Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia

Front matter

SHAPING | ee "URBAN ™ “FUTURES IN.

“MONGOLIA ks

A h Ulaanbaatar, Dynamic Ownership and Economic Flux j ECONOMIC EXPOSURES IN ASIA

Contents

List of Figures vi Preface viii Acknowledgements xii A Note on Orthography XV Introduction: Dynamic Ownership and Urban Futures 1

1. Productive Circulations — Tracing the City through

Forms of Housing Finance 27 2. The Making of Public and Private in a Redevelopment Zone 55 3. Atmospheres of Tension in a Landscape of Change 80 4. The Possibilities of Possession - Exploring Ezemshil 100 5. Seeking Quality 122 Conclusion: Making the City Visible 144 References 158

Preface

This book places front and centre the lived experience of urban development and change in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It does so through an ethnographic account of the ways in which urban residents attempt to own, and hold on to, forms of real estate during times of economic oscillation. Recent experiences of increased foreign direct investment and economic growth, followed by a drop-off in this investment, have deeply shaped Ulaanbaatar’s real estate economy and its construction sector. Forms of temporary access to land have created proliferating possibilities of converting urban land into assets. The fast rates of urbanisation occurring in many parts of the world are often buoyed by increased investment of capital and ensuing construction, yet these in turn often give rise to many other unseen effects, diverse economic practices, politics, ethics and urban subjectivities. Construction becomes simultaneously a solution and a problem (Gleeson 2014), especially when economic processes do not work as they ‘should’, or people are dispossessed of land to make way for further urban change.

This book traces how some of these phenomena have been experienced in Ulaanbaatar drawing from 12 months of fieldwork conducted over 2015-17. It explores expanding circulations of money, housing finance schemes, redevelopment processes and emerging urban ethics during times of economic fluctuation. Following different actions, strategies and techniques that form the ways in which residents precede and underwrite the owning of real estate property, Shaping Urban Futures in Mongolia considers Mongolian conceptualisations of growth, multiplication, fair portioning and land custodianship and the way they shape people’s engagement with their urban landscape. Connections are revealed between the intimate space of the home, formations and ideologies of the national economy, forms of urban development and disrepair and the types of politics and ethics that can arise as a result. Through residents’ attempts to own property in the city, Ulaanbaatar itself becomes a site of examination and critique, as a space of difficulty as well as potential.

Here residents live and work within a dynamic urban economy that is intricately interconnected with transnational flows of finance and urban planning knowledge.

Such a topic explores some of the intersections between the anthropology of economy, ethics, politics and urbanisation. It integrates this with a consideration of Mongolian concepts of possession, ownership and custodianship. It does so with a consideration of Mongolia’s experiences with capitalism following the end of socialist governance in 1990. The cross-cutting themes explored in this ethnography stem from research that I conducted as part of a project funded by the European Research Council (ERC) entitled Emerging Subjects of The New Economy: Tracing Economic Growth in Mongolia. This research project was based at University College London’s Anthropology department and ran from 2014-19. I undertook a four-year postdoctoral research associate position in this project under the supervision of the project leader Professor Rebecca Empson. The Emerging Subjects project consisted of four anthropologists and a geographer, all of whom conducted individual research on different topics, including the extractive economy, nationalism, subjectivities and debt (to name a few). Overall our research examined the ways in which people experienced Mongolia’s recent significant period of economic growth and subsequent extreme economic downturn after 2013. As part of the preparation for field research we explored different anthropological approaches to the study of emerging economic subjectivities, capitalism, economic temporalities and resource economies. This formed a valuable, conceptual launchpad for exploring other themes that emerged in our own individual research.

