"Ghost Citiies"

Data Mining Reveals the Extent of China’s Ghost Cities

Overdevelopment in China has created urban regions known as ghost cities that are more or less uninhabited. Nobody knew how bad the problem was until Baidu used its Big Data Lab to find out.

MIT Technology Review | November 2, 2015

In recent years, China has undergone a period of urban growth that is unprecedented in human history. The number of square kilometers devoted to urban living grew from 8,800 in 1984 to 41,000 in 2010. And that was just the start. China used more concrete between 2011 and 2013 than the U.S. used in the entire 20th century.

Source: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/543121/data-mining-reveals-the-extent-of-chinas-ghost-cities/

Some of this building has been misplaced. In various parts of China, developers have built so much housing so quickly that it has outstripped demand, even in the world’s most populous country. The result is the well-publicized phenomenon of ghost cities—entire urban areas that are more or less deserted.

<more at http://www.technologyreview.com/view/543121/data-mining-reveals-the-extent-of-chinas-ghost-cities/; related links: http://arxiv.org/abs/1510.08505 (Ghost Cities Analysis Based on Positioning Data in China. Guanghua Chi, Yu Liu, and Haishan Wu.  arXiv:1510.08505v1 [cs.SI]. October 28, 2015) and http://qz.com/540571/baidu-found-chinas-ghost-cities-but-it-is-keeping-their-locations-mostly-a-secret/ (Baidu found China’s “ghost cities,” but it is keeping their locations mostly a secret. November 3, 2015)>