Mapping China: Urbanisation - 4 The Transforming Cities: Transformation of Resource-based Cities

The transformation of resource-based cities is an important category in the typology of urban transformation in China. In the last century, the steady growth of China’s petroleum industry gave birth to the development of a variety of resource-based cities. They differ in a lot of aspects but all of them used to, or still do, rely heavily on mining or other natural resource industries. Karamay is one of them.

Karamay is located in Xinjiang Province, where it is of political importance to anchor in an industrialized city a growing population of multiple minorities. Although the oil production in Karamay is still abundant, the city is facing the challenge of a flat economic structure. Unlike other cities which are suffering from an economic downturn due to the depletion of oil resources, the ever-growing economy in Karamay offers it an initiating power to diversify its industrial composition.

A comparable case is the city of Ordos. Gifted with abundant natural resources, Ordos contributed tremendously to the national economic uprising in the last century. As for now, coal mining remains one of the pillar industries of the city, but the mining industry itself is facing a drastic downturn. With the fortune created by the mining industry in the last century, Ordos poured a lot into infrastructure and real estate, building one of the country’s most famous new towns between 2005 and 2010 – Kangbashi. For a long time it was widely criticised for remaining a ghost town, with astonishing modern architecture and artworks everywhere but no human influx. Without the effective installation of a diversified social-economic structure, the new town will remain an empty shell that has no significance in the urbanisation process.