I lived in China for over 10 years and saw the transformation of cities through the building high-speed rail connections. The first weekend of my time in China in 2005, I took a K-Train to Suzhou(about 100kms from Shanghai) to see the gardens, and it took about 55-60 minutes on the train and we passed through […]
Why are countries creating their own cryptocurrencies?
Over the last few months, we have seen countries creating or preparing to make cryptocurrencies including China, Ecuador, Senegal, Estonia, Russia. The reason that countries are looking at cryptocurrencies(Cryptocurrency) is they see it as a way to efficiently and cheaply move forward in many areas including digital payments – if you have been in Asia […]
What’s in a name? Companies that use country of origin to become ‘international’
There is a growing number of landscape firms in China, some are foreign, some local and many a mix (often referred to as sino-american or sino-australia, etc). The company names are interesting to read some a very simple and aimed at a certain market, others keep their name from abroad or just create a literal […]
Landscape architecture in China needs to become more professional
I have been working in China for over 6 years as a landscape architect and there are many differences in comparison to Australia and Canada where I have worked before including size of the project, speed of design and the materials used (some good some bad). But the biggest difference that strikes me about the […]
Shanghai starts promoting Precast Concrete in Construction
Nearly every building, landscape and piece of construction in China uses insitu concrete (on-site poured) concrete. There are many issues with on-site concrete include Pollution: On site pollution, waste, noise, trucks, on-site mixers, soil compaction, water pollution Inefficient Usage: Concrete goes off (bad) quickly if not used within 20-30 minutes, transport needs to be fast […]