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The "Instant Cities" of Industrial China

Posted by: George Haugh

8 August 2010 - 7:00am

This year China will add 17 million people to its urban population. To house them, places like Guangzhou and Shanghai are constructing 'instant cities.' Christoph Gielen traveled through these developments, documenting the expansion.

"Walt Whitman imagined a future in which the global community was “welded” together, and Mao Zedong promised to build a “forest of chimneys” in Beijing. Industry has long been yoked to visions of utopia, but for decades now, we’ve also been quantifying the toxic emissions, rising temperatures and habitat fragmentation associated with unchecked growth."

In these photos, we can see both the "grandeur and the fear" associated with this kind of over development.

Gielen consulted maps, rode subways to their ends and wandered by foot for hours, searching for sites that he could transform into images that would both marvel at and interrogate urban infrastructure. He also hoped, in vain, to find the edge of the metropolis.

Full Story: China's Instant Cities
Source: New York Times, July 16, 2010
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Ecological theory would suggest a balance, that we, to the health of all concerned, think about with the plants and animals serving one another equally in a dynamic balance slowly changing through evolutionary time.
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