My own research interests on these topics emerged earlier during my doctoral research located in Mongolia’s west, which I completed from 2008-13 at the Australian National University. This research focused on musical performance, intersubjectivity and social moralities in a rural west Mongolian district. Here I learned how performance formed part of the attempts made by different people to try and create good futures. The majority of fieldwork for my PhD occurred from 2009-10 — a time when there was increased investment in Mongolia’s extractive sector. Many of my interlocutors at this time shared with me their anticipations of bright economic futures that were going to accompany this growth. Expectations of future wealth became part of my research on sociality and performance, as people correlated the possible causal effects of their own daily ceremonial and other musical sociality with its ability to harness fortune (hishig) and bring in good futures.

PREFACE

Musical performance thus formed part of an active prefiguration of futures people wanted to bring into being, implicating life in this rural area dependent on mobile pastoralism, the surrounding landscape, the climate and national economy of Mongolia as a whole. Researching people’s inter-generational, inherited custodianship of different musical knowledges, I also learned about perceptions of ownership, including engagements with spirit worlds embedded in the landscape and the responsibilities one carries when inheriting custodianship. The possession of rights to land access also pivoted around understandings of responsibility and negotiation of value. One cannot separate the cultivation of musical knowledge as a resource from that of the portioning and managing of landscape as a resource as well (cf. Humphrey 1995).

I came to the Emerging Subjects project with perspectives on custodianship and ownership that stemmed from rural Mongolian mobilepastoralist understanding of land tenure. While I was very much aware that the capital, Ulaanbaatar, forms a considerable economic and political centre in Mongolia, living in rural areas revealed the presence of different kinds of centres and peripheries. The rural homeland of my interlocutors during my PhD research was itself a major socio-spiritual centre; they travelled to and from this homeland and referred to it as a significant reference point when elsewhere in Mongolia. Because of this, I began my research on ownership in Ulaanbaatar in 2015 with the perspective of one looking at the city from within Mongolia: from the ‘countryside’ (hödöö) towards the city. From here my ethnographic gaze widened considerably to incorporate the wider political economy of urban development, the development of forms of financialisation around housing provision and the diverse population that has made a home in Ulaanbaatar, both recently and over several generations.

Ulaanbaatar is a city composed of essentially two main built areas: the centre of the city, principally made up of apartments and other buildings connected to core heating and water infrastructure, and the ger districts, expansive areas of fenced land plots, often housing self-built houses or ger (the white, felt, collapsible dwelling used by Mongolia’s mobile pastoralists). The two areas are distinctive, due in part to the fact that Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts are not connected to core heating and water infrastructure. There is a growing and important body of scholarship being written and produced about the ger districts, some of which can be seen in the work by Rick (J. E.) Miller (2013, 2017), Byambadorj et al. (2011), Terbish and Rawsthorne (2016, 2018) and Elizabeth Fox (2019). This book in parts also discusses the ger districts (see Chapters 4 and 5). However, overall, Ulaanbaatar’s areas of apartment blocks form a major

PREFACE ethnographic entry point of this book. I present this picture to demonstrate how the two areas overlap, are interlinked and mutually reinforce each other in different ways.

A central theme of this book is the way in which the presence of these two influential built environments influences people’s lives. Many residents engage with both areas on a daily basis. Apartment areas, like the expanding city periphery, are also very much a work-in-progress. As Ulaanbaatar faces increasing demands for affordable housing and increasingly severe air pollution in winter, this ethnographic narrative reveals the importance of taking the mutual influence of these two built areas into account. Doing so reveals ways in which Ulaanbaatar’s urban residents are questioning their futures, and what they believe urbanism in Mongolia should indeed become.

PREFACE xi xii

Acknowledgements

Iam sincerely indebted to the many residents, practitioners, officials and friends who spent numerous hours and days in Ulaanbaatar sharing their stories of their life in the city with me. The discussions that emerged — of strategies to gain housing, of their struggles with air pollution, of disillusionment over the failure of economic growth to continue, of great leaps of faith when making decisions around property that would affect one’s life for years to come — were deeply personal and emotive ones. Such reflections crystallised larger life trajectories that spanned considerable periods of political and economic change. I am deeply grateful that those I spoke to shared these important life experiences with me, and I hope this book does them all justice in revealing the ingenuity, resourcefulness and dignity that they bring to Ulaanbaatar. Many of the people I spoke to I consider dear friends, and I will remain indebted to them all for a long time to come. Although I have anonymised the people and places discussed in this book, and so cannot thank them here by name, please know that I am sincerely grateful.

