Give a thought to Mongolia’s urban future 

By Journalist Sh.Enkhtur

March 31, 1998. No. 013 (098) 

Mongolians are rightly proud of their nomadic past, but they'd better settle down and start thinking about urban planning, argues Ardiin Erkh newspaper's Journalist Sh.Enkhtur. And he has some novel ideas.

Many of us are proud to call ourselves nomads. But the tide of human development is running the other way - in favour of settled civilizations. This is also the trend in Mongolia, as people migrate to economic centres or join forces to work.

There are scores of small villages, each containing two or three families, running off from the main road to Ulaanbaatar.

But however much the government talks about regional development, they ignore the fate of the 350 small population units - soums and villages set up during the socialist period. Now many of these communities are turning into ghost towns.

The centrally planned notion of concentrating cattle breeders and farmers in such small units was not a good idea, but a poor attempt to establish social relationships among people. It has now been abandoned.

On the other hand, the nomadic way of life brings with it infrastructure problems. That’s why one or two families will settle along a road to earn some income from travellers passing by. That doesn't mean they're thinking of establishing settled towns. 

But we need to think about it. Why can't we find villages in beautiful locations with access to farm land and opportunities for cattle breeding - it would be, among other things, a great hope for future tourism.

The authorities will say that no money is available for such projects - while the villages once occupied by Russian military units lie abandoned and ruined by the wind.

Then there’s Mongolia’s capital and biggest city. Without planning, Ulaanbaatar is going to turn into a garbage dump. Ulaanbaatar's population is too concentrated. This problem could be alleviated if people lived in suburban satellite communities. 

In other countries many people commute by train from suburban towns to their jobs in the city centre. The only thing stopping large numbers of Ulaanbaatar residents living in the comfortable apartment buildings of Baganuur, Nalaikh and Bagakhangai districts, is fast, reliable transportation. In the near future a railway is going to be built from east to west. Old paths are going to be revived. Telecommunications is making the faraway nearby.

Imagine the possibilities. Why couldn't we build the "central" casino for Central 'Asia in Bagakhangai? Think of Las Vegas. Imagine its incalculable annual income. The United States is a vast country, and they built this gambling mecca in the middle of a desert.

If we do this, Bagakhangai can have an airport to serve planes of the rich and famous from every continent. 

Frankly, we've reached the point where there are more than enough prostitutes for the cities - they are practically going out to the pastures to serve countryside men. Their poor wives! Why can't we retrain these women in erotic dancing so they can serve the rich gamblers who come to the Central Asian casino that we've dreamt up? 

More: let’s build a “closed” elite town near the capital city. Ordinary folks can visit on weekends, while the rich who live there can do the same with Ulaanbaatar. These schemes may sound like dreams today. But tomorrow they will come true. Mongolia is trying to become an air and land bridge between Asia and Europe in the next century. What shall we do if the bridge is nothing but empty steppe and three million people living in a small valley?

The government should give permission to private-sector companies to build their own towns wherever they want. If they like, they can name their towns after themselves, build monuments to themselves and appoint their executive mayor.

The huge sum of money that is going to be flushed away on the Youth Year refurbishment of Sukhbaatar Square would be better spent establishing a youth village in some suburban area of Ulaanbaatar.

Remember how quickly Tashkent in Uzbekistan was rebuilt after a natural disaster with the help of friendly socialist countries? Eastern China, which we have considered underdeveloped, is developing fast, and businesses and residential districts are rising day by day with the help of foreign investment. What is the secret of this boom?

There has been talk of moving Mongolia's capital to the ancient city of Kharkhorin. If we do so, Mongolia will be a country with "Kharkhorin heart," "Altanbulag and Zamiin Uud pockets" and "Ulaanbaatar brain." Then and only then will our problems of underpopulation and population concentration be solved.

The dream that stayed a dream

Almost 30 years ago, journalist Sh.Enkhtur warned Mongolia to plan its urban future or face disaster. He was largely ignored. A generation later, we take stock of what he saw, and what we failed to do. In March 1998, he published a column in these pages that most readers likely skimmed and forgot. He was worried about ghost towns forming in the countryside. He wanted satellite cities built around Ulaanbaatar. He imagined a Central Asian casino glittering in Bagakhangai. He asked, in a phrase that has aged uncomfortably well, “What shall we do if the bridge is nothing but empty steppe and three million people living in a small valley?” 

