This project, realized between april and june of 2015 across many chinese big cities, try to catch the landscape mutation in China. Since the 2000s, China has created a real estate bubble to encourage growth, using as concrete in 3 years as the USA in 100 years (Vaclav Smil study).
Entire districts are built in few months, often around attractive places already developed, as Shuangliu district around Nanhu Dreamland Park in Chengdu, Sichuan province. In the suburbs, striking contrasts appear, between real estate and cultivated lands. Farmers have to work with the sound of surrounding building sites, cultivating a land that will be soon in construction. With the local people who keeps the tradition to work the land, they make the most of the few place they can still cultivate after buildings are built. Concrete, glass and steel buildings with modern architecture are advantaged, to the detriment of farmers lands but also to the detriment of traditional detached houses, which are destroyed. The new chinese skyline is now marked with cranes and high-rise block of council flats, far different from the old chinese landscape. City centers also turn into big building sites, in order to welcome each day more and more inhabitants.
Marine Lepetit is a photographer based in Bordeaux, France. She defines her work as a documentary work, trying to catch raw reality without spending to much time in post-production. She makes photo reports about building sites for an engineer magazine and illustrations for tourist guides. She also spends time to realize personal project, as the one presented just next : Modern China, a new landscape.
