But all real estate development is a gamble, and it all represents, to some extent, the prediction that there will be greater value in the future than there is today. The gamblers of Shenzhen (to the extent that, in China, they are not entirely guided by the firm hand of the State, about which I’m not entirely sure) have gotten their payout, and reinvested. California City and Lehigh Acres overplayed their hand. The reason Shenzhen’s speculators “won” was that their city filled a niche – cheap shopping for Hong Kongers, cheaper labor in the proximity of Hong Kong, housing for mainland Chinese whose livelihoods depend on the SAR, but who haven’t been permitted (or can’t afford) to live in it, to name a few examples. California City and Lehigh Acres were built on a much greater leap of faith – that people would up and leave for the desert or swamp for no apparent reason.

But there is a way to connect the kind of speculation that made the founders of Lehigh Acres and California City envision their creations, and that which results in the constant cycle of replacement in a city like Shenzhen. There’s no guarantee that Shenzhen will not get remade a little more aggressively, that it winds up surpassing the needs of anyone who would want to live or work there. After all, speculation is not just a matter of gambling on a need. The odds are stacked; developers seek to create need as well. In the unbuilt cities, this is represented by the investment in roads, parks, other attempted inducements to move to empty, purposeless places. In Shenzhen, it is the notion that demolition and replacement do not just fulfill the demand for more space, but attract it as well – presumably, the replacement is envisioned as an improvement. But if the improvement is either too weak or too extravagant, if it outstrips both the demand that exists and that it is able to induce, there is always the chance it might fail.

In that sense, both the unbuilt cities and Shenzhen have something far more in common with each other than with Ordos. All these places are the bizarre fallout of their respective economic orthodoxies. But the unbuilt cities were founded, and Shenzhen is continually rebuilt, on the basis of hope. They demonstrate radically polar consequences of capitalism’s penchant for distorting value. Ordos is fundamentally different: the extreme manifestation of Keynesian waste, it was built for the sake of building, the architectural equivalent of a bridge to nowhere.

i’m wondering what a sound foundation for growth is. the term “foundation” seems at once architectural and geographic, and yet – again i am trying to make sence of the world from shenzhen, where neighborhoods and buildings and whole chunks of the ocean are regularly “unmade”, i.e razed for the next generation of buildings – in shenzhen cycles of unmaking are fundamental to the economy.

is the city’s sound foundation simply a surplus of people? or certain kinds of desires? or simply a surplus of capital and few viable investments? in shenzhen, all that is solid melts into air – and this effervescence (shall we say) is precisely what pays. is this what california city and lehigh acres lack? a critical mass of speculators beyond the first generation of investors??