If we needed any further confirmation that China is the champion builder of sprawl in this decade (sorry America, you don’t even come close against things like Dubai Marina), this reporter traveled to an entire city built by developers in Inner Mongolia, that, it turns out, no one wants to move to because there is no economy there, as compared to the traditional city down the road.
The economic dimension problem of sprawl building is shown here as evidently as it can be shown.
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7 Comments
Funny. Not that we didn’t see that coming. It will be interesting when China has to start devaluing its money or the rest of the world has to start devaluing its money in order to compete.
ORDOS? no wonder no one’s settling there
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_Ordos
I’ve heard about Ordos when they organized Ordos100, a competition about 100 single-family houses, each one covering 1000 m2. (http://www.archdaily.com/tag/ordos-100/)
I was wondering who could organize today a competition about a brand new suburb, but now that I’ve seen the reportage you posted I start to understand why!
Astonishing story. You couldn’t make it up. I vote the town is renamed Cynicism.
Mathieu – thought you’d be interested in this article:
http://economistsview.typepad.com/economistsview/2009/11/topdown-versus-bottomup-macroeconomics.html
It looks like macro-economists are starting to explore the parallels between economies and self-organizing systems.
Thanks epar, but economists have always been interested in self-organizing systems. The best they could come up with to explain the phenomena was a crude metaphor, “the invisible hand”. Then in the 20th century, some economists decided that self-organization was no science at all and invented macro-economics in order to produce equation models of government finance, with disastrous consequences.
The fact that macro-economists are embracing emergence simply means that they are giving up on macro-economics.
This is why making decisions based purely on calculations of economic value is frightening nonsense.