OLD replaced by NEW - Discovering Shanghai READ MORE

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Shanghai, China 2018

Shanghai is imploding to quickly to explode in modernity. The city has had an impressive fast developing and old buildings are demolished to give space to new, modern and more efficient residential complex. Shiny skyscrapers rise everywhere like the  business district ones, creating the iconic landscape admirable from the left side of the Huangpu river. Cranes are now an integrant part of the landscape. At their basement the old simple houses are disappearing and probably in couple of years it will remain only a pale memory of those little, crowded small buildings. Some little shops still undaunted sell old kind of furniture, memories or memorabilia of a disappearing China. Residents with no other possibilities still live in their old dwelling, keep fixing them as best they can and in the cheapest way, because they probably will be forced to leave in a near future. Small local business hardly try to survive in this desolate landscape. “Old will be replaced by new” and elders, who have to leave space for young generations, will inevitably left behind. Some of those still have the opportunity to gather in front of their houses and chat on the street, but less lucky ones spend their time at the parks, trying to find the serenity they can’t have around their evolving neighbourhood. Each of those things will disappear: elders on the door steps, sinks with tap water outside, laundry hanging on the windows, clothes hung like flags of the city who want to erase its past. Sooner or later the “Old City” of Shanghai will be transformed in something touristic. It will become the umpteenth clever Chinese remake, but this time it will be the copy of itself, the copy of the small neighbourhood that once was the soul of the city.