One City, Nine Towns

The Shanghai City government initiated a new town project in 2001, named "One City - Nine Towns", to urbanize satellite towns around Shanghai and relieve population pressure on the city center. Most of the towns were build in a country-themed way, representing architectural styles from England, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, Canada, Sweden, Spain and China itself. I explored and photographed those themed new towns which revealed themselves as a balancing act between architectural style citation and blunt fakes, leaving a surreal aftertaste of misplaced oddities. The Shanghai City government declared the experiment as failed in 2011