 From New Town to 'Ghost Town': Lessons from the Cases in Yangtze River DeltaMeiqing Li No 6fhdn, SocArXiv from Center for Open Science Abstract: As the claim of many ‘ghost towns’ emerged in China since 2000s, it has aroused increasing social-economic concerns as well as governmental policy responses to ‘destock’ and refrain from the development of new towns and new districts at local level. This dissertation contains an exploratory study that aims to clarify the concept of ghost town by making typological generalization from historical cases. It then specifies the scope of China’s emerging ‘ghost towns’ as those originated from unsuccessful new town development projects featured by highly vacant properties. With a focus on cities in Yangtze River Delta region, it examines the general context of YRD in terms of population growth, urban and economic development. Illustrated by the empirical analysis of two representative cases of Wujin District in Changzhou and Tianducheng in Hangzhou, it argues that inappropriate development strategies as well as underlying institutional arrangement towards neoliberal capitalism fosters such ‘ghost town’ phenomenon. While the situation can possibly be rectified, lessons and implications are twofold: under decentralization, new town development strategy should be differentiated based on city positioning; and under privatization, mega city development is not going to work successfully by solely relying on the private sector. Date: 2016-05-31 Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:osf:socarx:6fhdn Access Statistics for this paper More papers in SocArXiv from Center for Open Science |
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