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The “city” of Kangbashi, for instance, sits on the edge of the Inner Mongolian desert. It was built from scratch in 2004. Architecturally speaking, it’s impressive, or at least ambitious. It features a meticulously landscaped central plaza more than a mile in length, along which sits a library shaped like a trio of enormous shelved books, a museum shaped like a cross between a peanut and a bronze beanbag, and an art gallery vaguely modeled on a pair of yurts. Wide avenues lead to shopping malls, hotels, and high-rise housing developments. The city was built to house more than a million residents. But when I was there in spring of 2016, it held barely one-tenth that number.
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Vince Beiser (The World in a Grain: The Story of Sand and How It Transformed Civilization)