Unruly Places: Lost Spaces, Secret Cities, and Other Inscrutable Geographies (12 page)

Although there is a long tradition of viewing calamity in geographical terms, we have become increasingly nervous about being reminded of failed or “fallen” places. The journey from Sodom and Gomorrah to the disastrous places of the late industrial age is also a shift from the strident, hectoring religious geography of the premodern world to a culture of avoidance and unease. Where once bedeviled cities were constantly invoked reminders of the ceaseless ingenuity of evil, the poisoned places of the secular era are hidden from view. The transition from one kind of moral geography to another deposits us in the deleted town of Wittenoom.

About twenty thousand people lived at Wittenoom before the mine was shut in 1966. The town was taken off the power grid in 2006 and the state government in Perth issued dire warnings to anyone thinking of going there. The official decree maps out a plan of erasure:

• the town of Wittenoom should be closed as soon as possible;
  
• all buildings and structures in Wittenoom should be demolished and associated infrastructure removed to remove any easily visible sign of past habitation;
  
• road access to Wittenoom and Wittenoom Gorge to be reviewed with a view to realignment, or closure and removal.
  

Western Australians expected no less. Contact with any form of asbestos can be fatal, even after the briefest of exposures, and blue asbestos is the most deadly variety. Hundreds of Wittenoom workers, residents, and even casual visitors have died of mesothelioma and other asbestos-related illnesses. The subtitle of
Blue Murder
, investigative journalist Ben Hills’s 1989 book on Wittenoom, is
Two Thousand Doomed to Die
. Although much of the town had already been demolished, an entrepreneurial cussedness sustained Wittenoom into the 2000s. It hung on for years, with a population of about thirty, as a ghost town curiosity (the bumper sticker available from the town’s souvenir store read, “I’ve Been to Wittenoom and Lived”). Compared to the dead silence of what was once the world’s largest blue-asbestos mine, the totally deserted town of Koegas in South Africa (closed in 1979), Wittenoom was almost lively. In recent years, however, the number of permanent residents has fallen to only five, and the state government is now determined to move everyone out.

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
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), 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.

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 estate 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.