I first heard about Wittenoom on a health and safety film featuring the Australian entertainment legend Rolf Harris. He set off for Wittenoom in 1948 pursuing an idea to paint the area’s spectacular gorge scenery. Finding that he wouldn’t be allowed access to the gorges without signing up to work, he became, in his own words, an “utterly useless” miner. Crawling in the low tunnels, Harris experienced at first hand the mine’s minimal safety standards and the “haze of dust” around the rock-crushing area. Luckily for him he found the work impossibly backbreaking and didn’t stay long. Instead, it was his father who died of asbestosis. This may have been caused by his work at a Perth power plant or when he built the family’s “fibro shack,” an Australian asbestos-walled kit house popular during the postwar building boom.
Mining for asbestos in this remote region began in 1938. An upsurge in demand during the war years saw activity expand until, in 1947, the company town of Wittenoom was built to service the mines up the gorge. By the 1950s it was a considerable settlement, but profits were falling since Wittenoom could not compete with the giant South African operations. Its closure in 1966 was more a reflection of the fact that it was running at a loss than dawning health concerns. It was only by the late 1970s that Wittenoom was fully exposed as the worst industrial disaster in Australian history.
The Western Australia government considers the cost of cleaning up Wittenoom to be prohibitive, and it is also understandably nervous about the idea of luring people back to a place where new hazardous waste sites might yet be discovered. So Wittenoom is deleted. This is a treatment regularly meted out to disaster towns. They are not merely closed down; all mention of them is removed from signposts, postal directories, and official gazetteers. The roll call of poisoned towns includes such places as Pripyat (see [>]), the now largely abandoned town that housed the workers of Chernobyl; Bechvovinka, a Russian nuclear submarine town, deserted because of radiation leaks; Centralia, a mining town in Pennsylvania made uninhabitable by an underground fire that began in 1962 and is still burning today (the road into town bears the graffiti legend “Welcome to Hell”); and Gilman in Colorado, a lead-mining town closed because of ground toxicity.
Despite their lowly profiles, these places can at least be name-checked. They might even be said to be famous, if only when compared to the many thousands of smaller, less distinct pockets of land that have been contaminated and closed off. We all know of such sites. I don’t have to walk far from my front door in Newcastle to find large tracts of city land poisoned by lead, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc. Contaminated ground is common. Sometimes these places acquire a local reputation, becoming landscapes of intrigue for the adventurous and the timid alike. They symbolize the evils of unchecked industrialization for a few, but for most they seem to evoke something more diffuse, a kind of generalized dread.
For governments having to cope with these stains on the map, vanishing them away is the obvious and easiest solution. Yet while all the erasing and banishing that goes on around us has a solid health and safety logic, there are other human needs to consider. I’m not just talking about the need for messages that remind us of environmental tragedies but something more universal and much older. After all, the desire to morally organize the landscape goes back a long way. Geography was once central to morality and religion. Heaven, Hell, and all the other destinations and journeys of salvation and damnation were understood as permanent places and cartographic realities. They offered a moral map that helped people situate themselves in an ethical landscape. Hell was below, Heaven above. Such literalism may sound quaint to modern sensibilities, but it seems that we still need morality to be tied down and rooted to particular places and specific journeys. If our moral categories float free from the earth, they float away. Religion has always been upfront about all this, meeting the understandable need of earthbound creatures for moral questions to be written into the hills, and for salvation to be a physical destination.
So rather than being deleted from the map, places like Wittenoom should be kept before us as visible manifestations of the consequences of greed and ignorance. They are parts of our lives, of our civilization, and they should be acknowledged with a steady and remorseful determination. Abolishing them leaves us with a deceptively and unconvincingly airbrushed landscape. Wittenoom should be treated as a memorial and paid the kind of attention currently reserved for battle sites, albeit from a safe distance.
Kangbashi
39° 35′ 59″ N, 109° 46′ 52″ E
As we have come to see, places have power, and power is symbolized by its possession of place. The deep bond between the two is especially clear in empty landscapes, such as the ghost town of Kangbashi New Area in the Chinese city of Ordos.
