world’s largest ghost city.
In Hangzhou, they actually built a full replica of Paris called Tianducheng. It has its own Eiffel Tower and even a version of the Champs-Élysées. It was meant for 10,000 people, but for a long time, fewer than 2,000 actually moved in. Pretty surreal, right?
The people in charge were betting on migration, economic growth, and a level of tourism that simply never happened. They projected huge numbers, but the reality just didn't catch up to the ambition.
What do you think, is it better to build for a future that might not happen, or just wait until the people actually need the space?
