C OMMENTARIES “…Writing complex history and politics is definitely not easy. Reading several of Non Arkaraprasertkul’s publications both in English and Thai in the last few years has proven that it is possible to make these topics both interesting and informative. His latest book Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form is not an exception. His curiosity about places, peoples and cultures is extraordinary and matched so well with his capacity to ‘map’ complexities of history, urban geography, physicality and politics with a simple discourse that is easy to follow. He convinces us to see multiple layers of local realities beyond the ‘western’ perspectives on the global city of Shanghai. He describes the making of this cosmopolitan city can complete in a globalized economic context despite its fragmented urban fabric. It has undergone significant crisis, through challenges from semi-colonialism, socio-political collapse by war and lack of coordination in the planning process. Interestingly, the author suggests that the selling point of Shanghai’s tourism in the early twentieth century was the elegant image that
This book is an attempt to integrate research, architectural knowledge, and fieldwork to understand the phenomenon of the urban transformation in Shanghai, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Having once been a lucrative treaty port city, Shanghai has re-embarked on the mission to become an economic global city through a combination of assimilated industrialized cityscape and the startling industriousness of Chinese pragmatism from 1980 onwards. Driven by the momentum of free-market capitalism within the politics of a state-controlled quasi-communist socialist entity, Shanghai’s built form and environment have been conceived as a cultural construction of the conspicuous consumption of global financial marketing and of ostentatious expenditure of the elite. Nostalgic hearkening back to the glory days of foreign occupation does not adequately explain the phenomenon that exists today. Central to the aim of this thesis are the questions on how the global market was utilized, what internal and external forces were at play, and the importance given to the perception of values. By critically examining the history of the city’s planning process and the reality of its urbanism, this book outlines the city’s pragmatic developments dominated largely by its politics. The New Shanghai is a production of image, as it has always been the façade of China by virtue of its strategic location for international trade. The mediation between the representational built form, through politics, and the internal social transformations, by means of its soft cultural infrastructure, has created cosmopolitanism unlike anything else in the world. The author Non Arkaraprasertkul, Associate AIA, is an architect and a Harvard-Yenching Institute Fellow in Chinese Studies at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University. He teaches architecture and urban design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he received his training in architecture and urban design, and was a Fulbright scholar and an Asian Cultural Council Fellow (Affiliate of Rockefeller’s Brothers Fund) in History Theory Criticism of Architecture.
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COMMENTARIES
“…Writing complex history and politics is definitely not easy. Reading
several of Non Arkaraprasertkul’s publications both in English and Thai in the last
few years has proven that it is possible to make these topics both interesting and
informative. His latest book Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form is
not an exception.
His curiosity about places, peoples and cultures is extraordinary and
matched so well with his capacity to ‘map’ complexities of history, urban
geography, physicality and politics with a simple discourse that is easy to follow.
He convinces us to see multiple layers of local realities beyond the ‘western’
perspectives on the global city of Shanghai. He describes the making of this
cosmopolitan city can complete in a globalized economic context despite its
fragmented urban fabric. It has undergone significant crisis, through challenges
from semi-colonialism, socio-political collapse by war and lack of coordination in
the planning process. Interestingly, the author suggests that the selling point of
Shanghai’s tourism in the early twentieth century was the elegant image that
replicated ‘western’ neo-classical styles. However, he proposes that a new Chinese
identity can actually be enhanced through a mixture of diversified sub-cultures on
Shanghai’s streetscapes. This book clearly points out that the absence of human
scale in the city streetscapes can diminish contact, the sense of security and the
pedestrian energy level of the city. In general, it answers two simple questions: how
a ‘global metropolis’, in particular Shanghai, is defined and transformed, and what
is to be expected from its changing images or representations. It is therefore
worthwhile to read this book especially as a case study for those policymakers,
urban planners, urban designers, architects, academics and scholars who would be
keen to learn more about urbanism of the global cities through different lenses in
order to see hidden dimensions. The Chinese largest urban ‘global village’ of
Shanghai has more historical complexity and dynamic development than arguably
any other world city in this century. For those wishing to broaden their
perspectives on all these issues, I highly recommend this book.”
Dr Polladach Theerapappisit Lecturer and Course Advisor, School of Social Sciences The University of Western Sydney, Australia
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
“Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form offers a well-thought-out
perspective in understanding the amazing transformation of urban Shanghai.
Having been a short-term visitor to Shanghai and overwhelmed as most, the book
offered me a framework for understanding what I have experienced and a platform
for exploring contemporary city questions. The historic Bund – lively, and with
fear of being run over by the traffic – and the dull Pudong New Development –
offers an intriguing comparison and an effective way of summarizing the new
urban China. My stay was short, and my background is curiosity in how and
where people live in cities, but clearly city centers give the starting point, the image
and the tone of a city. But this understanding brings new questions and issues for
reflection.
One wonders if the need for Shanghai to build a bigger Bund to herald its
arrival as a world city is a missed opportunity: it is a dynamic city of the present
but not a city of the future. The Bund was built before the internet, e-commerce,
and all the other technological wonders which question the need for a center as in
the past. Symbolic importance still remains in the more traditional sense, but the
need for proximity as a guiding principle is being increasingly questioned. The
time traveler today may see nothing particularly new in Shanghai, but perhaps
things that are only bigger and more grandiose. Shanghai had the opportunity to
demonstrate the future, instead of flaunting its newly acquired economic prowess
through a ‘the same but one better’ approach. The bigger high-rises, the more
advanced faster trains do not signal new concepts of city development.
One wonders if the current ‘tremendously dull atmosphere’ that confronted
the time traveler in Pudong is only a temporary state. As the traveler continues
onward in his journey, he may be confronted with a different Shanghai entirely. It
is unlikely that the city will stagnate, and new uses with new responses to urban
form most likely would take over – cities, as nature, abhor a vacuum. We read that
the Bund was built over a longer period which offered flexibility to respond to
changing circumstances and adjust to needs. Pudong is instant – it is a ‘one-shot’
effort, with little time to adjust while being developed – it is a belief in knowing
what is right and doing it. Could Shanghai be compared to a Disneyland with its
attempt at a better-than-real-life reproduction of reality?
One wonders if the same energy as seen in the center would have been
applied to housing. Housing represents the largest sector of a city, and has been
problematic historically as cities have growth rapidly from new economic realities.
Similar rapidly growing cities in history and today in the Third World exhibit vast
uncontrolled expanses of informal housing in accommodating growth – often as
squatters – which seems to have been avoided in Shanghai. One is so overwhelmed
by the center that the outer lying housing areas are forgotten, as the debate over the
spectacular center dominates.
One wonders if time is the critical factor – where we stand, and from what
time we observe offers only one perspective. We tend to look at things as a
‘snapshot’ as a key to understanding, and at great risk we look beyond as images of
the future. What would the future Pudong bring as it adjusts to real needs of the
city instead of symbolic imagery? As Shanghai matures, would the now dull and
often-unoccupied high-rise areas become vibrant with new energy and uses?
Would Shanghai fulfill its desire a vibrant model city?
Lastly, one wonders why Shanghai has chosen the European/North
American model for emulation, turning its back on its own rich culture. The need
to mimic and to do it bigger is more an element of insecurity than strength.
The book is an excellent foundation for exploring contemporary city-
building issues. Shanghai is unparalleled in growth and grandeur, and it is truly a
Global City, but of the past and not the future. It offers a clear lesson for
architects and urban planners: nothing is static, and the past, present and future
must be considered simultaneously when building cities. Flexibility with the
ability to adjust as circumstances change is the imperative. We cannot know the
future, but we should not be rigid as we embrace the present. The design challenge
is a city that responds and dominates the present, while allowing the unknowing
future with grace.”
Dr-Ing Reinhard Goethert
Director, Special Interest Group in Urban Settlement (SIGUS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
“This book is a timely and intelligent examination of Shanghai’s recent
urban transformations. Shanghai is a city whose efforts to reintegrate itself into the
global economy have seen the use of built form as a form of cultural construction,
one that seems to represent the conspicuous consumption of global elite. Beginning
with the questioning of the very conception of a hybrid urban city, this
examination of Shanghai’s urban transformation asks how the politics of built form
can impact such a transformation. Integrating theoretical research, architectural
knowledge, and on-the-ground fieldwork, this insightful and thought-provoking
work seeks to understand the phenomenon of how the global market is being
utilized through the combination of an assimilated industrialized cityscape, as well
as through the startling industriousness of Chinese pragmatism. The book’s three
parts set out its research methodology before going on to examine the importance
of the politicization of the built form of the city. It ends with a reappraisal of the
research findings using the politics of built form as a framework. Any attempt to
understand the urbanism of Shanghai, or indeed any phenomenon in modern-day
China, is going to require an understanding of the Chinese language – this book
not only shows this, it even provides a helpful glossary of Chinese terms, something
that reflects the author’s own Thai-Chinese roots.”
Dr Gregory Bracken Lecturer in Asian Urbanism, Delft School of Design TU Delft Architecture Faculty, The Netherlands C-editor of the Spring issue of the ‘Footprint’ E-Journal.
∞∞∞∞∞∞∞
“…There is a lovely article that I would like to introduce here [the third
chapter of the book]. Non Arkaraprasertkul analyses the Pudong area in Shanghai.
From a distance the highrises blend together into a lively modern skyline,
Arkaraprasertkul writes. On the ground however the Pudong area is deserted. It is
lifeless. In the urban plan the central avenue (as wide as the Champs Elysee plus one
meter) is lined with lower buildings, pushing the skyscrapers backwards. In reality
though, the freestanding skyscrapers don’t line the road at all. Without a
programmed plinth the streets have emptied. This in contrast to the old city of
Shanghai, Arkaraprasertkul says, where the streets are livelier than ever. At the
beginning of the twentieth century skyscrapers were the result of a delirious city
life. With the skyscrapers of Shanghai the image of that vibrant city has been
recreated. The city itself however is absent. The new city can be best experienced
from a distance or from an airplane, Arkaraprasertkul concludes. Never try to walk
it.”
Michiel van Raaij Eikongraphia IconographyBlog www.eikongraphia.com
such as the Bank of China (1940s), the Sassoon House (1929), the Hong Kong
and Shanghai Bank (1923), and Russell & Co. (1881) constituted the pictorial
gesture of the Bund, and consequently the image of Shanghai dans l'ensemble. When
ships stopped a mile offshore, the Bund, the charismatic skyline seen from afar, was
effective in transmitting the image of a modern city.27 And as visual scale altered
and intensified with proximity it became clear that the distant image of the city
had everything to do with the built form. In other words, the Bund was the
inhabitable representation of the new commercial city.
Shanghai’s cutting-edge technological advancement also “sharpened the
confrontation between China and the West and created a deep dualism.”28 The
formal establishments of the foreign settlements reflected a rigid division of social
classes and a basic “served-servant” relationship.29 There was, of course, a certain
psychological tension underlining the colonial situation in Shanghai. There was a
pre-conceived cultural supposition that the foreigners were privileged, which was
seen in the minimal resistance of the Chinese themselves who were economically
dependent on the foreigners. It was the foreigners who actually created a lucrative,
self-sufficient city. The foreigners, at first, urbanized the city through early
capitalism, and were fond of being known as the authoritative creators of the city,
rather than the inhabitants. It was also the popular perception that the foreigners
were the creators of the city.
24
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Interaction between foreigners and the Chinese only happened through the
necessity of business, diplomatic meetings, and ethically-mixed gatherings of the
elite. Historian Jonathan Spence observes:
Many wealthy Chinese businessmen lived in comfortable homes with
gardens…[and] had social contact with the foreigners and shared their
business interests, which was to make sure that a reliable source of labor was
available to work in their factories and on the docks, and that the social
amenities revolving around their lavish clubs and the racecourse were not
distributed.30
Quantitatively, contrary to the claim by Sinologist Marie-Claire Bergère, Shanghai
as a Treaty Port was used to extract profits for foreign trades; primarily those of the
British. The Bund at the time was, perhaps, the only intentional linear waterfront
skyline in the world. Its dazzling image successfully imitated and was favorably
compared with Manhattan’s skyline and it definitely trumped the image of Paris in
the same period.
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History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
Figure 5: Paris Waterfront in the 1900s.
The Bund skyline exemplified the prevailing condition of Shanghai’s
identity, which was not made up of the original inhabitants, but by outsiders, who
asserted their superiority. The “key” to modern China, Shanghai accommodated
city dwellers that were proud of calling themselves “Shanghainese” regardless of
their original birthplaces.31
Although the building of the Bund was only partly planned, several
buildings were also hastily added to the corridor after the success of the previous
buildings. These necessarily hasty additions tended to erode the “sense of a whole.”
