Colossal. Profligate. Horrifying.

Several videos documenting the demolition of one of China’s notorious “ghost cities” have recently been racking up millions of views on Twitter and YouTube. For some reason, the videos of the event—which record the destruction of fifteen tower blocks in Kunming, China that occurred on August 27, 2021—are only now going viral, which is why I just discovered them. While the scale of the waste the videos record in Kunming is staggering, it is only the tip of a much larger iceberg. Combined, the “ghost city” phenomenon, China’s now-faltering real estate market, the recklessness of the country’s mega-developers, and the misguided policies of Chinese authorities are unimaginably profligate and injurious.

 

Many of China's other “ghost cities” sit unfinished, having never been occupied. They now either require significant ongoing investment and maintenance to keep them from falling into disrepair or are slated for razing. I read that China has adopted a “build, pause, demolish, repeat” policy as a means to both limit the building supply to prevent a precipitous drop in property values and increase economic activity through construction. Effectively, the Chinese government has sanctioned an unprecedented squandering of resources, one that is anything but sustainable.

 

The disregard for sustainability is horrifying. The embodied carbon implications are enormous. The greenhouse gas emissions arising from the manufacturing, transportation, installation, maintenance, and disposal of building materials associated with such massive and irresponsible developments move the planet that much further away from meeting climate action goals. Approximately 30% of global carbon emissions are attributable to the building sector. As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, it is clear China’s development patterns are consequential. “Build, pause, demolish, repeat” is not a formula I associate with a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions.  

 

While China today is the world’s biggest climate offender, other developed nations are not without culpability. Though the proportion of overall global carbon emissions coming from the U.S. is less than half that of China, the American share of tons of CO2 per capita is more than double. Growth for growth’s sake as a means to ensure global economic and societal stability is not a sustainable paradigm.  

 

To limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, the United Nations 2022 Sustainable Development Goals Report says greenhouse gas emissions will need to peak before 2025 and then decline by 43 percent by 2030 and to net zero by 2050. Under the best of scenarios, achieving these goals is optimistic. I tend to be a pessimist on the issue of large-scale climate change, which I consider to be inevitable despite all efforts to reverse it. I believe our planet has already passed the tipping point beyond which there is no return. We thus have a duty to build with an understanding that is grounded in reality. Our way forward will be marked by a focus on flexibility, diversity, redundancy, and community and away from current trends that rely on technological fixes, unsustainable economic models of growth, and excessive globalization.

 

Notwithstanding my pessimism, I do believe it will always be in humanity’s best interest to do whatever it can to minimize the adverse environmental impacts of buildings through the entirety of their life cycles. What distresses me is seeing unmistakable evidence that many still fail to recognize the damage wrought by extravagant and unnecessary development.