The district is internationally known for its opulent civic square and monuments and in 2009, made global headlines for having a population of around 30,000 people, which was considered small relative to the grandeur of the built-up space, and was deemed as a "ghost city".[4] However the district's population has grown since in the years afterwards, and had reportedly reached a size of almost 120,000 people in 2021.[5][6]
Geography
Within the Ordos prefecture, the district is located southwest of Dongsheng, the prior urban center of Ordos, and north of Ejin Horo Banner. Together with Dongsheng District and Ejin Horo Banner, it forms the city's urban core and is also the political and cultural center of Ordos City. Adjacent to the south is Altan Xire, the highly urbanized county seat of Ejin Horo Banner, separated from the district by the Wulan Mulun River.
History
Kangbashi District's predecessor was Qingchunshan Development Zone, an autonomous region leveldevelopment zone, approved to be established in December 2000. In 2003, the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region agreed to transfer the administrative area of Qingchunshan Development Zone from Yiqi to Dongsheng District; in June of the same year, the fourth session of the People's Congress of Ordos City considered and passed the resolution of relocating the municipal government to Qingchunshan Development Zone; in May 2004, the municipal people's government approved the detailed control plan and renamed it as Kangbashi New District. In 2006, the urban planning of the new area was approved by the regional government as an important part of the overall urban planning of Ordos, and in July of the same year, the city government moved to the new area as a whole. After the preliminary work of planning, demonstration and approval, the construction of the new district officially started and was mainly carried out in three stages: from 2004 to 2007, the infrastructure construction stage; from 2007 to 2011, the above-ground project construction stage; from 2011 to 2015, the project construction perfection stage. In 2016, the State Council agreed to approve the establishment of county-level Kangbashi District, which is the same administrative division as the original Kangbashi New District.
With an expanding district due to economic exploitation of the local natural resources, but dwindling water supplies due to the continual expansion of the Ordos Desert, Ordos officials were faced with a local infrastructure planning problem. Hence in 2003, Ordos city officials launched the creation of a new 1 million person city district. Located on a 355-square-kilometre (137 sq mi) site 25 kilometres (16 mi) from the existing city of Dongsheng, the new city is located next to three existing reservoirs on the site of two former villages.[7]
By 2010, the current city on a site of 35 square kilometres (14 sq mi) had capacity for at least 300,000 people, created with an estimated investment of around 1.1 trillion yuan ($161 billion).[8]
In 2021, Nikkei Asia reported that after Ordos No. 1 High School and other locally prestigious schools had relocated to the district, property prices in the area increased significantly.[9]
Other: Ordos City High tech Industrial Park (鄂尔多斯市高新技术产业园区)
Economy
Street of Kangbashi
There is a campus of Beijing Normal University and a municipal library. A five-story shopping mall offers a food court and other shopping. A large "fountain show" provides evening entertainment.[10] Economic activity is gradually picking up with the help of the local government which has relocated its administrative center and high quality high schools here. A documentary has been produced by outside filmmakers which documents the facilities of the city and its gradual growth.[11]
Apartment and office capacity
Characterized as a ghost town, Kangbashi was made world-famous by a news report in November 2009 from Al Jazeera,[12] later picked up and expanded through an April 2010 article in Time magazine,[13] for having few residents but massive amounts of empty residential housing and high-tech public works projects. Subsequent reports have supported the claims that Kangbashi housed around 20,000 to 30,000 people as of 2010[update].[14] In 2014, the vacancy rate of new homes was 70%.[15][16]
Writing in Forbes in 2017, Wade Shepard had questioned the justification for the label of "ghost city" and argued that it was being judged too quickly, as it was too soon to be speculating whether a new city will end up being largely uninhabited in the long run. Shepard noted that when Al Jazeera had visited Kangbashi, the city back then was only five years old, and had around 30,000 people, and that it really should have "impressed the world" for having an entirely new city and partially populating it in just five years' time. Shepard also pointed out that by the end of 2015, housing prices have risen by approximately 50% on average and that in 2017, the population has grown to 153,000 people, and there were around 4,750 businesses in operation in the city, as well as having just 500 apartments still left on the market, out of the 40,000 apartments that had been built since 2004.[6]
^Jody Rosen (March 6, 2015). "The Colossal Strangeness of China's Most Excellent Tourist City". The New York Times Travel Magazine. Retrieved March 9, 2015. It's nice here," said one of the women. "My hometown is a tiny place in the grassland. The people here are more well educated. There's so much more to do here." What is there to do in Ordos? "I hang out with my friends. We study at the library. We go to the mall.