Many people have assisted me in Mongolia during fieldwork for this book. I would like to sincerely thank Ts. Uranchimeg, Seruntungalag, Batsuuri, Ingrid Plueckhahn, Christopher de Gruben and Sarnai. A sincere thank you to G. Badruun: as a member of the Emerging Subjects advisory board, and a knowledgeable person committed to finding different avenues towards urban improvement in Ulaanbaatar, I have always enjoyed our conversations about the city. A sincere thank you also to my dear friend and colleague Terbish Bayartsetseg, a social work scholar from the National University of Mongolia and Ghent University, with whom I conducted a considerable amount of collaborative research in the ger districts — none of which appears in this book directly, but which has appeared in other co-authored publications. I am forever grateful for our friendship and conversations.

A sincere thank you to T. Aldarsaikhan for our fascinating conversations and for providing feedback on the history section of the introduction to this book. Your knowledge of urban planning and perspectives on Ulaanbaatar are a true inspiration. I also wish to extend sincere thanks and gratitude to my two research assistants, B. Doljinsuren and B. Erdenezayaa, whose linguistic skills, insight and readiness to conduct ethnographic research greatly assisted with the research that underpins this book. I would like to thank Ya. Hishigsuren for assisting with interview transcriptions, and I also wish to thank the very talented Setsen Altan-Ochir for her invaluable assistance in translating several of the many interviews that I drew from for this book.

The journey of this book forms an outcome of many discussions, reflections and helpful critiques that have arisen from ongoing conversations with various people. Several sections of this book were presented as part of different kinds of reading groups, seminars and workshops, from which I received invaluable feedback at different stages of the writing process between 2016 and 2019. I would like to thank staff from the University of Melbourne’s Anthropology and Development Studies Department for providing helpful feedback when I presented a seminar paper in March 2016. In particular, I would like to thank Assoc. Prof. Monica Minnegal for her comments on customary forms of land tenure. I would also like to thank the Mongolia and Inner Asian Studies Unit (MIASU) at the University of Cambridge for kindly hosting me to give a seminar on ownership and urbanism in Ulaanbaatar in May 2018. I would like to thank UCL Bartlett School’s Development and Planning Unit (DPU) for including me in the workshop ‘Urban Vulnerabilities: Infrastructure, Health and Stigma’ held in June 2018, through which I received excellent feedback and engaged in great collaborative discussion. I would also like to thank the staff at University College London — Anthropology for having me give a seminar presentation in October 2018 during which I received invaluable feedback that prompted rich reflection.

Importantly, I would like sincerely to thank the Emerging Subjects Team at UCL Anthropology — Prof. Rebecca Empson, Dr Lauren Bonilla, Dr Dulam Bumochir and Dr Hedwig Waters — for their friendship and excellent intellectual collaborations that have formed part of the impetus and development of this book. A sincere thank you to Rebecca for her supervision and support during the four-year postdoctoral position in which this book was written. Many thanks to Bumochir for our many discussions as we co-edited a journal special issue on ‘Capitalism in Mongolia’, published in Central Asian Survey in 2018. Writing through these themes helped me to conceptualise aspects of this book in ways that I did not at first envisage. A sincere thank you to Lauren for her friendship and support and our fascinating discussions that spanned Mongolia

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS xiii xiv and numerous theoretical topics. A sincere thank you to Hedwig for her friendship, discussions and for providing feedback on a chapter of this book.

