5. One in five

This week, we’re talking about one of the biggest stories in the world today – the urbanisation of China. In 2006, American student Wade Shepard found himself lost in an entirely empty city somewhere in western China. When he told his professor about the experience, the response was a shrug and the words, “Yeah, those things are everywhere”. So Wade set about exploring these empty cities. Last year, he published a book, Ghost Cities of China, about his experiences, to explain where these cities come from – and why they’re not really ghost cities at all. Also this week, we’re introducing a new segment in which one of our listeners tells us about their own city. This week, the man behind the curtain, our producer Roifield Brown, tells us about his hometown Birmingham. If you’d like to contribute to this section in future, you can leave us a short message on Speakpipe – or, if you think that what you want to say will take more than 90 seconds, you can just email us an audio file. Skylines is the...

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