The image of Shanghai embraced people’s understanding of their own identity as
26
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
supported by hybrid cultural infrastructure mediated through built form. In other
words, the cultural resistance was mitigated by the idea of Shanghai as a “melting
pot.” Shanghai’s built cultural infrastructure represented different cultural norms
favoring strategies that would enhance the image of a world metropolis. To a
degree, the use of architecture in the city as a collective picturesque “billboard” that
attracted global attention emphasizes the fact that Shanghai had never fully been a
Chinese city.
The unprecedented economic progress gave birth to such things as the
“Chinese bourgeoisie” which was, alas, short-lived. It did not lead to an industrial
revolution; otherwise, Shanghai today might be different.32 The Bund was a
historic record of the semi-colonial period in China and “the architectural
interaction between the Eastern and Western cultures.”33
Figure 6: Above Skyline of Manhattan Waterfront in the early 1900s, compared to Below The Bund Skyline in the same period. Photograph: Shanghai Archives & Visual Shanghai
27
History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
SHANGHAI AND CHINA
After the Qing were overthrown by the military force of Sun Yat Sen and
succeeded by the Republic of China in 1912, China’s politics went into turmoil.34
Sun Yat Sen resided in Shanghai for six years from 1918 to 1924 to secure the city,
which, as his financial base was crucial to his provisional government and the
newly established Kuomintang (KMT) party. In 1927, the committee appointed
by Chinese City Powers (not to be confused with the Shanghai Municipal Council
run by the foreigners in the International settlement) produced a semi-official plan
for the city, which focused on the urban development of the northeast district as an
extension of the existing urbanized international concessions.35 The proposal forced
the population of the downtown Puxi area to be dispersed onto the west bank of
the Huangpu in order to avoid the overcongestion of the business center and the
collapse of the city’s outdated infrastructure.36 This “Metropolitan Plan for
Shanghai,” however, remained on paper due to the war against Japan.
In 1929, the Nationalist government decided that it wanted to reconsider
the idea of a master plan for Shanghai – a plan that would create a modern
industry and “diminish the power and the presence of foreign enclaves.”37 The idea
was not new; rather, it revisited Sun Yat Sen’s Metropolitan Plan for Shanghai,
which extended toward the north of Shanghai, on west bank of Huangpu River –
the area remained untouched by any development.38 The primary objective of this
extension was to “build a metropolis that would be large and modern, both in its
structure and function, to reestablish Shanghai as the Great Port of the East.”39
Dong Dayou, a Chinese architect trained in a prevailing Beaux-Art style
architecture, was recruited by the KMT government to accomplish this task. Dong
28
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
proved to be the perfect man for the job, not only through his extensive neo-
classical architectural projects in Shanghai but also his bonded connection with
prominent influential architectural firms which gave him essential access to the
political core.
Figure 7: Dong Dayou’s Plan for Shanghai Civic Center, 1929.
The dominant trends, derived from the educational institutions from which
the first generation of modern Chinese architects graduated from abroad, did not
have any competing choices.40 Assimilation had already dictated the trend of neo-
classical style with its advanced construction technology. While a northern city
like Beijing was partial to the so-called “adaptive architecture” of American
architect Henry Murphy, Shanghai and the southern cities still favored eclecticism,
a foreign style, which had become “intrinsically” traditional for urban Shanghai in
the 1930s. The KMT leaders’ ambition to expand the city to Pudong,
notwithstanding the massive cost resulted in a constraint on the project by the
financial instability of the Nationalists. Dong, now working for Chiang, relied on
29
History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
the civic design of Puxi’s already constructed infrastructure as he proposed the
northern axial expansion.
Dong’s plan embraces several “city beautiful elements,” such as symmetrical
axial planning, grand boulevards, open green spaces, an obelisk monument in the
center, and classical buildings of a uniform height. However, it represented a shift
in the way the “city” was perceived, from being a portrait of commercial power,
like Manhattan, to institutional power, like Washington D.C. That is, while the
Bund was maintained as a commercial corridor in the south, the new governmental
district would be located in the north. Despite the fact that the civic plan for
Shanghai was completed, it was not implemented due to the course of the second
Sino-Japanese War, resulting in the Japanese occupation from 1937-45.
There were two other important events that substantially impacted the
development of the city after the glorified period of the 1930s: World War II and
the founding of the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.). While World War II
introduced Japanese control into the hybridized cosmopolitan and equation, the
founding of the P.R.C. and the subsequent strict control of the Communist party
delayed the re-organization of the city’s economic system. The concessions had
been handed back to the Chinese during the war.
SHANGHAI UNDER THE SUN: THE MODERNIST DREAM
The subsequent Japanese occupation during 1937-1945 brought about one
of the most ambitious plans for Pudong. This was to turn Shanghai into the East
Axis’ capitol, resembling the ambition Adolph Hitler had for Berlin.41 The
30
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Nationalist government crumbled under Japan’s threat of military invasion, as did
their political holds over the city. Under Japanese control, Shanghai was used not
only as an instrument of the imperial army, but also as an economic engine of
“strategic importance”: the goal for anyone wishing to take control of Shanghai.42
Despite its constant “secret” support for both the KMT and the Communist
armies, Shanghai continued to operate under absolute Japanese occupation,
making considerable profit for their new regime under the Japanese’s business
monopoly.43 Japanese architects and planners quickly developed several plans for
Shanghai. The most provocative of these plans was by Kunio Maekawa, a Japanese
Modernist who had worked in Le Corbusier’s atelier. Pudong was conceived by
Maekawa as an ideal venue for the extension of a continuous Modernist super grid
extending from Puxi.
Not only would Maekawa’s East-West monumental axis wipe out the
existing lilong fabric, but it would also create a continuous linear plaza,
unprecedented in its scale, across Huangpu connecting the two shores. In this plan,
every building on the Bund in the path of this Modernist ceremonial mall would
be removed to make way for the continuation of the dominating axis Maekawa
drew from Nanjing Road. The connection between the two shores was articulated
through the vast and monumental scale of the waterfront landscapes. “The plan is
immediately reminiscent of Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City,” Alan
Balfour observes.44 In actuality, had this been built, the unparalleled scale of this
public space would have surpassed Tiananmen Square by at least threefold.
31
History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
Figure 8: Kunio Maekawa’ Plan for Pudong, 1942.
Across the river on the Pudong side, Maekawa placed a colossal pyramid at
the center of a public park to serve multiple recreational, civic, and ceremonial
purposes. For Maekawa, as it was for other Modernists, only unprecedented
monumentality could resurrect the city from the Chinese and colonial past, which
was to be forgotten and replaced by the new Japanese future. Maekawa’s plan for
Shanghai was the eradication of its past history, particularly though the demolition
of the Bund.
The dropping of the atomic bombs in August 1945 ended the Modernist
dream of the Japanese. The surrender of Japan in August 1945 brought World
War II to a close, and freed China from the tyranny of the Japanese Empire. The
KMT returned to power again for only a few years before Mao Zedong and his
32
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Communist Party of the north marched down to Shanghai and overthrew the
KMT government in 1949. In 1946, after World War II, Shanghai was handed
back to a single Chinese government under the KMT. The liberation of this semi-
colonial city involved merging the French concession and the international
settlements. The foreigners and their extraterritoriality status were expurgated from
Shanghai.
TOWARDS TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SHANGHAI:
FROM MAO TO DENG
As the city came to life in response to the challenge of Deng Xiaoping in the
late 1980s, the inspiration was Manhattan…[Deng, by ways of central
government and local authority,] carefully cultivated propaganda by the
authorities, preparing the people for a spectacular transformation – a
mission for the modern city. 45
Shanghai under Mao was a period of transition. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap
Forward and Cultural Revolution both greatly constrained the way in which the
socialism developed during this time.46 The so-called “adaptive Marxist-Leninist
socialist economy,” whose aim to achieve social equality operated through the
absolute control of labor and products, brought about the most negative change in
the social structure of Shanghai. Similar to other socialist cities, the differentiation
between social classes was reduced by leveling of consumption patterns and lifestyle
imposed by the socialist government. The number of agricultural enterprises was
minimized and Shanghai became a true “industrial powerhouse.” Spurred on by
Mao’s famous quote, “I want to see smokestacks everywhere,” heavy manufacturing
33
History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
industry dominated production in the Maoist era. The shift from a free-market
capitalist economy to a socialist economy brought about the decline of Shanghai.
After the Communists took over the city under the founding of the PRC,
Mao announced that Shanghai would be “central to the socialist economy”47; in a
sense modifying Shanghai to become the model of the appropriate socially
economic Chinese city, despite the well-established capitalist economy typical to
most treaty port cities at the time. Action had to be taken against moral decay, such
as prostitution and mob violence, as moralization was mandatory to the socialist
economic system. The Communist Party was embarrassed by the thriving trades,
which went against everything it stood for.
The new socialist economy re-structured the entire business circuit in the
city, transferring control from private to public hands. The collective work unit
system or danwei (literally means “working commune”) was introduced and
Shanghai’s industrial status became synonymous with many cities in China – “with
thousands of smoke stacks.” Mao’s view of Shanghai revolved around the issue of
consumption and colonialism as “evil and corrupting,” and thus in need of
redirection towards “city of production.”48 The direct outcome of this reformist
ambition was the 1953 Soviet-influenced master plan, which focused
predominantly on workers’ housing, railway planning, and the basic form of
administration centers. These were the basic elements of the new “socialist city.”
China under Mao’s direction, aimed for economic self-reliance in light of its
substantial human resources. Mao’s reform required a dramatic redeployment of
resources which had significant consequences for Shanghai. This included the
centralization of political power in Beijing; insuring the government’s policy of
34
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
economic dependence; and establishing China’s diplomatic isolation vis-à-vis the
West and relative closure to foreign trade; and shutting out significant investment
in Shanghai.49
Buildings on the Bund were thus allowed to deteriorate; but no more than
any other buildings in the city. In fact, the Bund buildings were used as
government offices, including the Mayor’s office. After the victory of Chinese
Communism, “foreigners and wealthy Chinese fled, the drug trade and nightlife
vanished, and the Paris of the East became a depressed industrial city forgotten by
the world.”50 Though the city itself did not produce much profit, the newly
nationalized industries created an unprecedented financial flow within the Chinese
orbit. Despite rigid Communist control, Shanghai still contributed the largest
revenue in the country to the central government. Mao’s socialist views focused on
social structuring through the diminishing of class conflict, making the physical
planning of the city secondary. There was, however, a plan to make a part of
Pudong a riverside park.51 This plan, however, died with Mao in 1976 and the
passing of the control of China to Deng Xiaoping, who would play a critical role in
the development of Shanghai in his own right.
OPEN DOOR POLICY: SHANGHAI AS THE DRAGON’S HEAD
Deng Xiaoping’s era-defining “Open Door Policy” of the 1980s is pivotal to
the birth of the new Shanghai.52 The shift from self-reliance, which had been
China’s policy for thousands of years, to the “new” policy that did not restrict the
admission of foreign imports was the manifestation of the leap towards capitalism –
global capitalism to be precise – boosting the long-struggling process of Chinese
35
History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
modernization from the end of the Opium Wars.53 The policy’s key strategy was
the establishment of special development zones, which originally did not include
Shanghai. In 1984, however, through a long and intricate process of lobbying
among the country’s top leaders, Shanghai was given special status as part of the
fourteen coastal cities designated to encourage capital flow through business
transactions.54 The quantitative success of the early days of the Open Door Policy
produced enormous profits for China, making it possible for Shanghai to become a
bastion for both industrial and service-sector business. Massive amounts of funding
for both short- and long-term infrastructural improvements were given to Shanghai
from the early 1990s onward. According to Richard Marshall, “Shanghai invested
three times more in its urban infrastructure [over the] last five years than the total
invested in the previous forty.”55 The “1984 Master plan,” initiated by Former
Mayor Jiang Zemin, compellingly set comprehensive guidelines for both the
redevelopment of the central city, and the establishment of satellite towns. Yet the
plan did not immediately receive the substantial support from the central
government essential to its implementation. The plan was delayed for six years
before receiving significant attention from the President himself.
SHANGHAI 2000: LUJIAZUI
The return of foreign investment in the opening of this jewel of the Far East
was quickly matched and surpassed its old days. The Bund, although not
reclaiming its past status, had been partially revived and used as headquarters for
foreign financial institutions in order to set up their new business base in the East.
