Faces of Progress
A less noticed face of progress in cities like Shanghai, is the authoritarian planning which clears the ground for glitzy highrises. I would like to hear from architects about this ethical dilemma - Foster, Portman, Kwan, Tse, Kohn Pederson Fox, Jerde, SOM… almost the Who’s Who of contemporary architecture. Its hard to grasp the scale of this transformation from a single photo: since 1998 over 3000 highrise buildings have been built, assisted by US$45 billion (between 1990 and 2000 yes that’s billion and obviously a much higher figure if it was over the last decade) in investment, mostly from Hong Kong and Japan. Journalists have claimed that 1/6th of the world’s construction cranes were deployed in Shanghai. Since 1998, rather than land ownership, occupants were granted land usage rights (ie. leases) in which a market was allowed. Most tenants could easily be moved by municipal authorities or state corporations who gained control of key plots as incumbents. Most of the US$45 billion went for leasing costs paid to the municipality, who were key boosters of development.
Granted, as part of the construction boom (from my observations of completed but near empty projects, Shanghai is overbuilding in office space), over 120 million square metres of housing was built but generally in less favorable, less serviced locations, such as industrial suburbs from where the Shanghai textile industry was removed or closed down (with a loss of over 400,000 jobs, mostly women) or in new towns built from scratch but without strong social networks of service providers or even complete facilities. The new highrises have more services, but not necessarily more space, so many families continue to crowd many generations into one unit. For those occupants that refuse to move, buildings can be knocked down around them until they give up due to the construction noise - which can run 24 hours a day.
Its unpatriotic to be critical: senior planners worry about ability of community to keep pace with construction. Some claim that the culture of Shanghai is in fact utterly open to change - an ongoing triumph of absolute pragmatism. While even he is worried about the sprawl, architect Ma Quingyun claims ‘That’s true Chineseness…We don’t care about the look of the building, so much so everybody still lives in Shanghai in ugly buildings. We care about how convenient life is.’ Yet, divided by a 500m-wide river, it is neither a convenient nor human-scaled city and what has been built demonstrates that the only duty of architects in Shanghai was to flamboyantly decorate the outside and tops of standard highrises. Only now is innovation come into discussion, for example, in building systems or energy use. So Shanghai architecture has actually not been innovative, just fast. …Except for those who don’t want to move.
(Amonst others, I recommend a+u Architecture and Urbanism May 2005 special issue: Beijing-Shanghai Architecture Guide, Deborah S. Davis (ed.), The Consumer Revolution in Urban China (U. California Press, 2000), and Gilbert Stelter’s online bibliography.
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:11 am
On the other hand, as de Certeau observes, what the consumer makes or does with the product, or in this case, the space within the building is an example of production, is it not?
It could be considered an example of innovation - only, not on the side of some of the builders.
We could treasure the longtangs while they’re still there, though.
July 23rd, 2007 at 2:31 pm
Chinese people just had this sweet little ideology of “remembering how bitter life was in the past and then think about how sweet it is now”. They are no perfectionist, nor do old generation chinese give any value on aesthetics. But then I would think of Jacques Tati in Mon Oncle. And vulgarism seems to be an element of diversity that would make cities interesting.
I know the city well and would recomment Moganshan Road for everybody. The urban mirage across the river versus abandoned factories at this side tells a lot about Shanghai.
July 25th, 2007 at 10:25 am
Though images suggest “conceptual ruins” more than “faces of progress” I remain unconvinced by the underlying argument of the post. Thinking comparatively to New York helps to realize that moments of intense construction remain foundational for the condition of urban infrastructure as long as the intensity of change or renovation remains unsurpassed.
Last weeks water pipes at one of the streets by NYC’s Grand Central Station exploded. Plain disrepair from the very time such elements of urban “progress” as sewage, water pipes, and copper cables were laid can bode looming disaster for many cities in the West where unless things repair themselves the impasse between individual and collective rights continues to block infrastructural overhaul.
Though it does appear that cities illustrate what imaginary is at work as they change over time, Shanghai’s transformation may produce results akin to those that explosive growth of Los Angeles brought about. As to whether drastic changes in quantity transit into transformations of quality, per Shanghai as agglomeration of buildings, I tend to agree with Ulrich Beck that revolutionary change can go unremarked as part of everyday life, as totally banal event, as biggest building boom in human history for example.
The irony of Shanghai moment may be that it has only started its urban transformation and in directions that are only faintly visible.
July 25th, 2007 at 11:26 am
The small army of textile workers refuses to stop besetting my mind since China’s textile exports have continued to grow at robust double-digit pace, which could mean that the industry itself has added as much in terms of its labor force, abeit further inland.
That way Shanghai could be intent on repeating the course that other metropolices have followed as they leveraged their communication, transportation, and information infrastructures to attain dominant position within the landscapes of flows that support their existence.
The discourse on textile manufacture seems to have special significance in the West as its industrialization in Europe, and later North America, has destroyed markets for textile producers elsewhere.
The present moment may be presenting a new form of re-distribution of the cruelties of progress in ways that force reconsideration of how narrative closures are made on the topics of movement of labor, goods, and capital.