Thank you to UCL Press for their support and work in bringing this book to publication. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers who provided invaluable feedback. A thank you to Dr Saskia Abrahms- Kavunenko for our time spent catching up while conducting fieldwork at the same time. A sincere thank you to G. Munkh-Erdene for providing feedback on a chapter of this book. A thank you also to Sanchir Jargalsaikhan for our many discussions and musings on politics, scholarly themes and methods; your ongoing work is a true inspiration. I would also like to thank Dr Elizabeth Fox for our discussions of Ulaanbaatar and Dr Tess Altman for her friendship and support during the writing process. I would also like sincerely to thank the ‘Grupo de Ayuda Mutua’, a group of postdoctoral fellows and early career researchers at UCL Anthropology, for reading and providing feedback on chapters as well as providing invaluable moral support and friendship at the later stages of the writing process.

I would also like to thank the editorial board of the journal Inner Asia for granting me permission to include in this book ethnographic material and themes discussed in the following article:

Plueckhahn, R. 2017. ‘The Power of Faulty Paperwork: Bureaucratic Negotiation, Land Access and Personal Innovation in Ulaanbaatar.’ Inner Asia 19(1): 91-109.

Chapter 1 forms an expanded discussion of a blog piece posted on the UCL Emerging Subjects Blog, 16 March:

Plueckhahn, R. 2018. ‘Ideologies of Mortgage Financing in Mongolia’, Emerging Subjects Blog. https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/mongolian-economy/2018/03/16/ideologies-of-mortgage-financing-in-mongolia/ March 16.

The research for this book was generously funded by the European Research Council, ERC-2013-CoG, 615785, Emerging Subjects.

Lastly, but by no means least, I wish sincerely to thank Janosch and Sascha Hoffmann for taking this journey with me.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

A Note on Orthography

In this book I use the following transliteration system of Mongolian Cyrillic. I have followed the system used by Empson (2011, xiii).

OasO

© as Ö

Y as U

Y as Ü

E as Ye blas Y

FO as Yu/Yü (depending on conjunction with front/back vowel)

For the plural of some Mongolian words used frequently in this text, for example ger, I have used the Roman ‘s’ at the end, rather than the Mongolian plural.

XV

Cities are fertile sites, not for following an established pathway or master blueprint, but for a plethora of situated experiments that reinvent what urban norms can count as ‘global’.

The cities that remain crystallised in images we are afraid of touching are not cities we inhabit as citizens but cities of nostalgia, cities we dream about. The cities ... we live in are, like ourselves, continuously changing. They are cities to make sense of, to question, to change. They are cities we engage with.

Caldeira (2000, 8)

In Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, fences do not establish permanent boundaries, but have for a long time been mobile transformative devices. Erected from wood or sheets of metal, they act as markers that reconfigure space, bringing a certain idea of land into being. They can be dismantled and re-erected, and in this way the land they demarcate is malleable and transformative. This way of ‘holding’ and ‘releasing’ land is most predominantly seen in Ulaanbaatar’s proliferating ger districts — vast areas of fenced-off land parcels. On these land parcels, urban residents erect gers — the round, white, collapsible felt dwelling used by Mongolia’s mobile pastoralists — or self-built houses made of wood or brick (baishin). Lacking connections to core infrastructure, including running water, sewerage or centrally provided ex-socialist heating systems, the ger districts form a built and fenced environment that has long been a feature of urbanism in Mongolia and the establishment of small plots of ‘private’ property.

Figure 0.1 A view of the core city area of apartments surrounded by expansive areas of ger districts. The ger districts expand considerably beyond what is shown in the photo. Source: author

Ulaanbaatar also consists of a centre core area of apartment, government and commercial buildings that stems from the way the city was designed during the socialist period (Figure 0.1). Since the end of socialism in 1990, fences have been steadily erected in other ways as well. Following the recent years of a growth in construction from 2011- 15 (National Statistics Office 2019a), fences became another ubiquitous sign of land transformation. Usually made out of metal resembling the corrugated sides of shipping containers, and often high enough to obscure one’s view from a standing position, such fences often denoted the sectioning-off of urban land for development. They were sometimes erected for many months before building starts - keeping the land on hold. During this period of heightened construction, such parcelling-off of land was often viewed by residents as the co-opting of potentially public land into obscure, proliferating private networks of urban development. To many, these obscuring fences reflected opaque networks of people who could be potentially profiting from a building yet to materialise.

