China’s new city Ordos is regularly described as a “ghost town,” but the forces behind the city go beyond images of vacant towers. One of the fastest developing urban environments in China is the Ordos Municipality, located in the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region. Established only ten years ago, Ordos has become a widely debated example of an economic and urban development that attempts to leapfrog the progressive stages of modernization. Although growth is largely fueled by local extractive industries, official municipal discourse portrays Ordos’s long-term development strategies as a model to be followed, not only in terms of economic growth. Ordos’s leaders also claim to embrace development in terms of better education, hygiene, social welfare, more ardent institutions for culture and innovation, and environmental sustainability. Despite these pronouncements, the international press has branded Ordos as evidence of China’s real estate bubble and a construction culture gone into overdrive. there appears to be more to the picture than the international press perspective. Click on the image or title to learn more.
Self simularity,fractal and flow systems etc are often mentioned in the context urban evolution and landscape. However as this lovely post and commentary by Mike Batty highlights, there is often a disconnect between dfferent schools of urban planning, geography and their writings and how they often fail to reference related development and research works in complex sysems, physics and mathematics as if they were totally unconnected works. Batty argues that thesea re really disffernt aspects of the same phenomena and that the phenomena themselves are part of a unifiable view. I hope he goes on to connect the dots in a future posts. worth reading and following.