The bridge he meant was the country’s ambition to become a transit corridor between Asia and Europe. The valley was Ulaanbaatar. The three million people are now three and a half million, and roughly half of them still live in that same small valley, in a city that has nearly tripled in size without a plan to match. Our newspaper turns 30 this year. Sh.Enkhtur’s column is the right ghost to revisit.

Still empty steppe?

Sh.Enkhtur’s countryside concern was about ghost towns, or the small Soviet-era soums bleeding out. He was right about the bleeding, but he missed the specific wound. The countryside today is not simply emptying. It is emptying of women. In particular, in rural Mongolia, boys are twice as likely as girls to drop out of school. The reason is not indifference to education, it is livestock. Families keep sons home to herd. Daughters go to school, graduate and leave for Ulaanbaatar. The result, visible in village demographics across all 21 provinces, is a countryside that is quietly masculinising and ageing. Even a television dating show now pairs urban women from the capital with countryside men. That would not exist if the gender gap were not already a cultural commonplace.

Meanwhile, what these men are herding has grown dramatically. The livestock population reached an all-time record of over 71 million animals in 2022, the largest herd since records began in 1918. A catastrophic zud (severe winter condition) in 2024 killed approximately seven million animals, a 10.9 percent decline, leaving 57.6 million head by year’s end. These numbers are staggering for a country of 3.5 million people: roughly 16 animals per citizen. One in four employed Mongolians works in animal husbandry. So, in 30 years, who will herd the animals? The mathematical imbalance between growing herds and a shrinking rural workforce is the country’s least-discussed demographic crisis.

The climate is not helping. Zuds once struck roughly once a decade. They now come every two years. Pastureland is under stress that in 2024, the national livestock density reached 84 sheep-units per 100 hectares, straining natural pastures that have no alternative. Overgrazing is accelerating desertification. The steppe that Sh.Enkhtur romanticised in 1998 is narrowing.

There is genuine progress. Some 83 percent of herder households now have access to electricity, predominantly through solar panels. Three-quarters own a television. Mobile phone coverage has spread along major roads and into provincial centers. But data networks remain unreliable in remote areas, and the infrastructure gap between province centers and the countryside beyond them remains vast.

Sh.Enkhtur counted 350 small soums in 1998 and called them poorly conceived ghost towns in formation. Mongolia today has 330 soums, and no law to consolidate, merge, or fundamentally reform them. The socialist-era administrative map, drawn by central planners in Ulaanbaatar for a collectivised economy, is still essentially the map. Three decades of democratic governments have discussed regional development at length; none has restructured the basic units through which rural Mongolia is governed.

On tourism, he asked in 1998 why Mongolia did not develop beautiful rural locations for visitors. He had a point that time has only sharpened. The Government declared 2023-2025 the “Years to Visit Mongolia,” offered visa-free entry to dozens of countries and invested in marketing. What it invested less in was the experience. The Khuvsgul Ice Festival, held each March on the frozen surface of Lake Khuvsgul since 2001, has become a genuine international event, drawing thousands to ice sumo, horse-sled racing and shaman ceremonies. The Snow and Reindeer Festival, introduced in 2023 to showcase Tsaatan reindeer-herder culture, attracted over a thousand visitors in its first year. These are real achievements. 

Unfortunately, experienced foreign tourists consistently report the same contrast: the country’s scenery is extraordinary, its facilities are not. There are still too few clean toilets at tourist sites, too little reliable accommodation outside Ulaanbaatar, and almost no year-round tourism infrastructure in any single region. Prices for foreign tourists rank Mongolia among the more expensive adventure destinations in Asia for an experience that often does not match the price. No province has built a coherent year-round tourism ecosystem. Sh.Enkhtur asked the question in 1998. We are still asking it.

City that couldn’t plan

It was warned that without planning, Ulaanbaatar would turn into a garbage dump. It did not become a garbage dump. It became something arguably worse: one of the most polluted capital cities on earth, with traffic that can freeze for hours, and ger areas where coal smoke settles on children’s lungs through five months of winter.

