I feel like the idea of the Chinese "ghost city" is just plain false. You can label any new development this way. A typical housing development could have the title "Crazy Americans Build Ghost Houses". This is just urban planning and development being implemented.
> This is just urban planning and development being implemented.
I feel like this is the origin of it. In the US, we seem to take a much more short term view of "urban planning" - rather than being laid out up front to support high density, cities more typically grow via low density sprawl on demand.
The idea of having a city (or district) constructed from the ground up to efficiently meet the needs of citizens 15 years in the future is alien to most of us. The context in which we typically encounter large groups of vacant buildings and empty streets is one in which something has gone wrong, which I think is why we find the "ghost city" narrative compelling.