While such fencing was often erected in areas in which lots of new residential apartment buildings were being built, in the years following this period of heightened construction, other spaces in the city were starting to be sectioned off. These included areas that had been used as public spaces and were viewed by many residents as seemingly untouchable. When I visited Ulaanbaatar in November 2017 for a month-long follow-up visit, one such example of enclosing public land was emerging as an emblematic tipping point for how audacious these incremental forms of profit-driven land acquisition had become. In the centre of the city across the road from Ulaanbaatar’s predominant State Department Store, a public square had been sectioned off by large green corrugated iron fences. In a city with a general dearth of public spaces, this square had up until this point been an extremely popular place where families gathered around a fountain, children played and young people hung out together listening to music; it was often the location for concerts and small bazaars during summer months. The square is also the site of an iconic statue of the band The Beatles, which forms part of amonument to the pressures and restrictions experienced by Mongolian rock musicians during the later years of the socialist period.

During 2017, however, this popular public square had been sectioned off, ostensibly earmarked for the development of an underground mall. Plans to this effect were emblazoned on images stuck to the corrugated iron fences that surrounded the site. However, once an area was sectioned off like this, many people considered it to be very likely that the land itself would also be built upon. The sectioning-off of this land provoked significant protest from surrounding residents, and forms of popular mobilisation among them and other concerned citizens culminated in the fences being removed. It was as if the co-opting of this particular land was simply too audacious, provoking a kind of tipping point in a wealthy area that had the means to fight back.

This book explores the kinds of environments in Ulaanbaatar that led up to this moment. It describes a time in which residents were becoming increasingly sceptical about the co-opting of public land for private development. Overall, I explore the question: how have residents been negotiating Ulaanbaatar’s changing urban landscape up until this point, as they attempted to own property and real estate of their own? This book forms an ethnography of the lived experience of the after-effects of accelerated urban land transformation in Ulaanbaatar following a significant increase in urban construction. Such an increase had accompanied speculation-driven economic growth and foreign direct investment that took place between 2009 and 2013, surrounding Mongolia’s growing extractive sector. Post 2014, the country experienced a subsequent economic downturn after foreign direct investment lessened, severely affecting Mongolia’s national economy as a whole. I draw upon 12 months of ethnographic research during this period of economic slowdown in 2015-16, as well as a follow-up visit in 2017. During this time, I researched residents’ attempts to acquire and own property (including land and apartments), tracing people’s strategies and collaboration that underpin acts of owning and appropriating property.

The environment I describe reveals forms of urban enclosure that echo the experience of cities elsewhere in China (Ho Cheuk-Yuet 2015, 2017; Hsing 2010; Zhang 2010; Chu 2014) and Asia more generally (Harms 2016a; Shatkin 2017). Yet the malleable nature of land possession in Ulaanbaatar also provided striking forms of rupture and opportunity for urban residents. In their quests to own property, residents subtly shaped aspects of urban environments, spheres of financialisation and politics during this period — sometimes supporting nascent financial systems from within and giving rise to shifting forms of emerging urban politics.

Examining the experiences of urban residents in Ulaanbaatar contributes to the growing scholarly discussion of the experiences of property construction booms in Asia more generally (Harms 2016a; Ho Cheuk- Yuet 2015, 2017; Zhang 2010). It also provides a focus on resident-driven urban politics surrounding real estate and urban redevelopment emerging in parts of Asia (Hsing 2010, 4; Zhang 2010). However, focusing on Mongolia contextualises the lived experience of urban growth within the context of a volatile, fluctuating resource economy within the Asia region, and the resulting formation of capitalist economic entanglements within it. While Mongolian economic activities are often innately shaped by political networks of power (Radchencko and Jargalsaikhan 2017; Plueckhahn and Bumochir 2018), exploring the lived experience of residents attempting to own real estate in Ulaanbaatar reveals the emergence of burgeoning, shifting, varying political formations that exist both within and beyond these networks.

