Uploaded on 2020-07-15 by Daniele Marco Marchesin

I took this picture in Chongqing, South-West of China, which has been living a massive urbanization process since 1990s. Construction sites can be seen everywhere in the city. Here we can see materials for maintenance works undergoing on the riverside on the foreground, boats on the river, a daring and iconical bridge structure and some super high-rise towers under construction in the background. All of these include elements of globalized economy, and their construction would have been totally different in design and outcome without it. A large part of China falls right in the area of the world bamboo habitat, as we can see from the map shown by prof. Hebel, but still China adopted Western technologies and construction techniques as the only design and building tools for developing their territories in the second half of 20th century, considering it more reliable and convenient, unfortunately almost never using bamboo and other local materials and tecniques. It's estimated that between 2017 and 2019 China used the same amount of concrete that the USA employed in the whole 20th century, with an overall production of 2.2 billion tons of conrete, almost seven times more than India, the second producer in the world.