Ghost Cities of Metaverse

As Bill Hillier clearly states in his 1999 published book, Space is the “Machine” for human interaction. Social and economic activity makes use of space, and spatial qualities like distance, form/geometry, boundaries, and networks, affect the way people work, socialize, spend their free time and generally conduct their life within the urban environments.

In a similar way, to real-life urban environments, virtual spaces of Metaverse, tend to adopt spatial qualities that are necessary in order to create the so-called feeling of “presence” (Mandal, 2013), activating interaction among the Avatars, and also enabling activities of everyday life like walking, shopping, wandering, participating in collaborative initiatives etc. In most cases these virtual environments are clearly designed as “cities” (e.g. Decentraland, Somnius Space, Xi Rang), while in other cases like Second Life, they constitute a complete network of virtual places characterized by a great variety of urban and landscape features that could be perceived as a seemingly endless world.

However, socio-spatial interaction necessitates a considerable number of Metaverse users, occupying these digital urban environments. This is not always the case: in the present context we explore the way virtual spaces could end up looking like Ghost Cities, with only a marginal number of perceptible users, or no-users at all, creating a sense of an abandoned place. To support this hypothesis, we conducted a case study comparing the London City Sim of Second Life, a famous digital replica of real-life locations and landmarks of London, to Thames Town, a Replica Ghost City of China. Through a critical analysis, we explore the correspondence between the virtual manifestation of space and the physical actuality of the urban environment, examining how the average number of users could affect Metaverse Space.

Theory behind Ghost Cities

A Ghost City is defined as a city with no people that still contains visible and important infrastructure and buildings (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_town). The term is attached to whole cities or neighborhoods that are still inhabited but with considerably less population than previous periods.

Definition of a Ghost City varies: Some researchers exclude settlements that were abandoned as a result of a natural or man-made disaster, and apply the term only to describe settlements that were abandoned due to the fact that they became economically unsustainable.  L.Baker (1991) defines a Ghost City as a city where “the reason for being no longer exists”. 

Apart from cities that were abandoned, Ghost City as a term is used to describe newly designed urban areas that were never inhabited (Shi, 2020), or inhabited by a considerably lower population than expected (e.g. Kilamba, Songdo, Ordos).