[Urbanstudy] Shanghai: Where Blade Runner meets Las Vegas

[Shekhar Krishnan]

Where Blade Runner meets Las Vegas

Shanghai is mad for skyscrapers - it has more than the entire west 
coast of the US, and still they keep coming. But, as Stuart Jeffries 
discovers, preserving the past and planning for the future are rarely 
part of the architect's vision. And now the city's planners are 
grappling with the consequences.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/features/story/0,11710,1346214,00.html

Monday November 8, 2004
The Guardian

Shanghai is slowly sinking. It is, you might be forgiven for thinking, 
karma. For the past 15 years it has been rising faster and higher than 
any city in the history of the world. But the city's greedy 
appropriation of the air is proving too much for the ground beneath to 
bear. "Shanghai's ground condition is very soft," says Kuo-Liang Lee, 
an associate of Arup and Partners architectural office in the city. 
"The rock bed is about 300m from the surface and the underground water 
table is higher, about 1-1.5 m from the surface. There are now more 
than 4,000 buildings more than 100m tall in Shanghai. That results in 
extremely severe ground settlement." It's just one of the reasons why 
city planners are now desperately trying to halt the architectural 
annexation of Shanghai's skies. Dearth of greenery, horrible pollution, 
inadequate transport and an almost unbearable press of humanity on the 
streets are others.

Shanghai is now the world's most densely populated city, according to 
Wu Jiang, deputy director of Shanghai's urban planning administration 
bureau."Ten million people are living in central Shanghai and another 
10 in the suburbs. We made mistakes and now we are establishing several 
plans that will control the development of new skyscrapers and deal 
with the problems that they have created." Among the solutions is a 
metro system, a huge motorway network and massive greening of the 
choking and dusty streets - matters that good city planners might have 
considered in advance. But then, what city bureaucrat could have 
predicted that Shanghai, the launchpad for Mao's cultural revolution 
and for decades a stymied city, would become such a sucking vortex for 
Chinese workers, foreign capital and international whizz kids?

In any event, Shanghai has never been good at thinking ahead. JG 
Ballard, writing in his novel Empire of the Sun about the decadence of 
the city in the late 1930s, observed that "life in Shanghai was lived 
wholly within an intense present". Arguably, the key change between 
then and now is the heightened intensity with which this most exciting 
and fearful of Chinese cities inhabits its present, ignores its future 
and viciously erases its past. For not only has Shanghai expanded 
inordinately in the past 15 years, but it has also wielded the wrecking 
ball with abandon, wantonly destroying much of what made this 
architectural melting pot so cherishable in the first place.

"This is a country on steroids and Shanghai is its main artery," 
observes Andy Hall, a British architect and designer who is based in 
Shanghai. China currently consumes 40% of the world's concrete and 90% 
of its steel. Much of that is suspended above the heads of Shanghai's 
pedestrians. At one point in the mid-90s, one quarter of the world's 
construction cranes were at work there. For someone from London, the 
can't-do city, the energy of Shanghai's renaissance is impressive, 
whatever manifold aesthetic horrors and social problems this has 
caused.

None the less, one thinks of the French writer Guy de Maupassant who 
used to dine at the restaurant at the Eiffel Tower in Paris because it 
was was the only place where he didn't have to look at the thing. 
Shanghainese of a similarly fastidious temperament are not so 
fortunate. Even if they dined on the 88th floor of what is currently 
Shanghai's tallest skyscraper, the Jingmao Tower, they would be 
rewarded with 360-degree vistas over what was what once called the 
Paris of the East, but now has become something even more striking - 
and not, necessarily in a good way.

Of Shanghai's 4,000 100-metre-plus buildings, 2,000 are skyscrapers (ie 
habitable buildings higher than 152m or 500ft) - more than the total on 
the entire west coast of the US. Many are daft confections, tailored 
for the aesthetic sensibilities of small boys who like things that soar 
in the sky and glow in the dark. But if you dream of driving over 
raised motorways through a shouty neon cityscape where Blade Runner 
meets Vegas, go to Shanghai and hire a convertible.

Several of those skyscrapers are among of the tallest human 
constructions in the world. They make London's Gherkin (180m, 40 
storeys) look like a petty pickle and dwarf Canary Wharf Tower (243.2m, 
50 storeys). One of the dafter is called Tomorrow Square (285m, 60 
storeys), a missile thrusting upwards from the city's Huangpu district; 
another, called Plaza 66 (288m, 66 storeys), is a dull glass stump in 
the Jing'An district.

Not all of these Johnny-Come-Highlies are grotesque or banal. The 420m 
Jingmao Tower (slightly smaller than the 457m Oriental Pearl TV tower 
which it sits beside in the Pudong district) is an extraordinary 
skyscraper, arguably the building that gives the lie to Shanghai's 
silliness of high rises. It is the fourth-tallest building in the world 
and was designed in a style that quotes traditional Chinese pagoda 
design while echoing the art deco of Manhattan's most beautiful 
skyscrapers.

The Jingmao is thus emblematic of the mingling of western and eastern 
creative forces - something that the city has been good at ever since 
the British, those lovely people, used their leverage to create 
millions of opium addicts and compel the Chinese government to open up 
the city as a treaty port in the 1840s. "Shanghai has always been a 
hotch potch of east and west," says the Shanghainese architectural 
historian Lyn Pann. "It is a hybrid, and the Jingmao is a perfect 
expression of that. Most of the rest of the new stuff is rubbish 
though."