Neo-classical buildings on The Bund were revitalized to support service-sector
business. The demand for space, however, had increased drastically and become
36
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
extremely expensive by the mid 1980s increasing several fold beyond the capacity
of this poorly maintained commercial corridor, and thus requiring either a
significant upgrade or else an expansion of Shanghai’s financial district.
Econometricist Gregory Chow remarks on the growth in the GDP of China,
which has been extraordinary from the outset of the reform:
What accounts for China’s success is the way in which the Chinese
government adopted institutions and policies that enable the resourceful
Chinese people and foreign “friends” to unleash their energy to develop the
Chinese economy…the secret of success of China’s economic reform is that
it allows the non-state sectors to develop in the setting of a market
economy.56
Around the end of the 1980s, the dream of extending Shanghai across the river to
Lujiazui was again brought to public awareness by the Shanghai Urban Planning
and Design Institute.57 It was not yet seriously considered, however, because of the
institute’s lack of political clout. Central to the materialization of the plan was
Deng’s visit to Shanghai in 1990. Not only did he urge the municipal government
to consider the expansion of the city in order to accommodate the anticipated
demand for space due to the increasing population, but he also encouraged the
authority to “commodify” the empty land across from the Huangpu. His speech
following his visit is especially revealing:
Shanghai was China’s financial center where people freely engaged in
business. It should continue to serve as the center in order to attain an
international seat in banking. [As] finance is the heart of modern [Chinese]
economy; Shanghai will be the most important city to win for [China’s]
world position in the [economic] field. China must rely on Shanghai58
37
History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
Answering Deng’s call was Zhu Rongji, nicknamed the “Smashing Mayor” for his
uncompromising efforts to establish worthy collaborations.59 Risking his political
creditability in pursuit of his ultimate goal of attaining position as China’s Premier,
Zhu looked to François Mitterrand’s Grand Projets as a model for the new
Shanghai. The French influence comes not only from the pre-existing cultural
influence dating back to the Golden Age period, but also the good political
relationships, and the successful demonstration of power through architecture and
urban form of France’s capital city.60 Zhu, however, envisioned a plan that was
beyond Mitterrand’s imagination: to build the “New Shanghai” on the opposite
shore of the Huangpu River. He organized an international competition for the
Pudong area’s master plan in 1993, his final year in office. Due in large part to his
popularity gained from the “Pudong phenomenon,” Zhu later succeeded in
achieving his political ambition and became the Premier of China.61
The strategy Zhu employed is a classic example of global-city formation and
the infusion of foreign investment. He took advantage of Shanghai’s strategic
position from previous treaties and its location, felicitously known to the Chinese,
as the dragon’s head. Shanghai took out substantial foreign loans to invest in
massive infrastructure projects as a way to attract foreign speculation – providing
an international platform for financial exchange. This was expected to feed money
back into the system by fast business turnover. The formation of Pudong slowed
down the demolition of Shanghai’s architectural heritage which was in progress
since the opening of the country to the global market.
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
At the core of the Open Door Policy was the attraction of foreign
investment. The city’s new mandate would be to bring back the foreigners who left
Shanghai during the turmoil around the founding of the People’s Republic of
China. The appearance of Lujiazui, for Zhu, was biased towards emulating
Western cities, especially in the presence of high-rise towers and monumental
boulevards. With financial deals prepared for by the former Mayor Jiang, Zhu
promulgated his design for the city to be “a metropolis equal to New York and
London,” taking the city to its Golden Age. This included prodigious
infrastructure construction such as new traffic networks, sources of energy, urban
water facilities, and telecommunication projects.62 He forcefully put forward the
city’s development plan under the specific agenda: to be the “Oriental
Manhattan…to become an international metropolis of the twenty-first century.”63
In 1994, setting the stage for the unprecedented development of Shanghai, the
government-sponsored international conference on the strategic planning of
Pudong highlighted six ambitious objectives as outlined in “Shanghai, Towards the
Twentieth-First Century: A Research Report on Economic and Special
Development Strategy”:
To utilize the 6,300 square kilometer of multi-function megalopolis; to
achieve a GDP of RMB150,000 per capita with the expected growth rate of
11.4%; to transform Pudong into a tertiary-oriented economy with an
emphasis on finance, trade, and the service sector, to achieve the population
of 14 million; to restructure urban land use with a five square kilometer
Lujiazui and; to astronomically develop the new infrastructure for Pudong,
including the new airport and extensive highways.64
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History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
As observed in the early development of the Bund, the nature of assimilating
skylines of Western metropolises was already embedded in the tradition of
Shanghai from its early days.
In order to make sense of Shanghai’s urban form, we must understand
urbanism of the city from both ideological and physical perspectives. In the
ideological perspective, the next section explores the controversy over the
international competition for Lujiazui in the 1990s, demythisizes the politics, and
reveals the pre-conceived ideas that underlie “pragmatic nationalism.”
THE IDEALIZED URBAN FORM: THE MAKING OF LUJIAZUI
Underlying the selection of Lujiazui’s master plan, the politics of the
conceived urban form became the reality of Shanghai today. The sense of
nationalism embedded in the political interventions sparked a dramatic dialogue
between the reality of the situation and the fabricated dream of the authority.65
The planning of Lujiazui offers a dramaturgy of Chinese nationalism in response to
changes in the country’s international circumstances.66 While patriotism is
mandatory to regain esteem from several decades of decay, the connection to the
rest of the world via cultural transactions and foreign policy is a complex weave.
The tension between nationalism and “globalization,” is a path which Shanghai
must negotiate.67 The distancing of Shanghai’s image from being China through
the making of new urban forms was a bold national strategy and an international
maneuver. Globalization is a reciprocal product of this particular kind of
nationalism. In contrast to Shanghai in the 1930s, which was prosperity-driven,
40
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
the integration of Shanghai into the true international community and the world
system of economy became an approach to modernizing China as a whole.
In the early 1990s, Zhu Rongji, the Mayor of Shanghai, began his quest for
the new Shanghai by seeking consultation from the Institut d'Aménagement et
d'Urbanisme de la Région d'Ile de France in Paris. The result was the international
competition for Lujiazui in 1993. Taking into account an uncommonly loose
program, roughly calling for the development of four million square meters of
commercial space of the “twenty-first century city,” the assumption that this was
just an “ideas competition” is persuasive. The given “aim” was simply inclusive and
xenophobic:
To develop Pudong as a modern district with a rational development
structure, an efficient public transportation system, comprehensive urban
infrastructure, a rapid telecommunication system and a sustainable natural
environment.68
The only given existing condition was the Oriental Pearl TV Tower at the tip of
the shore, and the planned International airport at the southwest corner of Pudong
district. Among the top architectural firms that Zhu invited to compete, Richard
Rogers, Toyo Ito, Massimiliano Fuksas, and Dominique Perrault were the four
teams that actually submitted proposals. Rogers’ radial compact-city plan stood out
as the easiest to comprehend because of its forceful formalistic architectural quality,
which “can be appreciated as a singular object,” Marshall comments.69
Notwithstanding the arresting gesture, the scheme represented Rogers’s
considerable attention to the neighborhood-scale urban quality, not just the
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History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
monumentality of the high-rise city. The connection to the Bund as the relevant
precedent for envisioning Pudong was explicit. Roger wrote: “while the historic
Bund gave Shanghai a world famous skyline…it is on a nineteenth century scale.
Lujiazui will relate to it, but will be larger, on a scale appropriate to a city of the
twenty-first century.”70 The quality of urban form in Roger’s plan is phenomenal.
Roger’s conceptualized the urbanism of Shanghai through architectural-urbanist
lenses. The plan proposed a series of compound high-rise buildings, mixed with the
low-rise multi-function buildings clustered around a central open space. The
vehicular loop that spans in a circle across the project, serving as a “tube”
circulating people from a street level to the building level, connects the cluster to
the larger public space outside the center business district, and to the international
airport. Through a series of functional vertical arrangements of the large
infrastructural platform, Rogers’s plan separated people and automobile, making
the central business district an ideal car-free environment. The central open space
recalls Manhattan’s Central Park, as a significant recreational ground.
While the plan received enormous praise for its sensible planning creativity,
it was unavoidable that it would be criticized for its difficult implementation. Kris
Olds wrote: “[it] was pure paper architecture; an ideal city expressive of the
modernist ecotopia…No master plan of such complexity and technological
sophistication could ever be implemented in the messy and frenzied context of
Shanghai…[,that is,] the plan was pure theory.”71 Olds makes an interesting
observation. However, given Shanghai’s politics in the 1990s, the claim that
Roger’s scheme was too expensive is secondary. The subsequent history of
Lujiazui’s demonstrate an ambition to generate the global billboard by virtue of
architectural-urban expression that trumped economic rationality. To a degree, I
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
agree with Olds, especially considering the extreme confinement of formalistic
urban form, which might fail to accommodate the flexibility of Chinese cultural
dynamism. The urban form of Puxi consists of both planned and ad hoc urban
development; the integrity and identity of urban form has grown naturally out of
cultural and utilitarian responses to the physical form of the city. Rogers’ plan
imposes a rigidity that deviates such adaptive development over time.
Figure 9: Richard Rogers and Partner’s plan for Pudong, 1993.
Although Rogers’ plan was widely complimented, the competition judges
favored Perrault’s scheme, which encompasses a series of high-rise buildings along
the north and south sides of the shore, creating perpendicular corridors of
heterogeneous skyscrapers. One could easily relate the expression of this wall of
high-rise building along the waterfront corridor to the Bund. Despite the fact that
Ito’s and Fuksas’s plans were challenging and avant-garde in their emphasis on
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History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
programming urban form and blurring the boundary between object and space, the
abstraction and conceptual gestures of both plans failed to draw the attention of
the judges and were not discussed as much as Rogers’ and Perrault’s.
Figure 10: Dominique Perrault’s Plan for Lujiazui, 1993.
In the end, the juries made an anomalous decision. They picked the
“Chinese team’s” plan – the least complicated plan proposed by the Shanghai
Urban Planning and Design Institute. The de jure reason for the selection was, as
Marshall wrote:
Because the Chinese team presented the superior understanding of the local
environment…the scheme was deemed to be politically more acceptable and
it was technically easier to implement quickly72
Olds adds: “[t]he Shanghai team is familiar with the site, the program, the means
to implement the proposal. The proposal provides the image of a city ambitiously
44
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
conceived along a central axis which feeds the district while ensuring a large
amount of flexibility for future construction.”73 Not only does the plan fully
neglect public participation, but it also embraces a series of successful urban icons
borrowed from notable cities in the West.
The so-called “optimized plan” of the Chinese team encompasses the
desired elements taken individually from all four plans, idealizing roughly around
Roger’s and Perrault’s schemes, but, according to Rowe, using “functionalist
concepts popular in the west in the 1960s and 70s, with a general spatial
configuration that incorporated ring and radial roads serving clusters of relatively
intense development, with open-space preserves and greenbelts in between.”74The
central park and the waterfront promenade are highlighted as two major open
spaces, claimed by the designers as “the provision for good urbanism,” surrounded
and anchored by a series of high-rise buildings. The apparent element that is not
drawn from the proposals is the Century Avenue, proposed to appease the
government’s aspiration to have a civic element in the “manner of Paris,” referring
to the eighteenth century Champs Elysees, or specifically the program for its
extension “Mission Grand Axe” in 1991.75 The avenue was outsourced to be
designed, appropriately, by a French architect Jean-Marie Charpentier. In his
master plan, building’s heights are not uniformly fixed; thus, high-rise buildings are
to be located arbitrarily across the shore with an emphasis on the two sides of
Century Avenue.
45
History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
Figure 11: The Proposal by Shanghai Urban Planning Institute.
This seemed like Shanghai government hosted a world-class design
competition just to use the design of its own designer. If that was the case, why did
Zhu Rongji invite the élite architects to participate in this setup in the first place?
One answer lies in the mentality of Chinese business. The priority for a project is
usually given to the instant delivering of the conspicuous product. “[Because]
Shanghai's soul is in its openness to change, its tolerance and its absolute
pragmatism,” says Architect Ma Qingyun.76 In other words, tangibility, short-term
investment, secured turnover, and practicality are the identification of success,
especially in the context of Shanghai’s dynamic growth.77 Chow comments: “In
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
their own environment of economic institutions, Shanghai people seem to know
and are accustomed to their own rules, which have proven to be reliable based on
their wealth and success in the last ten years.”78
Zhu, a mastermind of China’s global economy, expected Shanghai to gain
instantaneous global attention from this “rigged” contest, and intended to immerse
Chinese architects in the planning practice internationally in order to broaden their
professional horizon.79 Resonating Fulong Wu’s argument on the influence of
globalization on Shanghai’s urban development, the competition created an
expected “catalytic effect,” which helped to break the ice for the new milieu of
contemporary built form and environment.80 That is, Zhu substantially succeeded
in both ways – no competition in the world was more noted than the Lujiazui in
the early 1990s, and truly, the Shanghai Urban Planning Institute had learned a
valuable lesson, which they used as a model, and professionally exploited
throughout the remaining years of the twentieth century.
