Houses and traditional gers in Ulaanbaatar in June.
Photographer: Hector Retamal/AFP/Getty Images
An Affordable Nomadic Home Design Struggles to Adapt to Urban Life
Traditional tents imported from rural life have become a cheap and easy source of housing for many in Mongolia’s fast-growing capital. Now the city wants to phase them out.
(This article is part of Bloomberg CityLab’s series exploring the iconic home designs that shaped global cities. Read more from the series. Get the next story sent to your inbox by subscribing to the CityLab Daily newsletter.)
Even by the standards of East Asia, the recent growth of Ulaanbaatar has been spectacular. While the Mongolian capital had about 768,000 residents in 2000, this number has since more than doubled so that half the country’s 3.4 million citizens live in the city today.