These photographs were made while living in Shanghai from 2005 to 2007. They come from a few specific places on the outskirts of the city. At that time, China’s rapid urbanization was pushing directly into older agricultural areas, and the edges of the city were where the overlap was most visible. But the places I photographed weren’t “transitional zones” in any tidy sense. They were spaces that felt unclaimed — not fully urban, not fully rural — and because of that, they had their own strange logic.

Much of the work comes from two informal settlements built inside stalled or abandoned developments. One was an unfinished luxury villa project where migrants lived inside the empty shells and ran a small salvage operation, collecting doors, window frames, and other materials from demolition sites across Shanghai. The other was a more improvised mix of self-built structures and leftover construction, held together by whatever people could find.

The surrounding areas were just as fragmented. You could see farm plots, demolition rubble, drainage canals, half-built towers, and golf-course advertisements in the same view. Next to one of the settlements was an abandoned “world park” — pyramids, European chateaus, and the like. The mix of farmland, failed speculation, and makeshift housing created a landscape that felt provisional and sometimes surreal.

Some things happened here because they weren’t allowed in the city center. The itinerant burlesque troupe I photographed was setting up a tent on an empty lot; I stayed for a couple of hours, went back the next day but they had already moved on.

Prints