Kangbashi is the new administrative district of Ordos City, purpose-built from scratch in the desert between 2003 and 2010 and briefly the world's most famous ghost city. The wide boulevards, monumental public sculptures, and vast empty plazas that attracted global media attention in the early 2010s are still there, but they now have people in them. The district has filled in enough to function as a normal Chinese city, with shops, schools, restaurants, and residents — though the scale still seems out of proportion to the population, and the quality of the architecture ranges from ambitious to grandiose.
Walking Kangbashi as an urban experience is unlike anything else in China. The sculptures are enormous and eclectic: bronze horsemen in the traditional Mongolian style, abstract steel constructions, monumental public plazas with fountains and electronic displays. The Ordos Museum, designed by MAD Architects in a spectacular blob of polished steel, is the finest building in the district and one of the best museum buildings in China. The adjacent government plaza and cultural centre give a sense of what a Chinese city designer in 2005 thought a city should look like.