Today we met with a professor and urban planner. He told our group about the work that he does and helped us better understand Shanghai as a planned, modern city. He showed us his designs from The World Expo, focusing on how they were green-friendly and helped develop Shanghai further aesthetically. Through our conversations, I could not help but wonder about the result of urban planning. Cities are continuing to grow and buildings seem to be being built as fast as others are being torn down. So I asked out guest lecturer about the longevity of his projects, curious about what would happen with these new urban spaces were no longer fresh and new. He responded by telling us that the life span of a building in Shanghai is roughly eighty years, and that Chinese tradition usually just relied on tearing wooden structures down so that they could be replaced with new ones. He said that for a long time, the Chinese thought of homes the same way they thought of clothes, they are something to use temporarily and replace as needed. The effects of this process includes and over-use of resources, damaging the environment. So we learned that although the trend is to build and re-build, Shanghai is headed in a direction that allows for building to withstand the test of time while also being sustainable.