The Jingmao Tower is more giddily imaginative than anything one can 
imagine rising from London's Docklands. A Feng Shui grandmaster blessed 
the building at its opening in 1999 and its 88 floors are auspicious to 
the Chinese (eight is a lucky number). The Grand Hyatt hotel occupies 
its upper 36 floors, and if you're a vertigo sufferer, you could do 
worse than indulge in some aversion therapy on the 88th floor 
observation deck: look left to the model city below, then glance right, 
down the hollow insides of this building, into the dizzying plummet of 
a 35-storey atrium. Or maybe not.

In 2007, the Jingmao will be joined on the Pudong skyline by the 492m 
tall, 101-storey World Finance Centre. Again, this is a west-meets-east 
development: designed by New York Architects Kohn Petersen Fox 
Associates, developed by a Japanese consortium which has invested $1bn 
in the building, including $200m for a post-9/11 strengthening of its 
structures.

Shanghai's growth spurt was arguably the fault of Deng Xiaoping. In the 
early 1990s, the Chinese leader initiated his open-door policy in order 
to stimulate economic growth and create socialism with Chinese 
characteristics. As part of that policy, Pudong, a then desolate area 
of factories and paddy fields across the Huangpu river from the city's 
historic centre, was made a special economic zone and quickly became an 
international playground for foreign capital and international 
architects.

In the days before the second world war when the Bund - that Shanghai 
riverside boulevard at the epicentre of Britain's Chinese adventure - 
was the most impressive street in Asia, the neon of its art deco hotels 
and pillared colonial corporate HQ was reflected in the paddy fields of 
Pudong. Now Pudong returns the compliment in spades: Nestlé, Samsung, 
Canon, Pepsi, Standard Chartered and many other brands of foreign 
capital nightly shine their gaudy retort across the Huangpu.

"Until the moment that Deng changed the rules, Shanghai had been a city 
frozen in time," says Lyn Pann. "It had been punished by the communists 
for its capitalistic decadence during the pre-revolutionary era and for 
being the centre of foreign influences in China."

The British influence on Chinese architecture was not confined to 
colonial bombast. In the mid-19th century after the Small Swords 
Rebellion, 20,000 Chinese sought refuge in Shanghai's international 
settlements or "concessions", and the British and French built hundreds 
of houses. Known as longtangs, they consisted of traditional Chinese 
houses with rooms grouped around a courtyard, but squashed together in 
British-style terraces. Arguably the city's only indigenous 
architectural form, longtangs were designed to house a family, but 
rooms rapidly became sublet, resulting in overcrowding and insanitary 
conditions.

Andy Hall, director of the Shanghai-based Surv architecture and design 
practice, argues that the recent building boom mimics that time when 
80,000 buildings were crammed into a few square kilometres in 20 years. 
"Clearly this city gets some of its vigour from haemorrhaging 
developments," he says, "but that doesn't mean there aren't terrible 
social consequences."

More than half of Shanghai's population lived in these longtangs for 
many years; but in the 90s, many were demolished as the city embraced 
newness and decent toilet facilities. Only recently has it begun to 
recognise that its past is worth preserving, converting some longtans 
into luxury apartments, transforming the ancient Yu Yuan Bazaar, with 
its lovely 15th-century Chinese vernacular, into a tourist mall, and 
rebuilding traditional Shanghainese houses at Xintiandi as restaurants 
and designer shops.

Hall's co-director, Thomas Chow, recently presented a paper called Five 
Ways to Ruin a City to the Shanghai Design Biennale. He suggested that 
the city's ill-considered and rapid growth had made it barely 
habitable. "In downtown Lujiazhui in Pudong, the scale is hostile and 
everything appears to have been enlarged on a photocopier; towers are 
towering, boulevards are 12 lanes wide (and un-crossable), without any 
relationship to human scale, activity, or urban life," he wrote. Worse 
yet, Shanghai's character was being obliterated. It had become all 
degraded style and no substance. The best international architects 
often felt as though they were shut out of Shanghai as developers 
favoured cheaper and tackier designs without creativity or soul.

In Chow's view, "the market's rapid pace of wholesale importation of 
foreign imagery has resulted in a scary, perverse, and at times 
ridiculous trend of turning modern cities into Disney-lands ... The 
urban landscape is being littered with wholesale copies and 
replications of foreign styles - a Dutch-style villa complex in Pudong, 
a French-style apartment complex in Xuhui district, a Spanish-style 
home, English-style gardens, the list goes on."

These are the grisly aesthetic developments that you can glimpse 
through your fingers as the tourist boat takes you up the Huangputo to 
the Yangtze and elsewhere in the city. But worse is the sheer density 
of Shanghai's rapid expansion. Wu Jiang, who was roped in from academia 
to help deal with the spiralling planning problems, wants to change all 
that. He talks excitedly about reducing plot ratios and making central 
Shanghai green and pleasant. But he also knows that such reforms will 
not be enough. "If we want it to be the best city in the world, it's 
impossible to carry on with this kind of building. You can't reduce 
that density through political power. You have to make it attractive 
for people to leave and live in new cities nearby."

And so, on the outskirts of Shanghai, connected by new massive 
motorways and rapid transit railways, 10 new cities, each of one 
million people and each with 10 satellite towns of 200,000 people, are 
being built. One, New Harbour City, will have the biggest docks in the 
world; another, An Ting, will be a huge car-manufacturing city; a 
third, called Song Jiang, will be a university centre.

It is thus that Shanghai hopes to build itself out of the problem that 
it built itself into. At a pace unparalleled in the rest of the world, 
it is again racing down the fast track to somewhere - whether paradise 
or ruin is anybody's guess.


_____

Shekhar Krishnan
Srishti School of Art Design & Technology
Dodballapur Road
Yelahanka New Town, Bangalore 560064
India

http://www.srishtiblr.org
http://crit.org.in/members/shekhar