As Shanghai’s new financial center, Lujiazui is located at the tip of the
Pudong shore with a strong visual connection to the old Puxi. The dialogue
between the two shores is not just the interaction between “now and then,” but the
encounter between the two faces of the city built in two different ways. While the
Bund had been eclectically built to become a symbolic façade of Shanghai, Lujiazui
was pre-conceived and erected to emulate the impression made from a series of
skyscrapers laid across the vast landscape. The expressiveness of urban form lies in
its “boldness.” American architect Benjamin Wood critically asserts: “Pudong is all
about show – it’s designed to create plots of land for monuments to corporate
power, the global economy.”81 What is considered as an urbanist strategy does not
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History, Power, and Modern Shanghai
48
seem to fit the purpose of showing the authority of Shanghai in the contemporary
time. Both the Bund and Pudong are case studies of how complicated uses of
architecture as visuals in a city re-construct meaning vis-à-vis a global narrative.
Despite the fact that the new development of Pudong was given a green
light from Beijing, the authorities had not seriously discussed the project for a
decade due to the investment risk. This was the case until the era of the Zhu
Rongji.82 Mayor Zhu ambitiously pushed the development of the plan, advocating
its accordance with the establishment of the municipal finance and trade company.
The new mega-infrastructure has been assigned to the west side of the city in
several master plans of Shanghai to support the establishment of Pudong, including
the extended subway lines, roads, highways, high-speed trains, and a new
international airport. As meticulously studied by Kris Olds, Richard Marshall and
Peter G. Rowe, the politics of the building of Lujiazui necessitates a replication of
the image of the great Western metropolises. This politics is a direct response to
the “pragmatic nationalism,” which is evidently immense in the making of new
urban space and architectural form.83
Whether the reinforcement the pragmatic nationalism using built form and
environment fail or succeed what we have learned is a series of ambitious attempts
to communicate certain messages of power to the world at large using visual
cultural symbols. The importance of the juxtaposing skylines of the Bund and
Pudong is not to be debated, but to be accepted. To understand Shanghai today,
given its relationship to its history, the next section will delve further into the city,
the heart of the New Shanghai – Lujiazui.
CHAPTER THREE
POLITICIZATION AND THE RHETORIC
OF SHANGHAI URBANISM
Despite the complete change of the Bund’s shoreline, the Bund has
remained remarkably intact stylistically. Yet, the time traveler felt the
dynamism of diverse modernities at work. The time traveler then made a
trip to the Planning museum, where he could see the whole city from a
bird’s-eye view. He was so shocked when he saw urban form of his city in
the “Great Model.” The planning staff came to him and gave him two
information pamphlets. First reads:
“Shanghai is better and better. The twenty-first century is full of promise. In
the new century, we will build Shanghai into the largest economic shipping
center in China, placing it in the first rank of historical cultural cities.
Furthermore, we will gradually build the city into one of the international
Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
central cities of economy, finance and trade: “the global metropolis of the
twenty-first century.” We firmly believe that with all the efforts that are
currently being made by the municipal government and the people of
Shanghai, we will be able to carry out our plans and bring all our goals to
fruition.”1
It is first useful to understand the goals of the city as underpinning the
specific “cause” that transforms its physicality. Can Shanghai really be the global
metropolis for the 21st century? The answer to this question lies in how “global
metropolis” is defined and what is to be expected from it. According to Sociologist
Saskia Sassen, a global city is:
An urban space with new economic and political potentialities, which
formulates the transnational identity and communicates … connecting sites
that are not geographically proximate yet are intensely connected to each
other.”2
By this measure, even without advanced technologies, Shanghai has always been a
global city.
The definition of a “global 21st-century” city, however, is ambiguous,
although it can be thought of as a future of free-market competition. In this sense
the extensive Chinese workforce can also be added to the equation.3 In order to
achieve the goal in a theoretical sense, the development of Shanghai’s urbanism
corresponds to the parameters of a compact urban place that provides the soft
cultural infrastructure, the organizational structure that allows diverse architectural
cultures to represent different cultural norms while still maintaining their
representational integrity by means of architectural and urban orderings. The
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
integrity of “form,” or urban identity, is required to establish a tangible perception
to which everyone can relate. The result of this process is the making of a
cosmopolitan city that can compete in a globalised economic context.
This chapter discusses the ways Shanghai might be understood through its
urbanism. The purpose is to realistically check the actuality of built environment in
relation to its history and political presence through first-hand primary sources,
which is to fill unanticipated voids that surfaced in the understanding of Shanghai
in a physical sense. This can be done from four following perspectives – urban
form, individual buildings and urban imagery, visualization of the skylines, and
streetscape. Using the city as a primary source, this chapter presents specific
information derived from my observations needed to authenticate the research.
That is, whereas the history is a cursory look of the city, this chapter presents
analytically microcosmic views of the city.
FIRST PERSPECTIVE: URBAN FORM
An aerial view of Puxi, which faces Pudong across the river to the west,
reveals a series of high-rise commercial towers and highways that are superimposed
on the old fabric of lilong, low-rise row houses adapted from the Western tradition
to accommodate the families of Chinese workers.4 The stark contrast between low-
rise lilong houses and corporate high-rises is primarily a result of lax (and/or absent)
zoning practices and height restrictions at the beginning of Deng’s economic
reform. As polar opposites of urban form – old low-rise fabric and the new high-
rise buildings – the current fabric creates a problematic discourse between old
forms of inhabitation and the new corporate culture. Whereas the gridiron
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Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
structure and the fabric of existing lilong houses could have been used by
contemporary developers as cultural elements upon which to expand, they were
instead considered as obsolete and, as such, prime targets for demolition.
Figure 12: Bird's-eye view of Shanghai in 1937.
What epitomizes this perspective is Charpentier’s Century Avenue,
Lujiazui’s main spine. The false premise of the avenue begins with the determina-
tion of its width to be exactly ‘one meter wider than the Champs Élysées’ in order to
denote the triumph of the making of this physically significant urban element. Its
penetration through the diagonal super block of parallel housing in Pudong creates
irregular plot shapes. The programming and anticipated use of the space in Pudong
has never been made clear. Although the Municipal Planning Bureau has
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
developed comprehensive zoning regulations and infrastructure plans, the District
Authority Control’s process of refining those plans with respect to the particular
district’s details, i.e. Floor Area Ratio and coverage, results in a changing of urban
form. Moreover, when the plan comes down to the Controlled Detailed Planning
Section, whose job it is to execute decisions, grant permission for buildings, and
regulate the formal quality of each plot, a series of performative rules and
regulations re-define the final form of the physical design without taking into
consideration any of the original planning attempts. In other words, there is no
central organization that gives a comprehensive overview of planning for the three
planning units, working independently from above.4
So, if we compare the proposed Avenue to its built reality, the continuous
platform of buildings along its length is absent. Charpentier designed Century
Boulevard to be the primary component that gives an appropriate scale to the
streets in order to facilitate interaction at the base of the buildings before getting
into the super high-rise buildings. If the plan had been faithfully executed, it could
have created a reasonably strong urban characteristic. In Lujiazui, however, not
only is the ground that mediates the perpendicular change missing, but the
arbitrary execution of its open space is also disruptive to any sense of coherence,
conjuring instead a monotonous experience in urban space.5
53
Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
54
Figure 13: Century Avenue, as originally designed by Arte, Jean Marie Charpentier et Associés.
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Figure 14: Century Avenue in reality.
55
Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
This monotony of the urban space is the result of a lack of development at
the pedestrian scale, which might have something to do with the attempt to make
Lujiazui into another Manhattan. Yet, while downtown Manhattan’s dense
skyscrapers are absorbed within the grid, and its lively street life directed by the
hyper-dense environment of a financial-scape, Pudong’s skyscrapers stand out as
scattered markers of individual buildings. The substantial distances between the
buildings, between the building and the open space, and between the building and
the pavement creates a lifeless street scene, almost depriving the city of its
exuberant life. While these actions have served to order the amalgamation of the
city’s urban form, in practice they have overlooked a more important concern
about the social stratification of a newly developed urban place.
SECOND PERSPECTIVE: BUILDINGS AND URBAN IMAGERY
Confronted by a jungle of glittering high-rises reminiscent of a science-
fiction movie, visitors to Shanghai might easily come to the conclusion that it is a
very rich city. Although there was, perhaps, one stage these buildings probably were
occupied; yet, since 2007, they are far from being fully occupied, and thus from
this perspective, the tall buildings in Lujiazui become purely symbolic. The
decision to position a handful of iconic skyscrapers side by side as a means of visual
competition with other dense cities in the West is telling. The original master plan
called for some skyscrapers to be grouped together in the heart of the CBD, while
other high-rise buildings were to be scattered randomly on both the eastern and
western sides of Century Boulevard. Such a distribution would have accentuated
the role of the towers as signifiers explicitly reinforcing an instant identity. These
skyscrapers do for Shanghai what the Eiffel Tower does for Paris. As Roland 56
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Barthes puts it, not only does built form generate meanings that constitute the
conception of the city, but the impact of the materialization of ideas also prompts
the creation of a new civic realm.6 The idea of making a great cityscape consisting
of high-rise buildings and monumental elements is essential in the making of
Lujiazui. Yet, this district’s tall buildings were not built to satisfy the need for
vertical expansion due to any lack of horizontal space, rather they were built for the
purpose of generating monumental symbolic value.7 The monumentality of these
urban elements are the unsubtle evidence of the actions taken by municipal
government, and fulfilled by the developer and designer, in the making of the
particular ‘form’ that recalls the patriotic past of China. It is not surprising that
their pragmatism would lead to the easiest way of establishing a level economic
playing field, if not a superior economic playing field, by building the highest
skyscrapers: the players being Shanghai’s competitors seeking global-city status.
This is evident from the attempt by Shanghai’s authority, and its
development partner, to make the Jin Mao Tower and the World Financial Centre
the tallest buildings in the world, and to be located in the Lujiazui master plan.
Both designs come from elite American architectural firms, and are programmed to
be mixed-use developments, consisting of office space, hotel rooms, conference
halls, observation decks, with shopping complexes on their ground floors. For the
Jin Mao Tower, the upper part of its trunk is simply an ultra-high atrium
surrounded by the corridors of hotel rooms, wrapped by a curtain-wall skin. The
elevation of the building to that extreme height is an obvious manifestation of
monumentality. Considering that labor in China is inexpensive, the construction
of both these buildings does not require as much financial investment as would
have been the case if they were to be erected in America or Europe.8
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Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
The semiotic quality of both buildings is obviously intended in yet another
manner: the local expressive references and the deliberate acquisition of visible
symbols of progress.9 It is as if their building is concrete proof of the ability to
match Western architecture style in height and grandeur, while simultaneously
leaving a unique indelible mark. The 88-story high Jin Mao Tower was designed to
resemble the ancient Kaifang pagoda (the legendary 11th-century Chinese brick
pagoda in Henan province) to instill a sense of nationalism in the local population.
The design of the 460-meter tall World Financial Centre has been the object of
debate over the abstract connotations of the circular void on the top of the
building. This, by chance, hit on a sensitive issue between China and Japan. The
New York Times journalist Howard French comments:
The representative of Mr. Minoru Mori [one of Japan’s foremost real estate
developers who funded the building of the World Financial Centre] gamely
protested that the circle with the sky ride was based on a traditional Chinese
symbol – the moon gate – but in the end they quietly backed down,
replacing the hole with a squarish slot.10
Also, even after the design had been finalized, some ten to twenty
additional floors were added to the building. This is because the clients demanded
that the building be not only a World Financial Centre, but also the world’s tallest
building.11 The confidence of modern Chinese capitalism was confirmed in the
making of ‘form’ – the envelope that uses the marvel of engineering technology.12
58
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Figure 15: Left Kaifang Pagoda, and Right Jin Mao Building.
59
Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
Figure 16: Left Model of the World Financial Center as original designed. Right A Rendering of the building after the circular opening on the top was replaced by the rectangle. What this perspective evokes is not the uniqueness of urban semiotics in
Shanghai, but the certain way in which high-rise buildings are pre-conceptualized
with a simple inference of power manifestation at work.
