Emmanuel Quartey

Geography Lesson

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This illustration never fails to astound me whenever I see it. It’s a powerful reminder that the continent of Africa is larger than the combined surface area of the USA, China, India, Japan and much of Europe. This Wikipedia article explains why the distortion occurs on most maps.

Update: the map, tweaked by The Economist. There’re a few important differences (The Economist version only manages to fit in Western Europe), but like the article concludes, “however you look at it, his point is a good one: Africa is much bigger than it looks on most maps.”

China Global Investment Tracker Interactive Map

The Heritage Foundation has a neat interactive map that visualizes Chinese global investment across nine industries.

China’s ghost cities

“In November 2009, Al Jazeera English correspondent Melissa Chan discovered the nearly empty “ghost city” of Kangbashi on the steppes of Inner Mongolia, equipped with six-lane highways, an opera house, art museum, and a stadium. The city immediately became a symbol of China’s housing bubble, which has resulted in 64.5 million empty apartments across the country—enough to house a third of its urban population.”

“While Kangbashi became the latest example of China’s overbuilding (on par with the empty New South China Mall—the world’s largest), the city is actually a complete success. Its sold-out apartments are second or third homes owned by the residents of Ordos, the city next door. Ordos is the capital of China’s coal and rare earth metals mining boom, with a GDP-per-capita estimated to be higher than Beijing … A city that found riches deep underground is building another city skyward.” (article link)

This reminds me of two cities in Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”. I forget both their names, but:

• in the first city, an entire mirror city for the dead was built underground, similar to the city of the living in every way. When there was a change in the city of the living, it had to be reflected in the city of the dead. With time, the differences became so minute that it became increasingly difficult to tell which city was the city of the living, and which was the city of the dead.
• in the second city, the city’s inhabitants occasionally had an overwhelming desire for newness. To meet this need, they built multiple cities - when the bug hit them, they all uprooted from one city and moved into another, satisfying an odd fallow cycle of their own making.