View from
Shanghai
an explosion of object
buildings is tempered by new infrastructure, parks
and conservation
Shanghai presents a unique almost control-model kind
of urban subject matter among world metropolises. It
is a city which after experiencing incredible
economic prosperity through the turn of the
nineteenth century froze its free market development
under thirty years of failed socialist revolution,
and then started again on an accelerating trajectory
towards capitalist ideals. The city currently exists
in a giddy state of equilibrium between government
control and market forces, the monolithic state
regime acting as a valve for releasing massive
forces which would otherwise send the country into a
multi-directional frenzy of socio-economic
instability. It is an increasingly well-documented
picture of intersecting sociological vectors and is
clearly shown in urban form transforming so rapidly
as to render it inapplicable to traditional static
analysis. Visitors should be warned of making hasty
conclusions about a city which lends itself too
easily to cliché and whose presence in popular
imagination is potently fuelled by a mythologized
past.
The government continues to invest heavily in urban
infrastructure -- the kind of investment which
represents the hardware of any global city. Since
the early 1990s, which saw construction of overhead
expressways and an underground transit network, the
city has seen massive upgrades in its infrastructure
-- a fifth road bridge has just been completed over
the Huangpu River with two new under-river tunnels
under construction; the outer ring road has recently
been completed; the world's first commercial
magnetic levitation rail system links Pudong airport
with the central city; US$3 billion has been
allotted for the 2010 World Expo; and public green
space is marked to triple per capita by 2020. These
measures are accelerating the city into
modernization and to some degree designed to impress
a world audience. Whether the bureaucrats can manage the hardware and
sustain modernization beyond the construction of
bridges and subway lines is yet to be seen.
The most high-profile development in recent years
has been Xintiandi.
Here architects preserved and reconstructed two city
blocks
of shikumen
(literally, 'stone gate') houses and opened a public
spine through the middle to create a
dining/retail/entertainment district capitalizing on
the historic value of the distinctly Shanghainese
building type. Xintiandi is a site rich in irony --
here the city's privileged classes dine on sushi
adjacent to a house memorialized as the site of the
Communist Party's first congress. And while the
project introduces quality urban public space to a
city increasingly reliant on indoor shopping malls,
it is a semi-private space under the burden of heavy
automated surveillance and guards who will exclude
shabby-looking locals. The development is but one
stage of a massive urban intervention which sees
neighboring blocks to be developed with high-rise
serviced apartments, luxury apartments, hotel and
artificial lake. Preservation enthusiasts have
largely been impressed with Xintia ndi, though the
success of the project has inflated land values in
the district and is leading to the quick demolition
of neighboring shikumen communities as property
prices soar. It is an increasingly common condition
of modern cities that historic conservation can only
be successful when preservation goals are aligned
with those of developers and inevitably those of the
massive global tourism industry.
Traditional housing in Shanghai from the
mid-nineteenth century consisted mostly of lilongs,
or dense networks of connected two-storey buildings
occupying a city block with shops fronting outwards
onto public streets, and residences above accessed
from internal alleyways. The term lilong refers to
these alleyways which are first reached through
gateways from main streets, and then are
hierarchically organized through semi-public,
semi-private and private lanes and courtyards
throughout the block. The apparent lack of
formalized public space in the history of
Chinese architecture can be partially explained by
this model -- residents talk, cook, eat, wash and play
in these alleyways and form a strong social fabric
which extends the nuclear family unit to a network
of extended family and neighbors. This homogeneous
mat of housing throughout the city was augmented
with uniform medium-rise worker housing in the '50s
and '60s. In recent years with wholesale razing of
neighborhoods for high-rise developments and
transplanting entire communities to government
subsidized housing on the city's fringes (part of
the massive shift towards private home ownership),
comes the discontinuation of a way of life which
gave at least a semblance of stability and security
to the city's inhabitants.
As regrettable as it is to see such lively urban
fabric instantly erased,
clearing such communities
is an upgrading of the city's amenities and marks
just the latest wave of urban renewal. The low-rise
clustered urban form was a result of developers in
the late nineteenth century rushing to meet new
housing demands in a city transforming itself from
feudal village into modern city. At the onset of the
Communist revolution, the state assumed ownership of
land and enforced a collectivized model of living.
Municipal agencies have now identified nearly four
hundred structures and 11 districts as 'fine
historic buildings and zones', for example, detached
garden houses in the former French concession. Such
policy seeks to preserve an urban form unique among
Chinese cities, though a clear strategy for their
ownership, upkeep and protection has yet to be
approved.
A parallel phenomenon to the displacement of lower
class residents sees citizens from the burgeoning
middle class renting closer to the centre of the
city in a glut of residential apartment complexes.
Developers have been having a field day buying
rights and providing upmarket housing in the form of
post-modern pastiches taking on such names as
Versailles and the French Riviera. Further up the
economic scale, developers are also pillaging the
worst of Western sprawl with gated communities and
suburban replica villages in far flung Pudong, Gubei
and Hongqiao districts.
Exemplars of contemporary architecture are still
mainly the domain of foreign architects -- SOM, KPF,
Jerde, Foster, MVRDV, Wood+Zapata, Arquitectonica
and RTKL all have projects here, with Tange, Graves
and many others well on the way. While the presence
of foreign design expertise is upping the ante with
local design institutes and contributing to an
international standardized cityscape, these
buildings with notable exceptions are largely
singular monuments. Planning authorities, property
developers and architects have rarely beneficially
focused interests. The Lujiazui financial districts
opposite the Bund and the rest of Pudong have
succumbed to engineering-led urban planning and
scale less development parcels which leave little
opportunity for an urbane pedestrian environment.
Huaihai and Nanjing roads have developed as credible
'market streets' and their skylines have given
hierarchy to the city's urban form. As the public
domain is upgraded and the built fabric stitched
together over time, hopefully we will see a more
legible environment for humans within this realm of
isolated shopping malls and high-rise towers.
The urban architecture of Shanghai is the physical
corollary of the paradoxes and conflicts in current
political dogma, a turbulent modern history and an
inherently flexible and resourceful people.
Author
Darryl Chen
COPYRIGHT EMAP Architecture and Gale Group
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