Has Dongying developed to a ghost city? - Evidence from multi-temporal population estimation based on VHR remote sensing and census counts

Abstract

With ongoing growth and continuous development of cities, the world is turning into an urban society. In this context, urbanization, population growth and migration towards urban areas are global trends. These processes are highly dynamic especially in China, with highest rates of urbanization worldwide. In contrast to these well-known trends, a recently emerging and rarely studied side effect is “ghost cities”, which became a notable phenomenon in China recently. A ghost city is commonly defined as a new urban development that is running at severe undercapacity with respect to population and businesses and where the availability of housing and public infrastructure significantly exceeds the practical demand. Against this background, this study presents a framework based on remote sensing for the assessment of the presence or absence of the ghost city phenomenon in a typical highly dynamic Chinese city. For this purpose, remote sensing data with very-high resolution (VHR) are employed for establishment of a 4d functional city model. Subsequently population capacity estimates are based on a statistical approach. The components of the functional 4d city model, i.e. the multi-temporal building model and the classification of building types associated with residential and non-residential function returned very high accuracies with κ of 0.73 and 0.89, respectively. The number of floors was estimated with coefficient of determination of 0.91. Compared to the numbers of official census counts, the multi-temporal population capacity estimation revealed a considerable mismatch of available living space based on VHR remote sensing data and actual population counts. According to the conceptual framework of this study, this disagreement indicates a high likelihood and significant evidence for the emergence and presence of the ghost city phenomenon for the city of Dongying. In addition, a detailed spatial assessment was conducted in terms of an index comparing the dynamics of residential developments and population numbers to provide an impression of specific regions of the urban area which are most likely to suffer from the ghost city phenomenon.