China's Ghost Cities and Malls

Re:China's Ghost Cities and Malls by gaius on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @10:19AM (#2387287)

You have to get the people there. This is something that "organic" cities like London, New York and Paris can do well, because there is a "virtuous circle" in action - people want to be at the centre of culture, culture costs money, these cities can attract the wealth creators who want to spend their wealth, and so it continues. Culture being whatever you're into, art, opera, fashion, publishing, fine dining... Cities like these are dynamos of both productivity and pleasure.

But in a sterile, planned city, that is initially empty... How do you get the ball rolling? How do you initially attract the people who can work anywhere in the world? The three cities I mentioned, and a few others, have solved that.

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Re:China's Ghost Cities and Malls by locopati on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @10:27AM (#2387333)

You say solved, but there was nothing to solve in your example cities since they were not planned or built from whole cloth (yes there were plans - the NYC grid, the Paris hub-and-spoke - but the cities, as you point out, grew and evolved).

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Re:China's Ghost Cities and Malls by gaius on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @10:52AM (#2387460)

Of course there was something to solve. London is 2000 years old, but NYC is much more recent. How did it become the hub for finance and media when there's Boston to the north and Washington to the south?

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Re:China's Ghost Cities and Malls by evgen on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @02:37PM (#2388550)

NYC had a better port. Back when this mattered, a deep-water port at the end of the Hudson river was a big deal (D.C. was never in the running, but up until 1815 or so Boston and Philly were bigger commercial centers than NYC.) For the first 100-150 years of its existence the early colonies traded more with England than with each other, so a good port was a necessity for a city but it did not need much else beyond that. Post-revolution most trade was still external rather than internal but England and France shut down most of this trade during the Napoleonic wars. At this point the advantage went to NYC because by sitting at the end of the Hudson river it was able to serve as the trans-shipment point for goods coming down from the Hudson river valley out to the other states. After the Gibbons v. Ogden court case established federalist supremacy over interstate commerce the maritime merchants of NYC were better positioned than their competitors in Boston, Philly, or Baltimore to take advantage of this explosion of commercial opportunity.

The reason people gathered at a certain buttonwood tree in lower manhattan was to trade shipping interests -- early finance was all about commercial shipping and the fact that NYC was an early leader in shipping led to the development of a finance hub and the two sides of the same coin propped each other up.

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Re:China's Ghost Cities and Malls by gaius on Wednesday March 30, 2011 @05:35PM (#2389349)

So how would you do this today? A better airport?

Here in England there is growing concern that Heathrow is stifling growth in London as it doesn't have capacity anymore and expanding it is politically infeasible. So it's not a far-fetched scenario...

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