Coastal City

This guide to Coastal City in Shenzhen begins with a simple fact: the ground beneath this shopping mall was open water within living memory, part of Shenzhen Bay before land reclamation filled it in through the 1990s and 2000s. It follows what happened to that raw, filled land in the years before the mall opened in 2007 -- squatters, tree farmers, and workers sorting discarded electronics moved into a strange in-between landscape. The American firm Callison eventually built here, and the district around it grew from bay water into one of the city's busiest commercial strips.