You might be aware (if you've seen a newspaper in the last two years) that China is booming. In the cities, this means, among other things, new! more! bigger! buildings. Construction is constant and everywhere. It also seems to me, for the most part, to be very fast. I happened to talk to an architect recently who told me that she was given an estimate of construction time for a shopping mall project -- one year, start to finish. Now, I don't know the details of this -- how many stories, whether that includes the 3 months' interior-finishing work, etc., but I think it would be fairly unlikely that the building is anything under 6 or 7 stories (and could possibly be more than 30, as some put office space on top of the many layers of retail, food, and supermarket). I also don't know how that compares to a similar project in the US or Europe, but it sounds fast to me.
I do know that as recently as Chinese New Year (early February), the area in this photo (left) consisted of a big dirt lot. This is what it looked like a little over three months later. In the last five months, I've also seen huge hotel buildings progress from skeleton status to nearly-done (or at least, they look nearly done from the outside).
A block of road near my house was starting to be torn up when I came home late one Saturday night (closing one lane at a time), cars were kicking up dust driving on its dirt layer on Sunday, I avoided it Monday, and when I went by again on Tuesday, traffic was sailing over the completely-repaved version.
And then there's the subway. I believe Shanghai opened three new lines at the end of last year, and is scheduled to open at least two more new ones next year (none in 2008, as far as I know). Partial impetus for all of this comes from the World Expo scheduled to be held here in 2010 (in the same way that the Olympics are spurring Beijing's intense development/rehabilitation), but part of it is also just the drive to make China's urban areas into world-class cities. Lemme tell ya, it's working.
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