I first heard stories about Kangbashi, a newly built empty quarter set in the arid landscape of the Chinese province of Inner Mongolia, in 2009. Journalists described streets lined with tall apartment blocks, grand plazas stuffed with iconic architecture, and yet not a soul in sight. Since then, other Chinese ghost towns have been spotted, often from satellite images. Huge new towns or suburbs freshly built, apartments waiting for residents, museums without visitors, shopping malls with no shoppers. Inevitably the accompanying news stories were headlined with dire prognostications of housing bubbles and financial meltdown. But this story is stranger than that. On closer inspection it turns out that Kangbashi is a latter-day provincial version of imperial geomancy. A local government has built itself a grand mini-city in its own honor, designed to inscribe and secure its power both through and on the landscape. At the heart of this new zone sits the vast palace of the borough. Tree-lined avenues radiate from it. It bulks out over the surrounding landscape, the throne of a municipality that has become fantastically rich very quickly.
Ordos, a Mongolian word that means “many palaces,” is at the center of China’s coal country. The city’s GDP grew from just under $2.5 billion in 2000 to $41 billion by 2009. It is a frontier boomtown where serious money is being made while the surrounding plains are being tunneled by anybody brave enough to risk the rewards. The landscape across the wider region is freckled with thousands of pits. Many are small-time operations where miners squeeze themselves down unsupported shafts that are not much bigger than they are. Underground fires are common, and many have proved impossible to quench. It’s dangerous work but the rewards can be huge. And the tax revenues and payments for licenses pour into Ordos. All that money has created a towering sense of municipal ambition. The city of Ordos wanted to turn itself from a backwater into something magnificent.
Even calling itself a city is a daring claim, since most of Ordos is grassland. On its eastern side sits the old town of Dongsheng, with its narrow dusty lanes. You have to travel 25 kilometers south to get to the ghost zone of Kangbashi but it is all Ordos, a “city” vast in size but with a population density of a mere 18 people per square kilometer—by comparison, London has nearly 5,000 people per square kilometer and Manhattan 25,000 per square kilometer. Ordos doesn’t need to play by familiar rules or worry too much about the consequences. The city bosses shifted nearly 400 rural families to clear the site for Kangbashi. It was built for 300,000 people, and it was not built on the cheap. It offers top-end apartments, lavish public squares, parks, and two man-made lakes that stretch for kilometers.
By 2010 city officials had to admit that fewer than 30,000 people had moved in. Conspiracy theorists in the West detect a master plan, and a story went around that, foreseeing global Armageddon, Communist Party bosses in Beijing had ordered the construction of a ring of cities to house key population groups if the rest of the country suffers nuclear attack or is flooded. One US conspiracy website explains that “for the communist Chinese government, building a network of new cities in strategic locations (such as the Mongolian highlands) to house hundreds of millions of refugees would be a very wise plan.” A more plausible explanation for Kangbashi is that local party officials got their planning wrong. They did not anticipate the scale of real esta
te speculation their project would unleash. All over China the new-moneyed middle classes with spare cash bought up properties in Kangbashi with the intention of making a killing but no intention of moving in.
Yet Kangbashi isn’t just about economics. After all, the city kept being built even when it was obvious it was going to stand empty. The scale of its structures, the size of its parks and squares, make no economic sense and never did. This is also a story of a local government that came to see itself as the Yellow Emperor of the coalfields and set out to use the landscape, as emperors have always done, to sustain their authority and announce their permanence.