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
THIRD PERSPECTIVE: STREETSCAPES
The skyline iconography makes one wonder how people on the street
experience it. Leaving aside the issue of mimicking Manhattan, since we cannot
assume the planner of Lujiazui had in mind the necessity of socialization at the
pavement level, one can conclude that the streets in Lujiazui are not efficiently used
given their excessive width. Century Boulevard has eight traffic lanes, one traffic
island, four bicycle lanes (two each way), and two pavements that are as wide as the
traffic lanes, all comprising a total width of more than 330 feet. All the streets that
branch off the Boulevard are half this width. The district is not dense; hence, the
public activity encouraged by urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs does not exist.13
This problem has been observed by the Shanghai municipality, which has since
retrofitted the pavements by embedding them with a series of pocket landscape
parks in order to humanize their size.
61
Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
62
Figure 17: Century Avenue and its oversized sidewalk. Seen from this photograph is a series of linear pocket parks retrofitted into the deserted sidewalk.
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Figure 18: Model of the proposed Century Avenue by Charpentier, showing the relationship between the sidewalk to the high-rise buildings along the avenue, and from the buildings to the low-rise residential fabric as one moves further away from the avenue.
63
Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
Despite the fact that Lujiazui is deserted at first glance, what might shed
light on the situation is a comparison between the condition of streets in Lujiazui
and “pre-Lujiazui” Shanghai. Street life is fostered by human-scale elements (both
planned and ad hoc) corresponding to the nature of the dwellers’ norms of
inhabitation. This observation takes the methods by which the street was
functionally and culturally conceived in pre-Lujiazui Shanghai as a point of
reference. Prior to the development of Pudong in the early 1990s, Pudong was
basically an undeveloped territory with warehousing and industry in the early
twentieth century and ship building in the latter half of the century. To understand
the interaction between architecture and the urban form in terms of how its people
perceive their city, it is essential also to look at how streets in Puxi have historically
formed and performed over time.
In 1930’s Puxi, the main interactions between the building and the street
were business transactions. Pavements served as the mediation. Beyond the
mediating pavement, however, labor activities, as well as various modes of
transport, were taking place. There were always Chinese laborers loading and
unloading cargo from ships, pulling rickshaws and, waiting for customers, walking
along the street hoping to get itinerant employment. The Bund was usually
crowded, but it was never over-crowded, since the major public and commercial
spaces were located in the inner parts of the city, in the foreign settlements. One of
the most fashionable vistas was from the top of a building on the West Bund,
looking down to a street that curves to the east. Here, the Custom House and the
Bank of China were the monumental landmarks. Five modes of transportation
were used on the Bund, according to the status of the passengers: foot, bicycle,
rickshaw, tram, and car. In contrast to the streets of the Bund, the streets of
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Lujiazui are confined to a single narrative. While the Bund embraced energetic
street dynamism by its functioning as a reception point and travel corridor,
Lujiazui streets are usually empty and deserted, illustrating the complete failure to
relate the scale of the building to the scale of the pavement. The size of streets in
Pudong is not defined by prevailing modes of transportation or commercial
requirements; instead, it is demarcated by a political agenda: to convey
monumentality that helps to reinforce a sense of nationalism.14
Figure 19: Left International Settlement in the 1920s , and Right St. Pauls and Ludgate Hill from Fleet Street, London, in1906
Figure 20: Street scene in Shanghai in 1900s. Photograph: Virtual Shanghai Project
65
Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
Figure 21: Empty sidewalk of Century Avenue during rush hours.
FOURTH PERSPECTIVE: VISUALIZATION OF THE SKYLINES
Both skylines, facing each other across the river, are important icons of this
former Treaty Port city. The similarity between the two is that the images of both
are meant to display the expectant future of this urban place. For the Bund, it was
the commercial value of individual business on the Treaty Port’s shore, which the
appearance of a Western environment could reinforce. The making of the Bund
skyline comes from an internal need: the need for visual representation using built
form was necessitated by the establishment of the various external cultures that
existed in Shanghai from the opening of the Treaty Port. In contrast, the visual
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
representation of Pudong is a result of an external push. As the Bund is a linear
corridor, the appearance of the building is vividly experienced as a panorama – the
height of a building is not as important as the degree to which it can be seen from
afar; a building can be clearly perceived no matter where the viewers are. But for
Pudong, with a setting that spans the large urban space, the height and size of
buildings are essential, which is why the planning of Pudong favours high-rise
buildings. Though specifically designed for effect, their effect is weaker than that of
the ad hoc Bund.
In Kevin Lynch’s terms, this understanding resonates with the “pre-
conceived imagery – something to which the observer can relate by virtue of its
spatial relations to the observer.”16 The Bund is a skyline that allows both visual
and physical interactions between the city and its people, for the image one sees
and the physical interactions with the buildings are firmly reinforced by its
inhabitable quality. Pudong’s skyline, however, is relatively abstract. Not only is
the composition of the Pudong skyline too complex to be perceived
comprehensively (only outlines and gestures are expressed through visuals), but the
human scale is also lost in the overwhelmingly vast and pedestrian-unfriendly
planning of its public space. For instance, Century Avenue is too wide given the
height of the surrounding buildings, and its lack of public functions. Considering
the vastness of the space unrelated to Everyman’s sense of scale, it is difficult to
imagine how a person would be able to coherently conceive and remember the
physical space by its urban characteristics. Yet, Pudong is not without living beings.
Coming up from a subway station, visitors encounter the lack of directional
indicators; they might not even have any clue that they have arrived in Pudong.
Despite the clarity of Pudong’s high-rise buildings when viewed from the Puxi
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Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
shore, they do not help to orient people because they are placed arbitrarily in the
vast concrete landscape of Lujiazui, which does not enable visitors to relate
themselves to anything familiar. Then, as they start to walk from the Oriental Pearl
Tower, at the north-western end of Century Avenue, to Lujiazui Park, the area’s
central park, it takes fifteen minutes. The distance between these vertical and
horizontal icons of the city is more than enough for the impression of the
monumentality of the vertical to disappear and to be replaced by the flatness of the
horizon without a single remnant of the mental image of the city. The size of the
Avenue and the location of the buildings do fulfill the intended political posturing,
but the overwhelming scale fragments any visual effect.
Figure 22: Lujiazui’s Central Park, located in the center of the CBD surrounded by rows of high-rises and scattered buildings with no supporting density.
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
Figure 23: The famous postcard scenery of Pudong’s skyline
The much-celebrated image of Pudong is apparent only when viewed from a
distance. Regarding its principal connotation of progress by means of built form,
Pudong needs the entire environment. While the Bund does not need a major
iconic building to define its symbolic significance, the image of Pudong is
dominated by the unorthodox appearance of the “Pearl,” the pagoda-shaped
skyscraper, and the series of modern reflective-skin buildings. The inevitable
emergence of modern and contemporary building typologies disturbs the cultural
identity and the way in which people conceive their meanings. Both the Bund and
Pudong are case studies of how complicated uses of architecture as visuals in a city
construct meaning vis-à-vis global narrative. Notwithstanding the tradition of
naively mimicking skylines, because “Manhattan has many skyscrapers,” the fact
that they are really “assembling” it without a thorough understanding of their own
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Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
need is critical. This causes new cities to look like one another. A fact re-asserted by
The Economist:
No wonder that swathes of Seoul look like swathes of Shanghai. Even the
most ambitious buildings, many designed by trophy architects who flit from
one country to the next, often seem alien to their environs.17
Whether they fail or not, it is certain that they are trying to convey to the world
their own messages of monumentality in service to a larger agenda of the identities
of power. Observed by Jennie Chen: “It [Shanghai] has been torn asunder by
colonialism, war, political exhaustion, economic ebbs and flows, and social
implosions. Yet look at it now; it is spectacular by all visual standards.”18
SUMMARY: MEANS OF UNDERSTANDING
The selling point of Shanghai’s tourism in the early twentieth century was
the elegant image that replicated Western neo-classical styles. The insistent focus
on the monumental, iconic representation of Shanghai consistently obscured its
human scale, especially the sense of inhabitation of the city. Historically, the Bund
was on the tourist map because of its iconographic nature. Its accommodation of
many intruding cultures did not succeed in mediating between tradition and
modernity, but rather inclined toward abrupt representations of external cultural
norms. Also apparent in a microcosmic perspective, the inherent contradiction
between local and foreign notions of open space – observed from the street scenes –
represented the other notion of a modern Chinese city, particularized by the
tension between the leap towards Western modernity and finding a new Chinese
identity through a mixture of diversified cultures. 70
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
What the observations in this paper suggest is a fourfold conclusion. Firstly, that
there was a lack of coordination in the planning process, which resulted in a
fragmented urban fabric. Secondly, the overwhelming reliance on the
monumentality of urban elements, such as high-rise buildings, without any
concern for their utilitarian role in the city, is not conducive to a felicitous
distribution of density in Shanghai’s current urban environment. Thirdly, there is
an absence of the human scale in the streetscape that diminishes contact, the sense
of security, and the pedestrian energy level of the city. And fourthly, the
production of the city as an image creates, as suggested by the first conclusion, a
fragmented urban form and urban spatial organization. This is the reality of
Lujiazui.
Whether or not pedestrians saw the monumental buildings along the Bund
as urban icons of which they should be proud, or as a mimicry of the Western
metropolis that eroded their Chinese identity, is important to the holistic
understanding of Shanghai, which has to be contextualized and understood from
every possible angle. Knowing how and from where we view the history of
Shanghai enables us to see beyond the veneer of the magnificent scenery of the
Bund and approach the fuller “reality” of Shanghai.
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Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism
72
Figure 24, 25: Above Hyper dense high-risescape of Puxi – the “Old Shanghai,” and Below Sparse cityscape of Lujiazui.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE POLITICS OF BUILT FORM
Eventually, our time traveler’s reactions went from surprise to fascination.
He then took a walk from the Bund toward the West side on Nanjing Road,
expecting to find the Racecourse; he instead found the People’s Square.
After wrestling with the automatic ticketing machine, which he surprisingly
liked, he took Shanghai Subway line three – which was now comfortable for
him – to Lujiazui. Coming out at the new landscape of Century Avenue, he
was totally disoriented and lost. The scale of the road was too big. The
imaginary landscape of coherent built forms, which had excited him when
viewing it from the other side of the river, decomposed into the vast and
gigantic fragments upon arriving in Lujiazui’s district.
Not wanting to be influenced by nostalgia nor be branded as a conservative
“old Shanghainese,” he asked the question: “how can I understand this place
for its contemporary value?”
The Politics of Built Form
Fundamental to the argument of this book is the undeniable presence of the
“New Shanghai” – the term that evokes an image of a city enmeshed in capitalism,
high-tech infrastructure, and contemporary architecture. It is the fabrication of a
so-called “instant urbanity”1 that responds to the culture of a capitalist-oriented
market economy. The ascendancy of the new skyline of Lujiazui is the outcome of
the move toward “Open Door” modernization (as opposed to the earlier
modernization during the treaty port era). The Open Door policy in the late 1980s
made the development of Lujiazui unprecedented in speed of construction,
approach to marketability, and urban form. The new spatial organization is viewed
from a different angle as a result of the shift in market strategy. Fulong Wu
describes:
“..[U]rban growth…[in Shanghai]…is a result of a profound shift from
‘developmental’ state to the ‘entrepreneurial’ city, which takes its place [in
this case, Lujiazui] as a spatial commodity.”2
Shanghai can be understood not only as a city of physical expression, but also as a
breeding ground of cultural modernizations compelled by the onslaught of
commercialization from the 1840s onward. For instance, the Treaty Port, the
regional center for commerce and industry, and the focal point of China’s
economy can only be operational where the arbitrariness of cultural resistance
persists through an ethnically diversified environment. The urgent needs of the
new urban identity pushed incrementally by the so-called “socialist market
economy” resulted in obviously exorbitant urban experimentation. Shanghai is
always a natural choice for the experiment because, as commented by Zheng
Shiling, throughout the history, “Shanghai has always been an open city.”3
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
SHANGHAI COSMOPOLITANISM:
THE CULTURAL INFRASTRUCTURE
The making of Shanghai can be accounted for largely by considering the
political-economic force operating within the city. As the growth of the city has been
predominantly the result of its advantageous position as a port, Shanghai’s
economy has always been prosperous, but under the control of internal politics.4
From the beginning of the colonial period, through the age of “Oriental Paris (and
Manhattan),” to the present, a series of political interventions has forcefully
changed the city’s built environment. The underlying factor that makes the
intensity and the level of physical transformation of Shanghai different from other
cities in China is its cosmopolitan society, and its short urban history. The cultural
infrastructure of the city has been gradually softened by the intrusion of foreign
values, represented through all possible forms of environment. Because there has
never been a significant resistance from the Shangahinese themselves, the
perception of the city has consistently been dominated by the “Shanghailanders,”
especially during the Golden Age.
