Where Concrete Meets Bucolic

On the outskirts of western Shanghai is a land where China's growth story is rudely juxtaposed with its less burnished past. Gleaming new factories, empty highways, and half-finished residential tower blocks sit shoulder to shoulder with dilapidated housing, human squalor and fetid canals. Both worlds are joined by air thick with dust.

Yet alongside these two worlds are pockets of bucolic life where rice grows in muddied paddies, where the housing is rural yet well-kept, and where bicycles are used as often as vehicles. If you ignore the dust and don't look up at the towering electricity pylons that crowd the horizon, you might imagine living here.