Beijing under construction
China, as a whole, is a booming place. But Beijing, pre-Olympics, was an insanely busy place for construction.
There were, obviously, the Olympic venues being built: various stadia, tracks, velodromes, and so on. But there was also the infrastructure to support all those athletes: the villages, training centers, the parks (and the water pipes to keep the ponds full). For tourists and the city residents: 2 new subway lines, a slew of paint jobs on historical sites (of varying quality), and hutongs to variously tear down or render tourist-safe.
Administrative building shaped like a flame.
The famed “Birds Nest” stadium.
The “BOB” broadcasting tower.
The “Water Cube” aquatic center, from the Bird’s Nest.
The competition pool inside the Water Cube. Unlike the warmup pools, which have been converted to a children’s water park by our return in 2011, the competition pool looks almost exactly the way it did in 2008.
The corridor separating the competition pool from the warmup pools. The water theme is beautifully represented inside the building, though the plastic “bubbles” have not aged well: they’ve gotten dusty and sun-faded, despite the legions of cheap labour available to keep things clean.
I remember the road outside of my office being completely dug up and repaved three times while I worked there in 2008. I never understood why; the asphalt was fine, it wasn’t a repaving. And I could never discern anything being placed into the roadbed, either: no pipes, no wires, just a hole, filled with packed dirt, covered with asphalt. Rinse, repeat. I always had a soft spot for the trees, which like everything else in China was considered disposable. Not only would you dig up the existing trees and throw them away, but when your project was done you could purchase adult trees and drop the new set in place. Because adult trees don’t like being uprooted and having most of their root balls trimmed off, the result was a boulevard of uniform-but-drooping trees for the rest of the year. I never found out what poor forest or tree farm they came from.
Sad trees. Compare the foliage to the thickness of the trunk; they’ve had most of their crown chopped off during the transportation process and are frantically throwing out leaves as fast as possible.
In 2008, there were two shopping multistory shopping centers being built within blocks of my apartment. In the US, construction projects usually mean a bit of noise pollution, limited to working hours. In China, where heavy machinery is usually replaced with manpower, the sound of pickaxes doesn’t travel far; it’s the smell of poorly-contained solvents that usually gives away the presence of construction. Beijing is famous for its dust storms, but for me the characteristic smell of this always-building city is the harsh smell of chemicals. At times, living in Beijing felt like living on a 24/7 construction site.
Everywhere you look, a muscular building is under construction.
Building materials would get stored on the street …
… and pedestrians would cut through the sites.
This isn’t a new building! It’s an old building getting a new face and having most of its guts ripped out.
I’m not sure why Beijing doesn’t use more machinery or automation in construction. A shocking-for-an-American number of low-skilled tasks are done by anonymous (presumably migrant) workers: hole digging; moving piles of dirt; running and testing wires. Perhaps it’s a job-creation thing. Or perhaps it’s recognition of the fact that Beijing is a complicated place, and the amount of time spent configuring a machine outweighed the more easily-taught human. I never figured it out, but maybe we’ll find out someday when China’s population stabilizes at a lower level.
Counter-intuitively to Americans, scaffolding is hand-tied bamboo.
Sometimes, a net would be strung overhead to protect the pedestrians below.
On-site donkey. In Beijing’s defense, this was the only site on which I saw any draft animals.
As the date of the Olympic opening ceremony got closer, construction got more and more frantic; line 10 for the subway was months late, and near the end, work schedules became 24/7. It sounds more draconian than it actually was; you see, many migrant workers, and certainly construction workers already spend their most of their time onsite, so working 24/7 meant rolling out of bed a bit earlier or going to bed a bit later - and since they were typically paid hourly, many of them welcomed the extra hours.
Yes: although I figuratively lived in a construction site, many of Beijing’s construction workers actually slept and ate in dormitory-style housing on site. They’re very distinctive looking once you know what to look for: an enclosed construction site, a 2-3 story building (usually white corrugated aluminum walls with a blue corrugated aluminum roof - no insulation here!), and a swarm of deeply-tanned dirty men coming in and out. Enterprising businessmen and women would figure out mealtimes and come by with cheap (ie, mostly rice) bargains, which the men - always men - would eat on the sidewalk outside.
“Haidian Huangzhuang” subway station, at the intersection of lines 4 and 10 (only line 10 was open while we were there); the station is to the left, and the on-site living facilities are to the right. The finished station is featured on wikipedia here.
Lunch break, resting in the shade before the food deliveries arrive.
Food’s arrived!
-- Cross-posted from http://blog.albertandhannah.com/hannah