It’s the third-largest city in California by land area but most people (including many in CA) have never even heard of this mostly-empty desert oasis, home to around 15,000 people. It’s not quite a city, but not quite a ghost town either.

Visiting the area is a bit surreal – roads running through its 200 square miles connect nothing to nothing in the hot Mojave, in some cases following straight lines and in others wrapping to form cul-de-sacs.

Some roads are paved, but most aren’t. In places, nature has started to reclaim the dirty gravel strips with hearty desert plants growing right up through streets.

Photographer Noritaka Minami recently took a trip in a helicopter to photograph the strange sprawling semi-ghost town, which are on display at On Freedom, an exhibition at Aperture for another month.

The place was a mid-century vision of a real estate developer named Nathan Mendelshon who purchased over 80,000 acres, imagining California City as a fresh metropolis for a growing state.

Some parcels were resold but never developed — others were bought and remain in use, mainly for people working at a nearby military base or prison.

The few houses that do exist seem almost stranger than the framework of roads around them, neatly fenced in a neighborhood of empty plots.

More from Minami: “This project focuses on California City, a master planned community in the Mojave Desert conceived by sociologist turned real estate developer Nathan K. Mendelsohn in 1958. California City was envisioned as the next major metropolis in California in response to the population and economic growths after World War II. This development was based on the belief that even in a harsh desert landscape, mankind had the freedom and power to produce a built environment that provided all of the essential needs for a prosperous modern life.”

In his series of black-and-white images, “aerial photography is used to document the scale of the vision Mendelsohn proposed in the desert and question whether this ‘wonderland’ could have even been sustainable in this environment. Despite having the foundation for a city in place, there are no indications that this city will ever be realized in the future.” In the end, half-built may be an overstatement — in reality, the place is more like a skeletal outline of a city, punctuated (like a normal rural landscape) by pockets of development and clusters of community.

London is filled with grafted facades, nearly two-dimensional artifacts held in place while updated buildings are constructed behind them; many seem to haphazardly half-disguise the boring new structures on which they are grafted. While other cities have done similar, the sheer volume of them in this East End neighborhood is astonishing.

The writer behind Spitalfields Life, a web publication, does not mince words in reacting to this partial approach to preservation, which “threatens to turn the city into the back lot of an abandoned movie studio …. As if I were being poked repeatedly in the eye with a blunt stick, I cannot avoid becoming increasingly aware of a painfully cynical trend in London architecture.”

In further criticisms, The Gentle Author bemoans the results as a compromise between “cowed planning authorities” and “architects … humiliated into creating passive-aggressive structures.” Perhaps this gives insufficient credit to architects, some of whom also fall guilty to facadism at times, and have been known to prioritize the exterior over the plan, skin over skeleton, form over function.

It is dangerous to suppose that preservation is necessarily binary. Compromises are almost inevitably made over time to keep architectural functional, through essential electrical and plumbing retrofits to more debatable code-related upgrades and updates. There is also a case to be made that the streets are a public room of which buildings are the walls, so preserving facades (properly, at least) can maintain the public’s experience of a place.

Nonetheless, whether you approve of the general approach or cannot see the apologist’s point of view, it is hard to argue against the examples: the executions documented by The Gentle Author range from mediocre to outright terrible. In short: there may be a right way to approach preserving facades as part of new structures, but many architects are doing it wrong.

When thoroughfares are subtracted from city grids, subsequent urban infill is shaped by the voids of these former roadways, streetcar or rail paths, standing out like architectural scar tissue when viewed from above. The effect is all the more pronounced when the disappeared passageways cut at odd angles through city blocks, forcing particularly odd-shaped ‘scarchitecture’ to follow.

When architectural writer Geoff Manaugh came across this phenomena in the streets of Los Angeles, readers rapidly began sending in examples from other cities. Some are surprisingly complex and counterintuitive, like the half-circle seen below (if you look closely) that seems to arbitrarily slice across multiple city blocks.

Manaugh’s fascination is infectious: “The notion that every city has these deeper wounds and removals that nonetheless never disappear is just incredible to me. You cut something out—and it becomes a building a generation later. You remove an entire street—and it becomes someone’s living room.”

Perhaps most remarkable of all: many of these scarchitectural expressions frequently go largely unnoticed on the ground level. Most, however, emerge immediately as visual patterns when seen from aerial vantage points, their persistently unconventional orientations going against the grain of gridded streets surrounding them.

Small buildings can completely conform to the unusual geometries these ‘ghost streets’ trace; some sides of other structures, reconfigured paths and even parking space orientations may also follow these uncanny trajectories, in part or in whole, as if aligning to secular ‘ley lines’ of invisible force. Next time you are using Google Maps, pan around your own neighborhood and you could find evidence of scarchitecture, perhaps cutting right through your own backyard.

Like a corroded time capsule, this submerged village has risen from the depths after being flooded decades ago when the local lake broke its banks and left Epecuen under dozens of feet of water. In 1985, a rare weather pattern broke a nearby dam first, then the dike protecting the town, quickly making most of it uninhabitable. Today, long-term changes in the regional climate have brought down the overall level of the lake, resurfacing the town.

Giving a tour of his devastated hometown, the man in the award-winning video above , Pablo Novak, claims his father predicted the return of water to the areas of land on which people were building back in the 1980s – at its peak, the place drew in over 25,000 tourists a year. Today, Pablo is the only remaining resident, slowly exploring the remnants now revealed as waters around the lake have lowered.

Located near Buenos Aires, it is hard to imagine that this place – with a permanent population of 5,000  at one point – was once a busy destination from tourists around the country and even the world, renowned for its high-salinity lake in which people came to bathe. This salt content is largely responsible for the high levels of damage done to the town’s buildings and infrastructure during its years underwater.

First, the fields began to flood, driving our narrator’s cows, horses, pigs sheep and goats back further onto land and forcing Pablo to buy a family home in a neighboring village. Now 85 years old, he always assumed the town would be rebuilt, but that has never come to pass.

Since the waters have receded, Pablo now tries to appreciate the solitude left in its wake and gives tours to those who come these days not to soak but to see the once-sunken village now risen once again to the surface. Images by Sam Verhaert, Jonathan Evans and Pablo Gonzales via Inhabitat.

Built in the late 1970s, this mining village housed 1,200 people at its peak and was left effectively intact for over twenty years before being sold as a whole for $5,000,000 to an entrepreneur in 2004 who has worked on bring it back to life in the decade since. He has, however, had to adjust his plans to the market along the way – his latest endeavor: to revive it to fit its original purpose once more (image above by Andrea B).

Located in northern British Columbia, Kitsault boasts a remarkable lack of decay, its infrastructure still mostly intact. It has over 100 houses and apartment buildings as well as a movie theater, hospital, shopping mall, recreation center and swimming pool.

Krishnan Suthanthiran purchased the town with visions of turning it into a rural retreat for the creative class and has already spent over $10,000,000 repairing landscapes and fixing buildings.

Still, much more work would have been required had the relocation of its previous occupants not been so hasty – they were moved almost overnight in the early 1980s, leaving almost everything intact behind them. Indeed, many of the spaces come complete with vintage furniture and decor dating back to the abandonment of the town.

The idea has evolved over time, however, as commodities markets have rebounded – this time liquid natural gas may be the key to the area’s success. In the end, Kitsault could once again become what it was to begin with: a mining town.