Last of the brooding buildings

Shanghai is bulging at the seams with all the humanity living there, and as the city modernises to accommodate it, so the spidery arm of the wrecking ball spreads.  Older buildings and neighbourhoods are being steadily demolished to make way for its steely young towers.

Photographer Greg Girard has taken some ghostly shots of these ramshackle buildings.  They lumber stoically in the foreground of glittering skyscrapers.  It's easy to personify them against that background of a thousand identical skyscraper windows and feel a tug of sympathy.  Lonely houses surrounded by a bulldozed wasteland, they look exiled.  Sitting firm in the face of their fate like old men, all weary and spent.  Just waiting to go.

Girard has some interesting pictures of what life was like in the dark depths of the Kowloon Walled city too. Go check out his website

As some background, Shanghai has a population estimated at 23 million, making it the largest city populace in the world.  It's grown to this size as a result of people migrating in to the city, as it's natural population growth rate has, since 1993, been negative due to low fertility rate.  The numbers don't leave much space for each person, hence the move, like most cities, to people living and working vertically, piled high on top of each other.  Shanghai boasts some of the tallest skyscrapers in the world, and since 2008 it's had more free-standing buildings above 400m than any other city.