Ghost Towns of the World: Where Places Were Abandoned, and Why, in Wikidata, Wikipedia and England's Deserted Medieval Villages

Ghost towns are abandoned for a handful of reasons: resources run out, wars and disasters strike, reservoirs flood valleys, nuclear accidents empty whole districts, and economies and populations drift away. I map the abandoned settlements recorded in open data and classify why each was abandoned. The sources are the 3,374 Wikidata items with coordinates classed as ghost towns, abandoned villages or deserted medieval villages, England's 2,074 deserted medieval villages and hamlets from Beresford's gazetteer, and the 492 places in English Wikipedia's 'List of ghost towns by country'. Reasons come from transparent keyword rules applied to Wikidata descriptions and classes and to Wikipedia text, with a confidence for each. The main finding is about the record itself. 80% of the Wikidata ghost towns are in the United States, and England's deserted villages make up 38% of the 5,448 settlements mapped; Africa, Asia and South America together hold 34 Wikidata ghost towns. Only 165 Wikidata items (4.9%) yield a reason, 61 of them from a mining word in the name alone. Wikipedia's list gives a reason for 300 of its places (61%): mining and resource booms first (81), then war or military use (55) and natural disasters (54), economic decline (50), reservoirs (27) and nuclear accidents (24). Where a year is given, 85% of abandonments fall after 1900, while England's dated deserted villages cluster in 1450 to 1699. The western United States has 1,053 ghost towns, 65 of them tied to mining, mostly by name. The data map who has catalogued abandonment as much as where it happened. Interactive version: https://maps.tristanhotham.com/ghost-towns/. Data and code: https://github.com/Tristan-Hotham/ghost-towns. Sources: Wikidata (CC0); Beresford's Lost Villages, University of Hull (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0); English Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0); Natural Earth (public domain). The paper, figures and the England table are CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; tables with Wikipedia text CC BY-SA 4.0; other data CC BY 4.0; code MIT.