View this link:

http://adswithoutproducts.com/2009/05/23/ghost-airports-fantasies-of-over-capacity/

Ads Without Products links to this strange BBC article on a South Korean “ghost airport,” originally designed with the intent of having up to three million people travel through it every year, while currently only 26 passengers a day come through the doors. I really liked this description, because it reminds me of living in both South Florida (where most property is obviously speculative) as well as Michigan (where lots of property is languishing in post-industrial decay):

So, while the Korean airport discussed in the BBC piece seems to have been born of political corruption – and even America has its own cases of that sort of thing – there’s still something to this I think. While it’s not at all hard to drive around the US finding the architectural materialization of private-sector speculations and public-sector dereliction, things like empty bullet-trains to unbuilt cities, hulking universities for student populations not yet born, hospitals for patients not yet sick, and slick public housing for populations yet to arrive but who vividly anticipated are very difficult to imagine in anything other than the light of the utopian apparitions. Those of us familiar with the post-industrial portions of the USA, the northeast and the Great Lakes region, know only the bent tracks and silted canals and abandoned silos and factories – the native flora cast in concrete and iron of unemployment, casualization, and privatization.