They prepared firecrackers in advance. When the good news came in it was almost midnight, but they still lit all the firecrackers in celebration.

Lu has been living his whole life in Dongshufang, a community only a few steps away from the Huangpu River in Pudong, now slated to be part of the venue for the World Expo 2010 in Shanghai.

Wu, together with some 5,000 neighbours, have been among the most enthusiastic supporters of the city's Expo bid.

They hope the Expo will bring dramatic change to their living conditions.

"I can scarcely bear to wait any longer for relocation!" Wu said.

Sons of a poor couple, Wu and his two brothers served as apprentices at a tailor's in Puxi from a very early age. They crossed the river every day by sampan, a small flat-bottomed wooden boat only capable of carrying five passengers.

The sampans were first replaced by big wooden boats, and later by diesel ferries. But as a result of the bridges and tunnels built across the river during the past 20 years, the once bustling ferry crossing received fewer and fewer passengers.

"Everything changes but Dongshufang," Wu said with a sigh. The area still looks the same as it did five decades ago.

Shabby shelters

Since the 1920s, a community began to take shape in the area near the Zhoujiadu ferry crossing, one of the busiest wharfs in town. Farmers, fishermen, boatmen, street vendors, all kinds of people from the bottom of society built their ramshackle shelters here.

Wu remembered clearly that his parents built their first "house" out of bamboo strips and mud. Some of their neighbours simply pulled their boats on to the river bank and built small cottages out of them.

Unplanned since its very beginning, Dongshufang is an absolute labyrinth to strangers, who easily get lost in the narrow zigzagging lanes.

Given these living conditions, life for the people living here isn't much fun.

No drainage system. No gas pipeline. They didn't even have a cable TV system or a single street lamp until this June. This is not to mention the lack of other public facilities such as museums or stadiums.

Over 1,600 families share five public conveniences or use chamber pots at home.

In addition to the dense population, which results in high relocation costs, the loss-making and polluting factories scattered in Dongshufang and the nearby area makes real estate developers hesitate to invest.

"Dongshufang has long been forgotten and left undeveloped," said Lu Hongbao, a government official responsible for Dongshufang.

"We've been looking forward to the government's decision to develop our community, so that we can move out of the current shabby houses into new apartments," Wu said, voicing what was on most of his neighbours' minds.

Expo go-ahead

The good news finally came when the city government announced its ambitious plan to further develop the banks along the Huangpu River, including Dongshufang.

"We won the bid at last, I am so happy, our life will be wholly changed," Lu said.

Wu is among the estimated 25,000 citizens of 8,500 families who will be involved in the relocation project resulting from the city's Expo plans.

The stretch along the Huangpu River between the Nanpu and Yangpu bridges, covering an area of 5.4 square kilometres, has been designated as the Expo site.

The major exhibition venues with exhibition halls as well as a conference building are to be distributed mainly on the east side of the river, occupying 240 hectares of land.

The decision-makers have set their eyes on the waterfront along the Huangpu River, which is the key area in Shanghai's latest reconstruction campaign for the old inner city.

The heavily-polluting steelworks, shipyard, chemical plant, port machinery factory, discarded dock warehouse, dilapidated huts and apartment buildings currently occupying the site will be replaced by the magnificent show halls, conference buildings and gardens.

The steelworks will be reformed and moved. The shipyard is to be moved to Chongming and Changxing islands at the estuary of the Yangtze River.

The other operations will either be demolished or transformed.

"By locating the Expo venue in this area, we hope to accelerate the city's structural readjustment, old district reconstruction and ecological improvement in the riverbank areas," said Tang Zhiping, deputy director of the Shanghai Urban Planning Administration Bureau.

Winning the bid for Expo will be another significant milestone in Shanghai's development, as the Expo site will undoubtedly be a new urban landmark, following the Bund and Lujiazui Financial and Trade Zone, he added.

According to the development plan, the canal, green "corridors" and buildings for meetings, exhibitions, entertainment and commerce will all be built for further use after the Expo, forming another cultural and commercial centre in the city.

| frontpage | nation | business | HK\Taiwan | snapshots | focus |
| governmentinfo | economic insights | campus life | Shanghai today | metropolitan |