Heterogeneity, as brought about by hybridization became the internal
culture of Shanghai. So, as many scholars point out, Shanghai’s urban culture has
been created, manipulated, and contextualized by the foreign models. By the
1930’s, so deeply rooted was the amalgamation of external cultures that it was
dubbed “the Other China,” to use Marie-Claire Bergère’s term.5 Prior to the
present, Shanghai had never been considered a focal point for cultural
development, but rather a melting pot of everything that was possible to encourage
the growth of the city as China’s economic engine. Shanghai was “the Emperor’s
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The Politics of Built Form
ugly daughter”: she may be ugly, but she wields the power. This power enabled
Shanghai to freely ignore or embrace all precedents in order to modify the city’s
attractive image, in accordance with the whims of whomever was in authority at
the time. The common perception is that Shanghai was, has been, and will
continue to be the “goose” that lays golden eggs for China’s leap towards economic
modernization. Serving the city’s economic role, hybrid culture is fundamental to
Open Door capitalism. Not only does it welcome foreign cash flow for circulation
in China, but it also fosters business transactions from every possible channel,
themselves loosened by the pre-conceived “Shanghai as a goose” mentality. So, by
nature, the culture of Shanghai is the culture of hybridity. Moreover, the idea of
expanding the city across the river to Pudong is by no means new – the Japanese
vision of Pudong in the 1940s is closest to what we see today. Chinese Celebrity
Architect Ma Quinyun comments:
[The hybridity] is indeed the true [Shanghai’s] Chineseness. Everything is in
constant mutation; nothing is set as fixity. We [the Shanghainese] don't
follow any spatial models. 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.6
The existence of Lujiazui, however, was not solely economic, but the inevitable
result of several factors. It was initiated by spatial necessity as Shanghai required
physical expansion in order to accommodate its floating population. It was driven
by the Open Door modernization concept, and pushed by the progressive politics
of Shanghai’s government. It was also enabled by Chinese pragmatism. Yet,
Lujiazui ultimately owes its existence to the soft cultural infrastructure of Shanghai
cosmopolitanism and its facilitation of the city’s heterogeneous nature.
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
THE POLITICS OF BUILT FORM
By constructing new but false images of Shanghai that does not exist,
planners and architects are “manipulating history” by manipulating
geography, resting the city’s future on an edge between the pain of historical
reality and the futile hopes of a city that yearns for the reshaping of history.7
The issue of politics is essential to the understanding of Shanghai not as an
ordinary Chinese city, but a city that China desires to exploit. I have been building
my argument on Rhoads Murphey’s and Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s analytical notions
of “Shanghai exceptionalism.”8 Politics in this sense is confined to the
understanding of “individual or collective choices” driven by aspirations to greater
status and power that inform the design of this particular built form and
environment. The establishment of a “Shanghai special economic” zone in 1984 is
one such choice yielding both a political statement and a physical form,
demonstrating the aim to make Shanghai an economic powerhouse of international
trade. Again, as implied in Bergère’s accounts on the breakneck pace of Shanghai’s
urban development, Shanghai was a southeastern city along with other cities in the
Pearl River Delta that was chosen in the 1990s to operate as the “head of the
dragon.”9 This imagery was deployed by Deng in the confrontation with the so-
called “conservative bureaucracy in Beijing”10 in the Post-Mao era. In keeping with
William Skinner’s 1964 model of China’s political cognitive geography, the
Beijing-centric view of the regime’s power in the 1980s would have required
keeping the capital city a mere symbolic city, shielded from any intervention which
might disturb alignments of Chinese cosmology and power recognized by the
Chinese from the ancient time.11 In other words, Deng realized that Beijing had to
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The Politics of Built Form
remain conservative, and anonymous economically, but he knew he could do
whatever he wanted with Shanghai. In order to enlarge the available space to
support massive expansions of the Open Door’s economy, the idea of moving
across the river to Pudong was introduced. The timing was right to gain national
prestige and power on the global stage; this finally justified the overwhelming
expense of the required infrastructure investments.
Although there was no official study on the development plan, the
approximate cost of expansion across the north-south axis of Puxi, which were
mostly farmlands, could also be as considerable as building up a new business town
in Pudong. The uneconomical investment in infrastructure, which had prevented
similar attempts in the city’s short urban history, became less unimportant
compared to the far more critical resurrection of the entire country’s economic
engine.
By moving away from the pre-conceived image of Shanghai and other
Chinese cities, the Shanghai government and the central power together were
strongly convinced that they could manifest liberal economic progress by direct
confrontation and competition. Lujiazui’s skyline is not meant to replicate the
skyline of Manhattan, but to succeed and replace it – beating Manhattan in its own
game – ambitiously proclaiming a new era of world economic power and the
shifting of the global financial center from the West to the East. The result is an
absolute control in the draconian exploitation of urban elements, putting
democracy – the making of urban form in a sociological aspect – in a subsidiary
position. The idea in itself might sound unreasonably bold, but the fact that the
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way in which the Chinese central authority idolizes progress should not be
underestimated.
The Bund might have declined a great deal from the Communist take-over,
but the reason that it could not be used for the ambitious program of the “New
Shanghai” was that the space requirements for the new city were beyond its
capacity. This was the reason for the re-assessment of Pudong as the new
development entity. The first job of the new business center was to reinforce the
new urban identity to promulgate its prominence in the global economy. The
emphasis on the proposals of the international competition of Lujiazui was not
accepted on innovation, creativity, or sustainability, but rather on the feasibility,
the ease of implementation, and the desired image of the city. This resulted in a
series of incomprehensible urban elements, including the arbitrarily distributed
urban plan that accommodates an over-sized boulevard, deserted central park,
gargantuan high-rises, and neglected waterfront. What is seen as an urbanist
strategy to design a better city out of the tabula rasa of Pudong was not taken
seriously by the authorities who were fixated on constructing a simulacrum of a
Western metropolis built elsewhere collectively over the course of the previous two
centuries.
While international architects espoused a model for a new urban place
drawn from the lessons of failed modern cities, the interplay of politics had already
dictated a particular form. The existence of tall skyscrapers in a place that is a vast
landscape is an anti-thesis to the “form follows finance” theory of the skyscraper.12
Michael Masterson writes: “Shanghai itself is so over the top…[y]ou wander about
slack-jawed and dumbfounded, staring up at the gargantuan buildings and
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The Politics of Built Form
wondering who built them, who occupies them, and who pays the rent? (Four
hundred skyscrapers at, say, two hundred million dollars apiece - what does that
come to and how can it be justified?)”13 The final plan of Lujiazui reflects the
politics of built form through the “international presence in response to a new
globalized environment,” which, according to Zhang Xudong – or even Fredric
Jameson – is postmodern to the core.14 Peter Rowe reflects on this as a “missing of
the middle ground.”14
Taking away the political interventions and mobilizations that have created
it, Shanghai would either decline, as many scholars have hypothesized, due to its
moral decay (the support from working class, and intellectuals would no longer be
there to sustain the presence of liberality) or, at the other extreme, it would
“organically grow” and, at the same time, heal itself from the mortal wounds to
become a Western metropolis like Manhattan or Chicago. Lujiazui would still be
built, but in a less aggressive way since there would be no need to oppose the
established skyline. Its job would be to support the demand for the reallocation of
the financial sector, providing an opportunity for the short-sighted rationalized
economy of scale, rather than the steroidal “economy of speed.”
PERCEPTIONS OF SHANGHAI
So, how should we perceive Shanghai, considering its condition of hybridity
and the abrupt leap from rural to urban and from urban to “hyper-urban” as a
result of the government’s desire to make an instant image for the city? The
answers are twofold. The first comes from a historical angle. The development of
Pudong as a whole is an “inflation” of Shanghai’s urban development. Despite the 80
Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
great difference in scale, the gradual building of the Bund was no less provocative
than the instant “making” of the Pudong New Financial District today. In fact, in
a socio-economic perspective, the Bund waterfront created a larger impact on the
urban realm, considering the “bleakness” and the lack of urban experience of the
city at the turn of the nineteenth century. The building of the Bund was a cultural
explosion since it was built on top of a fishing village. In addition, taking into
account the proximity of the building to the waterfront, the monumentality of the
Bund was unparalleled even by Western standards. The prime location of the
waterfront of the new financial city became its identity to global traders. It indeed
put Shanghai on the map of global finance during the period of “Rising Shanghai.”
If we take the building of the Bund as a precedent for the subsequent urban
development, the making of Lujiazui is nothing new. Ackbar Abbas comments:
“Shanghai today is… also something more subtle and historically allusive: the city
as a remake…”16 The purpose of Lujiazui is to create an impact similar to the one
made by the Bund in the 1930s. The detachment of the superficial planning
process from corresponding functions of townscape fails to grasp the sophistication
of the image of the Bund. A city of a vast non-programmed landscape,
environment unfriendly to pedestrians, and high-rise jungles, although successful
in attracting lucrative investments, falls short in attracting people. I am talking
about a population representative of Shanghai.
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The Politics of Built Form
Figure 26: Panorama of Shanghai’s skyline showing the juxtaposition of two
skylines: the Old colonial and the new modern skyscrapers.
Lujiazui will continually attract foreign flows of capital and provide massive
job opportunities for the citizens of Shanghai – but in what sense? Shanghai in the
1930s consisted of foreigners and immigrants; the city’s culture was a responsive
mechanism to the influx of the “otherness,” creating a so-called “Shanghai culture.”
Built form and environment were not pre-designed to cope with the change, but
were continually added in order to accommodate the exciting commercial
initiatives and the need for the image. The opposite is true of Pudong where
everything needed for an anticipated future was chosen for maximum impact. In a
similar vein, if Lujiazui is not to follow the same footsteps but to move beyond
what Puxi achieved in both qualitative and quantitative senses – money and
identity – it will have to deal with the “contemporariness” of Shanghai in the same
way Puxi did in the 1930s. Lujiazui may or may not have to deal with the same
factors. These include foreign investors and foreigners seeking their fortunes in a
vibrant and dynamic insulated business atmosphere.
The second answer comes from an architectural-urban point of view. The
perception of Shanghai to some extent hinges on the understanding of hybrid
urbanism. It is useful to return to our earlier query: Is the urbanism of Shanghai
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
hybrid? Has the urbanism of Shanghai ever been hybrid? The answer is neither just
yes or no; but this perception should be secondary to the understanding of the city
as a physical expression of the collective visions of its planners. Most important
modern cities have evolved with changing technologies and global commerce.
However, Shanghai took a quantum leap from a feudal past to the modern age.
Hybrid urbanism in itself does not alter justifications of the different faces of the
city. Instead of trying to search for the identity of Chinese urban culture, it may be
just that hybridity is indeed the intrinsic characteristic of Shanghai urbanism. The
abrupt leap from rural to urban after the Treaty of Nanjing in the shadow of the
Opium War represents the domination of foreign planning and the erosion of
domestic culture. As Shanghai had never been an urban place prior to the opening
of the Treaty port, external forces brought about the urbanism of Shanghai from
the start. Puxi developed as a western city positioned in old China – a condition
that was inherently hybrid.
In this sense, if we use the meaning of hybridity as a “mixing of two cultural
confluences,” the emergence of the modern Treaty port and the city of
Shanghai was solely an outcome of one political ideology, which then
influenced the making of the city. There is no “native Shanghainese.” Either
the original inhabitants moved out of the city during the settlement period
or were dominated by the foreign culture to become “colonial Shanghai”
urbanites. The native presence has never been sufficiently strong to persist
under the intrusion of foreign dominance. The city was re-composed by
divergent cultural forces.
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The Politics of Built Form
84
From the city scale, Shanghai enjoyed the coexistence and incorporation of
different planning elements, including the super block, central public recreational
space, commercial boulevards, and the lilong. Thanks to the massive immigration
of the foreigners who had made the city a cosmopolitan urban place, the
unprecedented Westernized plans of the city were accepted by the citizenry who
were not attached to the old Shanghai. Lujiazui’s existence does not hybridize
Shanghai. As a financial center “out there” to serve a particular purpose of the
government, this “Chinese City for the Twenty-First Century” is autonomous by
nature. Apart from the fact that it was built out of a field of swamps across the river
from the Bund where there was no cultural significance, its programs and functions
were solidly defined by the planning bureau to be separated from those of Puxi. Its
unique infrastructure was ambitiously put forth toward becoming the “Other
Shanghai.” Its purpose was to attract global flows of capital through its financial
service sector.15 The city image of Lujiazui was expected in the same way to
displace the image of the existing Shanghai, the Bund.