Such analysis raises the question of how residents —- who may not be part of these assemblages of urban redevelopment processes — attempt to bring into being types of urban futures. It asks what this can reveal about forms of urbanism in Mongolia that have concomitantly been shaped by increased forms of transnational flows of capital? Charting the emergence of ideals, ethics and subjectivities as Ulaanbaatar residents attempt to access, build, appropriate or secure the sale of property and real estate, I provide an ethnographic portrait of Ulaanbaatar as ‘a milieu that is in constant formation, [made up of] disparate connections’ (Ong 2011, 3). It highlights the diverse ways of being urban in Ulaanbaatar, and how these are often the ‘products of inventiveness’ within the city that move beyond the influence of Soviet urban planning, transnational financial flows or other international ‘influences’ or ‘models’ (Robinson 2006). Ulaanbaatar forms the largest urban space in Mongolia. While every Mongolian province (aimag) has a provincial centre or aimgiin tov that also consists of areas with apartments and ger districts, these are considerably smaller in scale than Ulaanbaatar. In 2018 Ulaanbaatar was home to approximately 1,491,375 people, roughly 46 per cent of Mongolia’s total population of 3,238,479 (National Statistics Office 2019b). Stemming from Mongolian pastoral nomadism that has shaped the country’s socio-cultural and political life for centuries, and still continues to do so, Ulaanbaatar itself has nomadic origins.

In the seventeenth century it began as a monastic city, consisting of a mobile populace that followed a central Buddhist temple ger (Campi 2006, 37). The site of this city shifted every few years after surrounding pasturelands became exhausted (Bawden 1968, 11). Originally named after the temple ger, this earlier substantiation of Ulaanbaatar was originally called Örgöö (sometimes written as Urga) (Campi 2006, 37). After 1778 the temple permanently settled at the present site along the Tuul River, from which it slowly grew into a place of business (ibid.). When Mongolia was proclaimed a socialist Mongolian People’s Republic in 1924, the city’s name was changed to Ulaanbaatar, meaning ‘Red Hero’. During the socialist period, increased urban planning occurred, including the implementation of two Soviet-influenced city master plans in 1954 and 1975 to account for a growing population (Boldbaatar et al. 2014, 124 and 172). Extensive apartment construction began after the 1960s (Boldbaatar et al. 2014, 146 and 153). Following periods of increased sedentarism, Ulaanbaatar has always consisted of ger districts. At the end of socialism in 1990, the Mongolian government allowed the free movement of its citizens. Migration to Ulaanbaatar, and to the ger districts in particular, has increased considerably since 1990. In several areas, Ulaanbaatar’s expanding ger districts as of 2015 covered almost 83 per cent of the city’s urban built area (World Bank 2015, 1), bordering the city limits, reaching up into mountain valleys and expanding over hillsides. This form of urban expansion — beyond the reach of centrally provided heating — has contributed to Ulaanbaatar’s growing seasonal air pollution. During Ulaanbaatar’s extremely cold winters, where an average daily temperature is roughly —23 degrees Celsius, vast numbers of ger district residents burn coal-fired stoves in an attempt to keep warm. The city’s winter air pollution, which often spans from the months of November to March, is becoming severe enough to constitute a growing biopolitical crisis for Ulaanbaatar’s urban populace (Sorace 2018) (see also Chapter 5).

