In 1990 Enkhtuya Baatar was a nomadic herder living in Mongolia’s northern Bulgin province when, one day, wolves began picking off her sheep. When a bitter winter, known as a zud, killed her remaining livestock Baatar, now 55, had little choice but to pack up and move her husband and four children to Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital. They rented a room on the outskirts of the city, sleeping on the floor. “We didn’t have any furniture, just a little old chest that served as a table, the place to make food, a cupboard, everything,” she says.
Mongolia is one of the most sparsely populated countries in the world, a land of desert, steppe and mountains of dizzying expanse. Ulan Bator, though, is brimming. In 1989 and 1990, when the Soviet Union collapsed and Mongolia became a democratic market economy, 27 per cent of the country’s population lived in the city. In recent years rocketing economic growth, spurred by the country’s vast and mostly untapped natural assets, has drawn herders to the capital in droves. Today almost half the country’s population, about 1.3m people, live in the city. The Asian Development Bank estimates about 40,000 migrants arrive each year.
With a lack of affordable housing and limited space in central Ulan Bator, most newcomers have little choice but to settle in ger districts, named after the country’s traditional round felt tent, which translates as “home”. These sprawling, unplanned neighbourhoods, formed of gers, makeshift houses and dirt roads, radiate from the high-rise office and apartment blocks of the centre like rings on a tree stump, with the newest settlements the furthest flung.