One of those areas can be found at the city’s northern edge, where the towering smokestacks of Wuhan Iron and Steel loom behind bent-backed farmers tending vegetable patches. Today Qingshan district is a patchwork of tiny fields, polluted streams and roadside markets selling building materials. But the city government is in the process of transforming this no-man’s-land into a sparkling new suburb. Between the steelworks and the mighty Yangtze River, demolished buildings and hoardings advertise a new logistics centre. Down the road, a giant railway station (Wuhan’s third) and a 6-kilometre bridge (the city’s fifth to cross the Yangtze) were completed in 2010.