China Segment

With the Expo looming (85 days on the sign I saw today), the construction that has consumed most of this fair city will soon cease. The air will clear up a bit, spring winds will come forth, and for about seven months between May and October Shanghai may actually become a livable city.

I think the climax of the construction must have happened around October or November. Since then many major projects have wrapped up or are in the finishing stages. Make no mistake; there is still a heck of a lot of work being done to roads, subways, new buildings, landscapes, etc. Everywhere the air is full of particulates not just from cars, but from cutting metal, plastic and glass, dust from cement mixers and sulfur from welding torches. Everywhere I go I can smell something in the air, and it’s not sweet spring dew drops. I’m pretty sure I’ve lost a year of my life having lived through some of this city’s worst growing pains since October 2003. My lungs have taken in awful quantities of construction-related pollution that this city has never bothered to admit is a problem. Nonetheless, I chose to be here, so I’ll have to live with it. But when people ask me if I would stay here and have a child, my answer is more than easy. Same reason I won’t have one in Mexico City or Cairo.

Shanghai will still have more and more re-development which means more construction. I call it redevelopment simply because most of the construction going on is the replacement of older housing stock with newer apartment towers. Unfortunately a great deal of what I see being built, to this day, are low-quality housing that is nothing but concrete, often not reinforced (as some designers recently told me). These buildings are meant to last 20 or 30 years, when they’ll be torn down and a newer, more modern building will be put up. (I’ve mentioned something like this before.) It’s extremely inefficient, but perhaps necessitated by Beijing’s (and Shanghai’s) promises of growth and quick results.

The good news is things will get better, and it’s already started. Even if it all revs up again after the Expo moves on to the next location, it’ll never be this bad again. I hope. I for one am glad the construction climax seems to have passed and am already enjoying small slices of quietude on a few streets here and there. Usually Spring Festival is a great to time be in Shanghai (save tourist and shopping hot spots like Nanjing Road and The Bund) because it empties out. There are about six million workers in Shanghai who were born somewhere else, and most of them go back home for the holiday. I’m not sure if some high-priority projects that are behind schedule will continue to be worked on during CNY, but if they’re important enough they might. Regardless, it should be a good time to walk around and begin to relish my last months living in this wonderful city. I’ve already been taking advantage of some of the new subway lines (numbers 7 and 9 pass nearby the official residence of China Segment) and the added green space may actually start helping my poor, damaged lungs.

Happy to be in Shanghai (despite my many posts cursing it),

Feds

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