Beijing isn't alone in its "edifice complex," the massive urban makeover that has transformed the Chinese capital in the run-up to the Summer Olympics. In Shanghai the remodeling of the city's famous Bund waterfront has led to some raised eyebrows. My colleague Duncan Hewitt writes from Shanghai:

When Shanghai does something, it doesn't do it by halves. For years, local urban planners have admitted that the city made a mistake in the 1990s, when it routed one of its major highways right along the famous Bund waterfront. Since then conservationists have dreamt of the day when the traffic would be rerouted, or even put underground in a tunnel, to spare the historic structures from pollution and improve the view of the famous old stretch of colonial-era buildings.

Yet the amount of work involved meant that such an idea seemed like, perhaps literally, a pipe-dream -- not least because Shanghai's notoriously marshy riverbanks are hardly the most ideal environment for tunnel construction (many of the Bund buildings themselves have sunk several feet in the past half century). But the World Expo, which Shanghai is to host in 2010 - the first time such an event has been held in a downtown area rather than out in the leafy suburbs - seems to have concentrated minds: last month the city announced a host of spectacular plans: the old elevated highway link which brought cross-town traffic onto the Bund would be demolished, and a network of new roads and tunnels would be built at a cost of almost a billion US dollars.

Most spectacularly, the plans include not only a traffic tunnel right underneath the Bund, but a double-decker tunnel, no less, with two layers of road carrying traffic in different directions, located just a few metres below ground in order to avoid existing subway tunnels. And the famous old Garden Bridge, a quaint steel girder structure which has carried traffic from the north end of the Bund across the adjoining Suzhou Creek for a hundred years, is to be dismantled piece by piece, cleaned and repaired, then re-erected one year later. City officials dismissed suggestions that this might be a rather excessive way of cleaning the bridge, saying that they wanted to strengthen the structure of its base, in order to enable it to "carry traffic for at least another fifty years."

For the observer, it's another of those cases where one can't help thinking: 'only in Shanghai', a city famously obsessed with grand plans - and with change in general. And this being Shanghai, officials are not wasting any time in putting the plans into practice. Barely a week after the public was first informed of the project, which will mean major upheavals in the city's traffic infrastructure while construction is underway, the builders were already at work, closing the concrete highway bridge which previously swooped down in a spectacular curve onto the Bund, tearing up the road surface along the waterfront, and beginning to dismantle the Garden Bridge.

For the first few days there were major tailbacks on Shanghai's streets, as residents struggled to find alternative routes: the city government admitted there had been problems, pledged to improve its strategies, and publicly expressed thanks to residents for their 'understanding'. But for many Shanghai citizens, this kind of sudden imposition of a major restructuring of part of their city with very little advance warning is now part of life, something they've become used to in recent years. Most shrugged their shoulders and sat in the traffic jams. "If it's not something the authorities can make money from then they'll never bother to publicise it in advance", said one cynical driver.

For the owners of the luxury designer shops and restaurants which have in recent years returned to the refurbished buildings of the Bund, there are mixed feelings. Some expressed frustration at the fact that after all the money they've invested in building their businesses, they received only very cursory consultation from the officials in charge of the reconstruction project; indeed some of those running businesses in the Bund area received no advance warning at all about a plan which could mean two years of roadworks outside their front doors. But others have set their hopes on the end result being worthwhile, with the Bund becoming a peaceful area for leisure and tourism.

Still, many such people remain a little perplexed: most automatically assumed that building a tunnel under the Bund at such vast expense was in order to allow the creation of a pedestrianised zone at ground level, which would fit perfectly with the government's official plan to turn the area into an upmarket leisure destination. But that's not quite the case, according to Qin Kangde, director of the local office in charge of tunnel and road construction: "We'll have four to six lanes of road, mostly for tourist buses and visitors to local shops and restaurants," he says. It's certainly an improvement on the current eleven lanes of traffic racing past the Bund on the way to somewhere else - and the public areas and riverbank walkway will be beautified too. But it's also a reminder that in Shanghai, home to two of China's largest auto factories, the era of the car is not quite over - even on the Bund...