From their civic palace, surrounded by empty streets and empty museums, Kangbashi’s rulers lay claim to a long imperial tradition of civilizing the wastes. It is no accident that the city is planned around a north-south axis, the old imperial urban pattern, nor that the municipal buildings have water to their front and hills to their rear, for in traditional geomancy this is the most auspicious combination. The symbolism extends outside in Sun Square, which stretches two kilometers down to a lake. The square is lined with grand cultural statements such as the shiny aluminum blob that is the Ordos museum as well as an elegant and airy library and an arts center. It is all done on a vast scale. And the fact that the city is populated by only a few disconcerted tourists hardly matters. These monuments to creativity and learning express and confirm the place of power just as surely as sacred paths and temples once did in ancient China. Such is the faith invested in this site that it is even imagined to resolve, or at least displace, political conflicts. In Kangbashi’s Genghis Khan Square sits a huge statue of the Mongol warlord and other plinthed stone giants that nod to Mongol identity, such as the two rearing horses energetically clashing hooves. The often tense relations between Mongols and Han Chinese, who comprise 90 percent of Ordos’s population but are far less dominant across the rest of Inner Mongolia, are resolved into shared symbols of ambition and entrepreneurial drive. Any trace of the filthy work that generates the money needed to pay for all this elaborate architecture is nowhere to be seen.
Building peopleless cities has become something of a habit among Chinese urban planners. There is the empty desert town of Erenhot, Zhengzhou New District, and many other resident-free settlements that have not yet been given a name. The Chinese have also built one in Angola. Kilamba New City, thirty kilometers from the capital, Luanda, is designed for half a million people. It has a dozen schools and more than seven hundred eight-story apartment buildings but it stands empty.
For all their confidence, these conjured landscapes have an urgent, almost desperate quality. Empty cities can evoke power but they cannot secure it. They point to the vulnerability of authority even as they act out its overweening will.
Despite the planet’s rapidly growing population, the early twenty-first century may well be known by future urban geographers as the era of empty cities. At no point in the past have we seen the construction of so many and on so magnificent a scale. Any media coverage they get is bewildered and, in the case of China, full of schadenfreude, one of the few pleasures left to an envious world watching and wondering at that country’s spectacular urban growth. To understand Kangbashi it is necessary to know that it is as much a symbolic landscape as a practical one: it is a new urban form that draws on old magic.
Kijong-dong
37° 56′ 12″ N, 126° 39′ 21″ E
Kijong-dong is a fake place where the lights go on and off inside tower blocks that have no glass in their windows. There are no residents and no visitors are allowed. But the lights are on timers and the roads are periodically swept clean. Kijong-dong, which is also called Peace Village, in North Korea, was built in the 1950s to lure potential defectors from the South and as a display of the communist state’s progress and modernity. The question is, what remorseless logic keeps it going?
Full-scale simulated cities are rare. They are sometimes called Potemkin villages, after the Russian minister who supposedly had fake villages built, complete with glowing fireplaces, in the recently conquered lands of the Crimea. It is said that he hoped to convince Catherine II that this was a prosperous and well-populated land. Unfortunately, there seems to be little truth in this legend. Better examples come from the Second World War, when decoy towns were quite common. One of the largest was a fake Paris, built to attract enemy bombers away from the real city (see “Arne,” [>]). But this was a hasty job, gimcrack in comparison to Kijong-dong. The idea of a permanent fake civilian village, deployed to make people across the border think things are going well, seems to be uniquely North Korean.
Peace Village is a product of the armistice treaty signed in 1953 between North and South Korea. A 4-kilometer-wide demilitarized buffer was established between the two nations and each was permitted one settlement within this 250-kilometer-long no man’s land. The South decided to retain the rice-farming village of Daeseong-dong. The North Koreans chose to build Kijong-dong directly opposite it, about a mile across the frontier. It was a much larger place, and images from Google Earth show a sprawling town comprising three main centers, interspersed with farmland. Each of the centers has rows of what appear to be very large houses or public buildings, many with large gardens. Although it does not feature on many maps of the country, Kijong-dong was built to impress. The costly blue-tiled roofs on many of the concrete buildings and the electric power supply proclaim an anachronistic vision of luxury and success. In the context of the thatch-roofed peasant buildings typical of the area in the 1950s, Kijong-dong must have looked like the future. At the time, mass housing and electrification were symbols of communist progress, but it is unlikely that observers from south of the border find them impressive today. They know that North Korea is poor and that it is one of the least illuminated countries in Asia. Nighttime satellite photographs show it as a pitchy emptiness surrounded by brightly lit neighbors.
