Author | Marcos Martínez EuklidiadasCities are dynamic bodies that tend to grow or decrease steadily over millennia, centuries or, at least, over decades. Mapping out a city and starting to build houses in the middle of nothing is rarely a good thing. An example of this are the Smart Cities that failed along the way, some leaving painful scars on the map.Lavasa (India), PlanIT Valley (Portugal), Ordos (China) or Santander (Spain) are a few clear examples of smart cities with their peaks and valleys. They all had great plans for the future, which finally fell short and they lost the energy required to reach their targets. All of them failed to grow organically and as needed by citizens.
Lavasa, India’s ghost city
It was in the year 2000 and the Smart City term was gaining momentum. Projects with vast mega-buildings such as those that eliminated around 700 entire mountains to extend the city of Lanzhou (Gansu, China), began to emerge. Some should have remained on paper, as the scientific community warned with regard to Lanzhou.This was not the case with Lavasa (India), designed by the multimillionaire Ajut Gulabchand, which started with zero properties and intended to build thousands. As an idea, it was not too bad. Gulabchand wanted to put his country on the map by creating a smart city from scratch. One of the first to appear in the world. It was a comprehensible idea and for a while, it looked like he was going to achieve it.But under the aesthetics of a Smart City Ajut Gulabchand’s real desire was to create a “New Portofino” similar to the Portofino commune in Italy and to do so in a physical space notoriously far from commercial routes. Portofino, it is worth pointing out, is known for both its undeniable natural beauty and for the way in which buildings blend with that nature.
PlanIT Valley, the Smart City that never was
It is interesting that, despite the predicted failure of Lavasa, India intends to build not one, but 100 newly built smart cities. Other projects, such as PlanIT Valley have never even managed to take off. Known as the “Portuguese Silicon Valley”, it expected to house 225,000 people. It would finally just be a dream. The developers never managed to create a united team, and without this, it was impossible to attract the necessary investment. The boat sank in the port.Meanwhile, in the United States Google is building a city of the future bordering with Toronto; and Jakarta is looking for more land in Borneo because its city is sinking. Perhaps the key is to extend cities instead of starting them from scratch. If so, Portugal has dodged a €10 billion bullet according to sources from 2015.
Ordos, the ghost city of China
Ordos has earned the accolade of “the largest ghost city on earth” and with good reason. Founded in 2001, in the middle of the desert and costing 200 billion dollars (PlanIT Valley was barely going to cost 5% of this amount), in 2016 around 100,000 people lived there, all Chinese government officials and the airport never saw a single plane.The original city was designed for one million inhabitants. Only in 2019, did satellite pictures begin to show vehicles parked next to the endless rows of houses. Yes, Ordos is coming to life, but it is doing so slowly and with signs of a difficult birth. Its blocks with only 20 apartments barely light up when the sun goes down.Most of the properties were designed with a higher than average quality for the country, therefore they are too expensive for the local population. And those than can afford it, go to other nearby cities such as Baotou, not to an unpopulated metropolitan area in the middle of a desert.All of this makes Ordos one of the youngest cities with the highest number of abandoned shopping centres. It did not even have to suffer the enduring agony of the American malls, because the ones in Ordos never opened. It is as if, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, houses had been designed with stables instead of coal cellars. But things can even go wrong with a roadmap.Santander, the Spanish city full of sensors
