Quote:
Originally Posted by mmikeyphilly
I just added China to my "bucket list".
Now, which City would I visit first? Oh my goodness, just too many! But I just made Shenzhen my first.
<<< I absolutely love those photos . The day dreams I am having right now.
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When there look out for an 'urban village'. Shenzhen is a very new city, barely 30 years old, and throughout the 90s semi-legal midrises were created as informal architecture. These are rapidly disappearing and there are calls to save them - they have a different ambiance and streetlife to the sparkling new city, and harks back toward traditional Chinese urbanity.
The buildings are known as 'shake hand houses', as theyre so close one can shake hands with your neighbour. They even block out daylight in places.
They're ugly, crowded and modern - but a photographers dream. Unlike all the other cities, SZ doesn't have any Old City as it's so new, and this is it's version. This is where the famed Chinese streetlife takes hold.
Theyre trying to save the largest one that's in Guangzhou (home to 50,000), but it's right in the path of the new CBD
Others are being cleaned up to an inch of their life, unrecogniseably
-there's an interesting one in SZ called Dafen, which specialises in sitting room art and art repro to order (with an army of very talented, poor sweatshop workers).