The official North Korean position is that Kijong-dong is a thriving community; that it contains a large collective farm (run by two hundred families) and many social services, such as schools and a hospital. Yet Kijong-dong is so close to the border that, with the aid of binoculars, people can see it is empty. And plenty of people do. During lulls in the level of hostility between the two countries, the border crossing draws a steady flow of tourists. They are eager to step across the demilitarized zone into the rarely visited nation to the north. Visitors, who are warned not to make eye contact with North Korean soldiers or gesture at them in any way, are taken to the nearby village of Panmunjom, from which Kijong-dong is even closer, clearly visible in the distance, though it is still very much off-limits. Panmunjom’s only attraction is the pleasure of straying into a forbidden zone. Tourists may also thrill to the official South Korean warning that their little journey across the border “will entail entry into a hostile area and possibility of injury or death as a direct result of enemy action.”
Other, newer propaganda tools also compete for the skyline. A nearby 525-foot North Korean flagpole, erected in retaliation for South Korea’s putting up a 323-foot flagpole in Daeseong-dong, was, for a while, the world’s tallest. Yet Kijong-dong remains a potent and, until recently, noisy symbol. Until 2004 loudspeakers on its empty buildings pumped out denunciatory speeches and patriotic operas across the fields almost every hour of the day and night. After a few years of silence, in 2010 the speakers went back on, not long after the North Koreans had sunk a South Korean submarine, killing forty-six of its crew.
Kijong-dong may seem like a novelty, but it is part of a twentieth-century tradition of hollow architectural spectacles. Communist regimes from Moscow to Beijing often indulged in monumental and monumentally useless buildings. They were built as expressions of revolutionary zeal and the permanence of the new order. What are we to make of the 1,100 rooms of Bucharest’s Palace of Parliament (a.k.a. the House of Ceaușescu), the second-largest building in the world, which was still being furnished when Nicolae Ceaușescu was thrown from power in 1989? Or Bulgar
ia’s Buzludzha Monument, a vast spaceship-shaped tribute to communism, filled with garish murals, that sits, remote and inaccessible, on the top of a mountain? Kijong-dong is part of a long tradition of clumsy architectural propaganda. It is a tradition that celebrates symbolism over utility, gesture over substance. It seems desperate for everyone to admire it but only at a distance—it’s a psychopolitical complex that doesn’t just spawn fakes but lovingly maintains them.
Across North Korea, monuments to prosperity and progress abound. The country is home to an Arc of Triumph, the largest arch in the world, which stands over a mostly empty highway. Built in 1982, the arch is inscribed with the “Song of General Kim Il Sung” and made up of 25,550 bricks, one for each day of Kim’s life. There are also the vast stone women that make up the span of the Three Charters for National Reunification monument, which yawns over another empty road. High above the capital, the 170-meter Juche Tower commemorates the seventieth birthday of the man who brought the country to its present parlous state, Kim Il Sung. It looks down at military parades during which fake missiles are trundled out for the benefit of an admiring world.
As part of their unsuccessful efforts to cohost the 1988 Olympics, held in South Korea, the North Koreans also built cavernous and little-used sports arenas. In the capital, Pyongyang, Chongchun Street is lined with a huge table tennis stadium, a handball gymnasium, and a tae kwon do hall. Most spectacular of all is the 105-story Ryugyong Hotel, one of the world’s largest hotels and the tallest building in North Korea. Its colossal pyramid shape dominates the capital. Building started in 1987, but it is still not finished, and it is unlikely that the hotel will ever attract the foreign tourists or investors it was supposedly designed for. It is another fake, a nostalgic ruin of the future that pretends, like Kijong-dong, to want to lure us in but actually doesn’t want anyone anywhere near.
Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies Page 9
