IN-PERSON London. Section A

Abstract

This presentation explores the ‘ghost city’ phenomenon in China that has become a symbol in the western imagination of the nation’s aggressive plans for mass urbanization and modernization. Designed to accommodate the hundreds of millions of citizens who are expected to migrate to urbanised areas over the coming decades, these large-scale constructions that were assembled at breakneck speed are distinctive for their empty, under-utilised spaces and acute underpopulation. Focusing on Ordos Kangbashi in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Zone, which was constructed after the region’s rapid acquisition of wealth due to the mining industry in the late 1990s, this presentation explores the various manifestations of precariousness that beset the city that has been marked as one of China’s most infamous ghost cities. At one end of the spectrum are the inherent risks of city-building master plans that depend on favourable conditions of a fickle global market and the unquestioning faith in untrammelled progress. At the other end, the city exemplifies the problematic erasure of the lived experiences of those who have built a life in this seemingly unhomely place. It is an erasure that creates a representational void and a dominant discourse of loss, failure and haunted futures. Situated within a cultural studies framework, and employing an autoethnographic and psychogeographic approach, this research contemplates how the intersection of local histories and the embodied experience of the city can cultivate a new capacity and openness to seeing other ways of being in a place and, thus, a re-thinking of what constitutes ‘home’.