Where Buildings Are Born

There's a great post over at EastSouthWestNorth about the bricks for constructing buildings in Shenzhen. The photos are amazing. On pier near the neighborhood in which I lived for the first two years in Shenzhen, people manually move bricks in the sweltering heat. The line about how much these laborers sweat should be more like, "they sweat more in a day than most people do in a month."

For those who are unfamiliar with Shenzhen, it is divided into two main parts: the Special Economic Zone and the rest. Bao'an is not part of the SEZ and it shows--it definitely doesn't look as affluent as any part of the SEZ. Bao'an is home to the ever-expanding airport and factories that stretch all the way up the highway to Dongguan. There is also an enormous e-dump (and other toxic dumps). This is where the iPod and iPhone are assembled.