Wuhan

The Qingshan region of Wuhan turns over like a rainforest; concrete and brick are as organic as moss, the sidewalks boil like anthills, buildings appear, grow, crumble and decay over weeks or days. A restaurant implodes and a gleaming aluminum tower appears in its place: the restaurant's elderly stone lions still stand guard, bewildered but faithful, outside the bank doors. Bamboo scaffolding and green cloth wrap rebar and concrete, building up or tearing down indiscriminately.

As corporations shove and shoulder each other for tower space, elderly retired schoolteachers in their tiny dilapidated apartments seize the bricks that fall from the towers. A ground-floor window abruptly sprouts a wobbly low brick wall outside it and encloses an thumbnail, amateurish garden; the next week the wall shoots up a few inches, then a few more, and suddenly the little apartment has an annex and the sidewalk is a little narrower. The neighbouring window throws out its own brick feelers and fronds, and late at night the walls ooze back and forth in slow-motion struggles for sunlight and space.

The narrow sidestreets are a constant howl of saws ripping through plywood, alumininum, steel, and bricks. Indignant chickens scurry away from sparks thrown by torches and welding rods, dodging the wooden wheels of a cart with an improbably huge loads of melons, drawn by a stolid peasant.

Buildings spread like mushrooms. A lump of rock falls off a truck, and a workman sits on it and sips his tea. His neighbour wanders over with his tea; a carved box appears and the rattle and click of high-speed mah-jong draws a little crowd of kibitzers. More tea is brewed, another carved box is taken out; umbrellas sprout an improvised roof. Someone drags over another rock to mark off a wall (and just down the sidewalk a stump falls off another truck and another workman sits on it to sip his tea); a piece of tin makes a more permanent section of roof and an enterprising woman starts selling fried dumplings. A peasant stops with his load of melons -- suddenly it's a market! Tar paper wraps around a piece of pipe: it's a shop! A bank! An office tower! And beside the office tower a tar-paper shack is wrapped around a stump and a street market is thriving, while next to it a mah-jong game bustles and, at the corner, a workman sits on a broken section of pipe to sip his tea.