Ulaanbaatar now holds nearly 1.8 million people, roughly half the national population, in a city originally designed for perhaps 600,000. In 2024, its annual average PM2.5 concentration was 25.7 micrograms per cubic meter: more than five times the World Health Organization’s annual guideline. In January 2019, the figure spiked to 194.6 micrograms. The city sits in a valley where temperature inversions trap pollutants in winter; coal-burning ger households, an aging vehicle fleet, and industrial boilers compound the geography into a slow public health emergency.

Sh.Enkhtur proposed suburban satellite communities connected by fast trains. The trains never came. The metro, a Ulaanbaatar infrastructure dream with origins in 2007, has been planned, cancelled, revived and delayed so many times that a cornerstone placed in a central district in 2013 still stands, surrounded by the gridlock it was meant to relieve. In the meantime, a cable car. Ground was broken in April 2024. This is not the transport system Ulaanbaatar needs. It is, for now, the one it can build.

Sh.Enkhtur’s boldest urban proposal was satellite communities, specifically naming Baganuur, Nalaikh and Bagakhangai, connected to the capital by reliable transport. These districts exist today roughly as they did in 1998: underserved, underinvested and avoided by the city’s residents despite their apartment blocks. The actual satellite city project that now draws government attention is Khushig Valley, 52 kilometres south of Ulaanbaatar where, in July 2021, Mongolia opened Chinggis Khaan International Airport, built with a 600 million USD Japanese loan. The airport handled 2.18 million passengers in 2024, already approaching its designed annual capacity of two to three million. An expansion assessment has been commissioned.

The more ambitious answer to Sh.Enkhtur’s satellite city vision is not near the airport at all, it is 300 kilometers to the southwest. In December 2022, President U.Khurelsukh issued Presidential Decree No. 230, directing the Government to restore Kharkhorum, the ancient capital of the Great Mongol Empire in the Orkhon Valley as a living modern city. Parliament passed a dedicated Law on Supporting the Planning, Development and Promotion of Kharkhorum City in January 2025, establishing a legal framework, a special tax regime, and a Kharkhorum City Development Fund. The master plan, which former Prime Minister L.Oyun-Erdene visited on-site in April 2025, designates 189,000 hectares across four soums of Arkhangai and Uvurkhangai provinces, with a residential area planned for 500,000 people, an international airport, a 4,800-hectare logistics hub, and a 2,450-hectare tourism zone around Lake Ugii. Around 70 percent of the city is planned to run on renewable energy, and a high-speed rail line is planned to connect it to Ulaanbaatar though a full transfer of parliament and the presidential office is not expected until 2050. An international design competition launched in March 2024 drew 428 teams from 54 countries. The winning concept came from a Chinese state consortium, China Road and Bridge Corporation and partners, with a design aimed at a green, culturally rooted and smart city. Mongolia’s once and future capital, then, is being planned with imperial ambition and a balance sheet that invites scrutiny.

And finally, the casino. It was imagined as Las Vegas of the steppe, a Central Asian gambling mecca in Bagakhangai generating “incalculable annual income”. The idea lay dormant for two decades. In December 2022, the Government revived it, submitting draft casino legislation to parliament tied to the “Years to Visit Mongolia” campaign. The proposed law required a minimum investment of 300 million USD from operators, imposed a 40 percent tax on profits matching Macau’s rate, and banned Mongolian citizens from gambling in their own country, which is a clause that prompted constitutional debate. In May 2024, Parliament voted to ban all forms of gambling outright. The ban took effect on July 1, 2025. The reason was that a financial investigation had found that 1.7 trillion MNT had been siphoned abroad through online gambling platforms between 2023 and 2024. The Central Asian casino never opened. 

Sh.Enkhtur’s 1998 column was brash, occasionally absurd and entirely correct. Mongolia needed to think about its urban future. It is doing so now haltingly, expensively, 30 years late. There is a version of this reckoning that is optimistic. Mongolia has a new airport. A metro is finally being procured. A cable car is under construction. A new city has its design. Solar panels have reached the ger. The Ice Festival fills up every March. These are not nothing.

But his original question deserves an honest answer. In 1998 he asked what Mongolia would do if it remained an empty steppe and three million people in a small valley. In 2026 the answer is that it tried to figure it out, mostly in expensive meetings, occasionally in earnest, and now faces the same questions at twice the urgency. The steppe is still waiting. The valley is more crowded than ever. And the women who might have built the countryside’s future are, reasonably, somewhere else.