High-profile ‘Belt and Road’ plan to build Europe’s first ‘smart city’ in Bulgaria lies in tatters
- Billed as part of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, a project to turn a shabby Bulgarian village into Europe’s first ‘smart city’ hasn’t got off the ground. What went wrong?
On a grey midwinter morning in Ravno Pole, a handful of mostly elderly residents amble listlessly past the scruffy village square, some picking up groceries from a small shop, others sitting on plastic seats in the lone cafe, tucking into US$2 servings of chicken and rice.
The houses dotted around the square are crumbling, the roads potholed, and the only signal of profitable activity comes from the rumble of trucks passing through on their way to and from an industrial estate and a supermarket warehouse.
An air of somnolence and quiet decay hangs over the village, which seems stuck in its Communist-era past, nearly unchanged since 1990, when a wave of protests in the nearby capital, Sofia, brought a close to Bulgaria’s four dark decades behind the Iron Curtain.
It is a scene you might find in thousands of villages across Bulgaria, or other former Eastern Bloc countries still struggling to catch up with wealthy Western neighbours. And for Ravno Pole, it is particularly harsh because things were supposed to be dramatically different.