To pursue this argument further, Shanghai has always been the economic
engine of China; therefore the fabrication and construction of the new global
economic culture are logically rationalized by the way in which the city extends this
perception. If there was genius loci at any given time of urbanized Shanghai, it
would be the being “Non-Chinese China,” or the hybrid culture of cosmopolitan
Shanghai.
CONCLUSION
The making of both The Bund and Lujiazui can be conceived as a
production of image, supported by the demand for economic advantage. The
purposes of the making of both skylines are confined to a single keyword,
“foreigners.” But in a different way: foreigners built the Bund for themselves, while
Lujiazui was created by the Chinese to attract foreign flows of capital. Setting aside
an issue of urban heritage versus the new high-tech urban elements across the river,
it is obvious that the planning of Lujiazui is less concerned with the tastes of the
public.
Although the making of the Bund skyline during the early twentieth century
was superficial to the extent that the chosen forms of the “design templates” were
derived from the Western precedents to replicate particular images, the abstract
quality of urban space imbedded in the spatial organization of the Bund waterfront
facilitated its acceptance by the society as discussed earlier in this book. This
Conclusion
mediated the different internal social factor in social structure between the
foreigners and the Chinese who lived in Shanghai. This is not the case for Lujiazui.
Notwithstanding the fact that a particular “form” was pre-determined by the
authority, several famous architects were invited to submit their design proposals in
order to provide some fresh ideas, which were to be judged for their “formal”
quality rather than the quality of the plan conceived in the manner of
contemporary urban design.
The politics behind the rejection of the favored plan by Richard Rogers
reinforces the argument that the idea of the building of the “new image” was
already pre-conceived. There is no attempt to implement any urbanistic elements
proposed by Rogers. Reading through the physical urban form of Lujiazui, it is
difficult to find the relationship between forms of buildings and the urban
structure as far as their integrity of urban expression. The abrupt changes in the
scale of the building to the streets disturb the urban morphology. The lofty
political ideals opted for superlative image, the “tallest skyscrapers,” the “longest
bridge,” the “largest boulevard.”
In this book, I have sought to understand the nature of the driving global
forces that are propelling the production of Shanghai’s Lujiazui today in
relationship to its semi-colonial past represented by the Bund in the 1930s, and to
call attention to the emergence of Shanghai in the world through its intrinsic
potential, setting aside the issue of its diminishing “historical authenticity.” By
tracing the history and politics of Shanghai, this thesis shows the set of conditions
that have forged Shanghai. “The man who lived seventy years ago,” provides a one-
sided reflection on the radical change of urbanism essential to the examination of
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
the history of this resurrected city. While our man would not be expected to
explore areas outside the cityscape, his standing in front of the Oriental Pearl TV
Tower enables him to gain a pedestrian’s perception of the holistic function of
built form and environment. The situation and social context of the time he came
from is different from today. The difficulty of doing justice to the architecture and
urbanism of Shanghai lies in the historical context of both The Bund and Lujiazui,
for which the time traveler story provides a framework.
Shanghai will not be able to escape its nature of being a hyper-competitive
competitor in the track of global economy – truly, it has always been.
Nevertheless, although the opportunities are seized, the cons of the rivalry
need to be seriously taken into consideration. The national goal to put Shanghai on
the map of global finance is equally as important as the rights of local citizens to
comprehend and cherish their urban realms. Attention must be paid to the process
of “urban retrofitting” to fulfill the needs of the city. That is, the market economy,
which has been responsible for putting a market town on an international standing
with other great metropolises of commerce, must continue to operate on the
premise of making Shanghai a city of cultural diversity. It took Puxi more than a
century to be loved and cherished by its dwellers. This process was brought about
by virtue of the gradual construction of its own urban culture – the culture of
cosmopolitanism – eventually overcoming the fact that the city was no more than a
cash cow for the foreigners.
Shanghai must be understood in terms of how two urban orders are
balanced: Human interventions, as the mechanisms of physical manipulation and
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Conclusion
88
construction, and internal social transformations, as the cultural value “from within”
that are subject to the way the city works beyond the gaze of the artificiality of the
built environment. This book suggests no balance exists between these two orders
due to the impossibility of judgment on this qualitative (conceptual) consideration,
but rather outlines the sets of social and cultural conditions by which the city has
been transformed throughout its short but complicated history dominated by its
politics while represented by its urban form.
Our time traveler never liked the “Ugly Pearl” – neither did I – but he could
not avoid seeing it. Its overwhelming scale and the notorious form
distinguished it from the rest of Shanghai’s cityscape. It was everywhere, in
the postcards, magazine, advertisements, and billboards. He started to realize
that this was propaganda using the entire environment to promote a
particular point of view!
The hyper-modern environment can be captured and remembered not only
by the lens of the camera, but also by the lenses of every visitor’s eyes. Before
he realized it, he started to embrace its impressive silhouette, as it gradually
replaced his initial perception of Shanghai. It was a déjà vu – the Bund was
not likable when it was first built but later became the symbol of the Old
Shanghai. After looking beyond the ostentatious appearance of the New
Shanghai, by virtue of its politicized history, the Pearl stands as a true
symbol of its “own task,” making sense of the city’s new identity as Shanghai
Contemporary.
That is to say, he began to like Contemporary Shanghai – so do I.
AFTERWORD
It is my honor to write an afterword for my former exchange student from
Thailand. When Non Arkaraprasertkul first arrived in Oklahoma, USA, the only
thing I knew about Thailand was that it was an exotic Asian country. A young boy
arrived at my home with black hair, Asian eyes and the slimness typically associated
with Asians. Other than the physical characteristics which were similar to mine,
there was very little with which I could make a connection. Although my own
parents were immigrants from China, the cultural difference was still dramatic.
Non was understandably shy and struggling with a language and culture vastly
different from his.
An early sign of his excellent artistic talent was an original drawing of my
house. I noticed his intense concentration and his rapid paint strokes. It seemed
that he preferred his artistic communication to verbal communication. By
November, sparks started to shine from his previously hidden personality. He
Afterword
made friends rapidly after that and even organized the other exchange students
with activities. He designed a T-shirt for everyone which further cemented their
friendship. Non became a true ambassador of Thailand to his friends and to me.
His adeptness at finding friendships has been an asset in his career. He has been
able to make contacts with brilliant people. His tremendous artist talent shows up
not only in his drawing and architectural renderings, but also in his ability to
recognize great artists and great architecture. This combination of conviviality and
master artisanship cannot but lead him to the most exciting architectural
happenings in the world in a short time.
Had Non confined himself to an architectural career in Thailand, it would
have been a loss to the rest of the world. His first bold step was to apply and be
accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
As noted in his dissertation, he almost missed the opportunity to study
Shanghai and its fascinating architectural history. This study has particular
significance because Shanghai is a city that, as the economic center of China, has
particular influence in global economics.
I suspect that it is rare for students of Asian countries that have not had a
close association with a western country to venture into Western academics. For
Non to understand higher level thinking in English is not just the mere translation
of Thai to English. The thinking process is very different. Non is able to give his
eastern creativity to a Western world.
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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form
It has not been easy. When Non translates perfectly logical and meaningful
sentences from Thai to English on a word-for-word basis, it becomes unintelligible.
I was taught Chinese and did not speak English until I entered public school. I
have regrettably lost Chinese, but remember enough to know that the thinking
process is very different. Chinese is usually monosyllabic and words contain the
essences of what they mean. Placing these essences together forms other essences.
To a westerner, Chinese poetry sounds trite and childish. But westerners are
putting words together, whereas Chinese are putting essences together to create
powerfully new essences. To string many essences together becomes awesomely
beautiful. I remember a term from mahjong. The players have to make certain
combinations to go out and win. Once a player is ready to go out, the last tile can
be drawn from the pile or taken from the discard of another player. If a player
draws the last card available from the pile and it is his winning tile, it an extremely
unlikely happening and given maximum points. Americans would say something
like one-in-a-million odds. Our family said it was “water under touch moon.”
This beautiful saying was four monosyllables, roughly “shooi duhii moh yert” (in
Cantonese, which is “shui zhong lao yue” or “水中捞月” in Mandarin). The
meaning is very poetic. It means that someone has reached under the reflection of
the moon in a body of water and actually touched the moon. Of course, that is
impossible, but it gives a poetic meaning to impossible odds.
Western culture builds on the material. Eastern culture builds on energy.
Western culture validates what can be seen and taken apart. Eastern culture does
not find a need to take everything apart because it would disrupt its wholeness.
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The road that Non has taken is fraught with many perils because of the great
differences in language and culture. Non’s perception is formed from the best in
Thailand. These perceptions particularly on Shanghai are invaluable to the
knowledge of the world. He can study this without the biased view of any of the
world’s great powers. He has taken a giant step which will lead to even greater
accomplishments in the future. I am proud to say that he was my exchange student
son for a year and remains a son.
My own personal road was also fraught with many perils not so much
because of language, but of culture. Both of my parents emigrated from Canton
China. My father, as a matter of fact, was refused entry because of the Chinese
Exclusion Act. The Chinese were the first group upon which immigration was
refused or limited. My father and his accompanying band of Chinese were forced
to go to Mexico. It wasn’t until 8 years later that his efforts were successful to enter
the United States of America. My mother’s history was dramatically different. Her
father was an American citizen who was sent back to China specifically to preserve
the Chinese heritage. Since most of the Chinese immigrants of that time were male
who had come to work on the railroads, there were very few female Chinese. My
grandfather sired 7 children of which 4 were female and 3 were male. All three
males married non-Chinese and all four females married into influential Chinese
families. My mother’s family had lived in Denver, Colorado long enough to
witness their homes burned to the ground by anti-Chinese crowds spurred on by
miners who feared that the Chinese would take their jobs. The fear and distrust of
whites was passed on to me, but nothing was ever said about the raids. This
prompted our family to remain in the background, to attract no attention. This
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did not stop the desire to excel. All of my grandfather’s children lived successful
lives and had children who integrated successfully into the American fabric.
Most important of the Chinese culture is the notion of saving face. The
public image was to be maintained even with deception, if necessary. If disgraced,
suicide was often the only course of action. This concept may illuminate many of
the actions that China chooses in its interaction with foreign powers. The Shanghai
façade has become China’s business face to the world. No more is this concept of
face more clearly demonstrated than in China’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics.
Despite internal difficulties, China presented the most spectacular display of
wealth, optimism, and health to the world. This notion of saving face also has a lot
to do with pragmatism. Whatever will expedite the possibility of saving face is
more important than internal consequences. In other words, if outsiders see
everything as going well, it is more important than if everything is going well to
insiders. This reasoning also creates a culture of secrecy. This secrecy is playfully
used in the United States by the phrase, “Whatever happens in……., stays
in……..” This is a good philosophy as long as it does not give license to immoral
or illegal pursuits.
This culture fears criticism from outside sources. When studying China, it
can be seen that this extends to the nation in its dealing with foreigners. Its many
attempts to shield itself has met with varying successes. The concession made to the
British and French in the opening of Shanghai is remarkable, but it can be said that
it was most practical means to preserve the rest of China. Actually, it was brilliant
to cede a very small part of China to protect the rest of the vast country. Did the
Chinese consider that opening a small hole in the economic dike would eventually
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Afterword
94
open a flood of foreign economic invasion? Paradoxically, it did open a flood of
foreign economic business, but it was the Chinese that did the invading. Can this
be seen a foresight or is it merely the Chinese taking advantage of everything in the
most practical way?
China has become a major player in the economic crisis that faces the world
today. The country has survived when other civilizations have toppled. Perhaps
there is a lesson to be studied and learned.
Victor Alexander Wong Oklahoma City, USA December 2008
APPENDIX
TOWARDS SHANGHAI’S URBAN HOUSING:
RE-DEFINING SHANGHAI’S LILONG
If one is to define the dominant characteristic of urban pattern in the hyper-
growth city of Shanghai, apart from the contemporary high-rise buildings of the sterile
development in the past two decades, it is the lilong, the low-rise neighborhood
housing crisscrossing large urban blocks. Shanghai is a city where two distinctive
urban characteristics – the contemporary high-rise and the traditional low-rise buildings
– create a paradoxical pattern of unevenly developed urban fabric. This pattern
continually raises tremendous concerns not only on a macro-structural level of the
city, e.g. urban land-use and expansion, but also street life and the living environment.