However, the expansion of Ulaanbaatar’s ger districts is not solely the result of ‘rural to urban migrants’ setting up land plots in the city. Considerable movement occurs within Ulaanbaatar itself. Recently, several ger district areas in the city have been experiencing overcrowding, spurring numerous types of movement within the city as residents seek available land in less crowded areas on the outskirts. Similarly, there is ongoing movement and linkages between Ulaanbaatar and other areas of Mongolia. Many people move seasonally back and forth from rural to urban areas in order to take up short-term employment, conduct trade, access health services or seek out educational opportunities. Processes of rural-urban migration often occur in stages with people moving back and forth before settling more permanently in the city over a longer time frame, complexifying who could be indeed categorised as a ‘rural to urban’ migrant. To the south of Ulaanbaatar, numerous luxury apartment developments stretch into mountain valleys. Many apartments have been built into areas of the Bogd Han National Park near to the spiritually auspicious Bogd Han Mountain. Apartment developments in the city’s other areas, often catering towards more affordable middle-income housing, sit closely alongside each other where developers have maximised land usage in these sought-after areas. Such jostling for space and high valuations of land in numerous parts of the city forms a striking contrast to the expansive pastoral grasslands that extend for thousands of kilometers beyond Ulaanbaatar. These far-reaching areas form part of Mongolia’s many rural districts, or sum, where herders move seasonally to herd their livestock.

Ulaanbaatar has recently experienced significant economic oscillation and material change, stemming from Mongolia’s period of considerable economic growth that began in 2009. This growth accompanied the vast increase in investment in mining infrastructure at two key mineral deposits — the coal deposit of Tavan Tolgoi and the copper and gold deposit of Oyu Tolgoi — located in the Gobi Desert in the south of Mongolia. During this period Mongolia experienced a growth in foreign direct investment that started rising in 2010 and peaked in 2011 (APIP 2016, 57). This resulted in Mongolia’s GDP growing considerably in 2010-11, reaching 17 per cent in 2011 (World Bank n.d.), and continuing to experience growth (albeit in lessening degrees) until 2013.

During this period of economic growth between 2009 and 2013, foreign direct investment in Mongolia had expanded to a number of other different areas, including secondary industries associated with mining, the banking sector, telecom sector and real estate sectors (Mongolian Properties 2015, 47). Such an increase in foreign investment in the ‘emerging’ urban real estate economies in Asia and Africa occurred after the post-2008 financial crisis, due in part to the downturn in property markets in other locations (Watson 2014, 216 and 222). When Mongolia’s economy was bucking worldwide trends and growing much faster than many other countries, the real estate and construction sectors in Ulaanbaatar were shaped by reverberating and contrasting temporalities that ricocheted off these investment flows around mining. Ulaanbaatar’s urban environment became a secondary point of transnational surplus capital absorption (Harvey 2010, 147).

This resulted in an increase in investment in the construction of both luxury and more affordable apartment housing and commercial real estate that spiked in 2011 and stayed consistent until 2014 (APIP 2018, 96). As someone told me in 2015 in Ulaanbaatar, ‘real estate is always 3-5 years behind everything else’. Buoyed by collective anticipations of economic growth and a simultaneous growing demand for housing in Ulaanbaatar, construction companies began planning for buildings in earnest in 2008-9. While the minerals lay in the ground, and politicians and companies argued over the details of mining agreements, Ulaanbaatar’s urban skyline began to grow — fuelled by anticipations of a future need for an upscale capital located in a soon-to-be vastly rich nation. There was a significant increase in the completion of the construction of residential apartment housing between 2012-14 (National Statistics Office 2019a), reflecting the delayed temporality between an increase in investment and the time required to complete construction. This period resulted in an increase in property prices and rents, which in turn only fuelled further investment. Large and small construction outfits within Mongolia sourced investment from China, South Korea, Russia and elsewhere to produce numerous developments. In 2015 a construction company employee explained to me that during this growth in construction, speculations and rumours abounded on how one could make up to 50 per cent profit on real estate developments — although in reality a lot of people did not.