Assorted Links

1. A special issue from Science Magazine on The science of inequality
   
   
2. How much does it cost to study in an Ivy League university?
   
   
3. Meet the Robin Hood of Science and download any academic paper for free at Sci-Hub
   
   
4. Beautiful photographic work on China's Ghost Cities
   
   
5. Student hacks Raspberry Pi to run college bar at Oxford (ht Jakob Engel). The piece is from 2013, but I've heard the system is still working fine.
   
   
6. How cold can Chicago get?
   
   
7. A map of NYC street trees by species
   
   
8. 3 years later, Syrian refugee camp booms into makeshift city
   
   
9. A fairly detailed map of commuting trips in UK cities, by Oliver O’Brien

How bad is the problem of ghost cities in China?

More than more than 50 ghost cities:

Today we get an answer of sorts thanks to the work of Guanghua Chi at the Big Data Lab at Baidu, China’s version of Google and one of the biggest Web companies on the planet, and a few pals. These guys have used the location data that Baidu gathers about its users to work out exactly where China’s ghost cities lie. And by tracking people over time, the Baidu team can distinguish between ghost cities and towns that are seasonally empty.Baidu has an extraordinary data base to draw on. The results make for interesting reading. Not only does the team identify more than 50 ghost cities in China, they are also able to analyze their spatial distribution and how it relates to the surrounding geography

You can download their study here and play around with the interactive map here.

[image credit: Guanghua Chi, Yu Liu, Haishan Wu]

The fake and empty Paris of the East

Besides the already famous Ghost Cities, China also has a growing number of copycat towns, or  'Copy & Paste Cities' as I like to call them.

They have built a fake Hallstatt (Austrian village), a fake Venice and a fake White House. Here is a nice video of their fake and empty Paris (ht Telmo Ribeiro).

Chinese Ghost Cities + Copy & Paste Cities

It's been a while since I don't make any post on the Chinese empty cities. So here is an updated 12-minute video on the "Chinese Ghost Cities":

Besides these famous Ghost Cities, China has also a growing number of copycat towns, the 'Copy & Paste Cities' as I like to call them. They have built a fake Paris, fake Hallstatt (Austrian village), fake Venice and a fake White House.

Angola's Chinese empty city

Chinese-built ghost town strikes again! now in Angola.

[image credit]

Related Posts:

• China's empty city (and here)
• It's Alive !!!

Copy & Paste Cities

(photo credit: Perseomedusa)

China is getting famous for its empty cities.* Well, China also has its Copied Cities now!! Geoff Manaugh (from BLDGBLOG) wrote an interesting article on this a few days ago (via MR and Urban Planning Blog - thanks Leo Monasterio for the tip).

* Something that India seems to appreciate (via Urban Planning Blog)

It's Alive !!!

Talking about the Ghost City of Zhengzhou it seems it's alive! Read about it here. (Thanks to Leonardo Monasterio for the tip)

by the way, check this video: Time-lapse video of a 15-storey prefabricated hotel in Changsha.

ps. too lazy busy to blog these days. Have a nice weekend!

China's empty city (again)

Another video on China's Ghost Cities (this one by Adrian Brown from SBS). As David Levinson said:

"If people believe that other people/firms will move there, they too will move there. If they believe it will fail, they won't and it fails. Changing expectations is critical for success."

I beleive that's the point. Chinese Urbanization has been so accelerated in recent years (mostly driven by government initiatives) that this pace seems to be leading to a sort of mismatch between future expectation and current actions of economic agents. [Ok, I recognize China must be much more complicated than that. I'm jus trying to keep it simple]

via The Transportationist

Check other posts about China here at Urban Demographics Blog.

China's empty city

How sustainable can that be?



Thanks to Leonardo Monasterio