It is understandable that high-rise development is unavoidable due to the massive
demand and exorbitant land value.1 We have learned and experienced from the
Appendix
unsuccessful precedents in the West and the extensive literature that criticizes the
impact of a city without diversity.2 In other words, although high-rise development
might logically and efficiently solve the problem of accommodating large numbers of
people,3 it will cause problems such as a diminished sense of community. I agree that
the traditional lilong house is no longer the most appropriate urban housing for
Shanghai. However, I propose that a viable solution is low-/medium-rise high-density,
multi-functional, community-oriented urban housing that will preserve the unique
nature of individual vibrant neighborhoods. Shanghai’s lilong is chosen as a
typological precedent for this study not only because it reflects a clever overarching
housing and landuse economy, but also because it provides the linkage to an urban
setting and public realm (accessibility and connectibility); the consolidation of the
sense of security (in other words, neighborhood watch); interior openness; diverse
dwelling environment; and perhaps the most salient quality, “lanes” living style.
Lilong’s uniqueness lies in the combination of these vibrant qualities, and the “order
and efficiency,” which are the principles of modern housing.
I will exemplify both the traditional and the modern aspects of lilong
neighborhood housing, aiming to re-define the abstract concept of the lilong, arguing
for its potential to be re-thought as a typology of high density housing today. In
particular, this essay seeks to deliver a practical answer to a conceptual question: how
does lilong provide the dwelling identity of Shanghai, taking into account its form,
meaning, and culture? The emergence of both lilong and Western modern housing is
rooted in a crisis of space and the economic drive of modern cities. Lilong architecture
was a convincing housing development strategy in modern Shanghai. I seek to
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examine in what way the lilong is a “mediating agency” between Chinese locality and
Western modernity? My hypothesis is that the architecture of lilong does not confine
itself to certain forms or physical configurations; instead it is an “abstract concept” of
an urban neighborhood. This dynamic concept addresses the spatial organization, the
architectural practicality, the casual formation of semi-private space, and the
community lane-life. I am convinced that we must understand this concept and use it
as a point of departure for the design of urban housing today.
This essay embraces four main parts concerning the critical understanding of
lilong vis-à-vis opportunities to develop the new Low and Medium Rise High Density
(LMRHD) housing in Shanghai. The first part is the analysis of lilong’s modernity, its
representational issues with an emphasis on how the modern housing programs are
adapted for the lilong and how the lilong – its users and its condition – respond to
those programs. The second part concerns lilong history, from which I seek to clarify
the developmental process of lilong from its emergence to its demise, emphasizing the
pattern of growth, the factors that had caused the shift in style and orientation, and
the causes of decline: drawing upon some exhaustive accounts on the history of lilong
that are written in English, this part will succinctly paint the picture of its historical
lineage, placing lilong in the context of capitalist Shanghai. Then in the third part, I
will re-define the abstract concept of lilong; in other words, what makes lilong a
physical mediating agency between the form of Western modern housing and
traditional Chinese dwelling culture. Broadly speaking, the hypothesis is that the
success of the lilong as a Chinese modern culture is not so much because of its
physical style but because of its idea of “neighborhood,” which is grounded on local
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and traditional building practices. The re-definition of lilong as a conceptual idea will
serve as a point of departure for the last part: a discussion of the possibility to develop
this housing strategy for contemporary application, in which I will also present my
preliminary proposal for The New Lilong.
Figure 27: Model of Shanghai showing the mixing of high-rise buildings and low-rise
lilong neighborhoods – paradoxical pattern of unevenly developed urban fabric.
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RATIONALE: LILONG AND MODERNITY
Minimal maintenance and maximum use of the land were the two
considerations of the foreign developers when lilong were originally built. Like many
other modern housing precedents in Europe and America, lilong has a systematic
structure conforming to the programmatic, functional, and economical needs of a city.
Shanghai’s abrupt leap from “rural” to “urban” was expeditious because of the rapid
increase of foreign investment. The emergence of this particular type of housing is
analogous to that of the West: mainly, the need for collective housing for the masses.
It was the condition of modernity4 – the change from an agricultural to an industrial
society under capitalist impulses – that gave birth to this housing type. The normative
program for living was then shifted from an aim to sustain a communal life –
represented in the clustered inward opening style of the traditional Chinese courtyard
house – to an individual life, an economical life of a modern worker whose need was
an adequate living space, and convenience to work. This was, at the time,
unprecedented in China, a country known for its abundant land resources. To a
degree, the designing of lilong can be seen as no more than just an assimilation of a
typical European row house building type. Notable common aspects are single-family
houses with party walls, private entrances, and the system of spatial hierarchy from
public to private. Moreover, it is also in the extreme efficiency and functionality of
lilong that modernity is reflected. The unit plan had become smaller over time,
according to Zhao, “from clan/family-based courtyard-centered living to the
community-based alley-centered [lane-centered] living, from a self-conditioned
traditional living style towards a more open, more independent modern urban living 99
Appendix
style, reflecting a shift from a metaphoric to a more functional layout.”5 The layout of
the lilong neighborhood was by all means the most efficient layout for the highest
density, the main lane running all the way or half way across the block as well as
branch lanes connected perpendicularly to the main lane.6 Dwellers had basically been
forced to spend more time outside because of the tightness and less sanitary conditions
of the interior space, resulting from the condensation of the unit for economic
purpose. Relating to the traditional Chinese house, floor plans were systematically
compromised: at the entrance was a courtyard, then the living room, and finally a
kitchen and a bath room in the back of the house (back-to-back in order to share wet-
walls), all the private areas such as bed rooms were on the second floor. Similarly, the
stylistic representation of the house diminished due to the increased emphasis on
efficiency: a plainer and cleaner façade became typical in the later generations of
lilong.7 Nevertheless, with a certain cultural resistance, abstraction never moved to the
truly modern, such as that of the famous Weissenhofsiedlung.8 The modernity of lilong
was also compromised by the users who were able to adjust the newly built
environment to fit their own long-held traditions of cherishing their living space.
However, situating lilong in the Shanghai context, the important factor of its
success was also the unique “Chinese dwelling culture,” which, from within, re-
defined the meaning of the modern elements borrowed from the west by the
understanding of space and its possible usage. It had not only vitalized the dullness of
the repetitiveness, but had also actively expanded the possibility of activating space
within the given constraints. For instance, common activities that were taking place in
the lanes – initially designed for people and vehicular circulation – transformed this
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internal road to a dynamic communal space for dwellers, recalling the internal space in
the traditional Chinese courtyard. Furthermore, lanes also provide for the sense of
“open space,” as Chinese prefer a small space with shading for activities. Lanes
perfectly serve that purpose and soon became imbedded in the dwellers’ way of life.
That is to say, the emergence of lilong and its success lie in two factors: Its
programmatic flexibility, and the plasticity of local culture. The morphological
structure of lilong varies little from site to site, but rather transforms over time. The
structure validates a physical agency that processes the transition from traditional
towards modernity resulting in the diverse urban social life. Each neighborhood is able
to utilize and incorporate own cultural norms.
To give a précis, several recent studies on lilong demonstrate that scholars now
pay more attention to its preservation and present possible strategies to revitalize and
re-use lilong in order to counteract the one-sided growth of high-rise urban housing
and commercial complexes that are gradually and monotonously engulfing Shanghai.
Nevertheless, there are also other issues that concern both Chinese and international
scholars, the nostalgia for an emotional beauty of the lilong – the beauty that lies in the
memory and reminiscences of people who have lived in lilong. It is the economy that
celebrates the sustainable and communal life of the working class. What was once seen
as truly modern has become a traditional heritage. Today, due to the profusion of the
population in Shanghai resulting from industrialization and urbanization, the demand
for housing has become one of the city’s great planning issues. The plan focuses on
maximizing density and financial return because of the potential for increasing land
value. The decision that has been made by the local government is basically no less
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than the idea of razing the less viable lilong to the ground and building high-rise
apartments, which could result in a negative social impact. Despite a truly modern
aspect that was widely discussed in the West, I am convinced that the factor that
makes lilong successful in Shanghai is the flexibility of Chinese dwelling culture. It
was the dwellers who saw the constraints more as a challenge to be met than as a
problem, and thus they were not bothered by the given structure of the neighborhood.
However, the situation today is more complicated than in the past. The survival of the
low and medium-rise cannot solely rely on the users, but also on how much the
developer can compromise to meet the explosive demand of the market.
LILONG: A CRITICAL HISTORY
The history of urban housing in Shanghai is not complicated. Urban housing is
the most significant component of Shanghai’s modernization, industrialization, and
urbanization which had not begun until the late nineteenth century with the opening
of the Treaty Port and the various foreign settlements.9 The consequence of the
process of becoming a port was the proliferation of commercial activity, leading to
dramatic population growth – exponential increase of the workforce (and also
refugees).10 Urban housing was initially built to house foreign industry workers and
their families frugally and economically. Shanghai’s “modern urban housing,” lilong,
was the solution the foreign factories and enterprises used for economical real-estate
development.11 Thus, the initial idea was no more than the economy of construction:
“buildings that can be constructed with wooden boards, built in row like army camps,
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accessed by some internal paths joined with one general path that connected to the
public street.”12 Although lilong was initially meant to be built with wood, the
municipal government’s larger concern about the safety issues in the late nineteenth
century led to new housing regulations, including the prohibition of wood frame
structure. The major materials were those that could be supplied locally: brick bearing
walls and wood beams. Lilong was modeled after Western row houses with the
Chinese characteristic “lanes and courtyards.” According to Zhang Shouyi and Tan
Ying, houses are clustered to resemble the basic traditional Chinese houses, allowing
many families to live together in the same compound.13 Although I was not
completely convinced that these characteristics were seriously taken into account by
the developers – since the distinctive notion of internal semi-private space in lilong
can be just ad-hoc – it is compelling to see how the Chinese users naturally adapted
their life-style to the constraint of space and the structure of the neighborhood. It was
around 1870s that the first lilong was introduced and it was also the first time the
“facilities” such as shared bathroom and kitchen were added to Chinese dwelling
culture. Xing Ruan says that lilong is more a “middle ground” between the English
terrace house, and the southern Chinese courtyard house.14 I agree with Ruan
architecturally and stylistically but not as concerns planning – lilong is tightly
structured to service the needs of people in Shanghai. 15
The authentic Shikumen Lilong,16 named after the “eye-catching” decorated
gateway to the neighborhood, was built during this period and became the most
popular lilong for the first decade of the twentieth century. Built to host members of a
working-class family, the size and organization of a Shikumen lilong house was
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Appendix
adequate. A courtyard was the highlight of this lilong, providing not only good
ventilation, southern exposure to sunlight, and communal space, but also a distinctive
solid-v oid fabric that systematically constructed a viable form of urban neighborhood.
There was also extensive use of foreign motifs: traditional European, Western classical,
Russian, or even Japanese styles of decoration was added to the façade of the house to
reflect the splendor of the community. In addition, integration of commercial and
residential components was the distinctive characteristic of the Shikumen style because
it did not only vitalize the neighborhood, but it also financially sustained the
community by feeding back the profit from the commercial component to the overall
system. The New Shikumen Lilong was later introduced as a result of the first stage of
Shanghai’s population growth – the first stage of an over-congested urban population.
The three-bay unit of the Shikumen was reduced to one with a smaller courtyard –
arguably just a small space to symbolize courtyard. Also, the spatial emphasis was
shifted from the interior (house) to the exterior (lane) – lanes were widened to
accommodate vehicles, resulting in a more spacious community space outside the
house.17
The New Style lilong came in the late 1910s due to the critical need for higher
density housing. Thus, the courtyard was defeated by the need for interior space; it
was significantly reduced, if not completely filled. The New Style was the compact
version of the Shikumen: the floor height and building width were decreased to the
minimum, the number of floors increased, and the interior space of each unit was
clearly partitioned for different activities.18 This New Style was preferred by the
developers as more economical than the Shikumen. Occasionally, during the same
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time, the Garden Lilong, a semi-detached house with a garden in the front, was built
for a purpose that was totally different from other types of lilong; it served the elegant
taste of the rich community.
Then, the development of lilong ended around the mid-twentieth century
when the economy took complete control with the Apartment Lilong, a five to seven-
story concrete frame structure, a Western-style apartment with shared-facilities. With
this birth of this soon become general high-rise apartment-type housing, the name
“lilong” no longer resonated with the celebration of Chinese communal life on the
ground. After the Apartment Lilong, developers shifted their interest to the notion of
an extremely efficient housing type, rather than the community-based housing type.
Thus, at the termination of lilong, there was the beginning of the development of the
slab block and modern high-rise tower.
To sum up, a series of lilong were constructed in the inner part of the city as
neighborhood units fitted into a city block. Changes include the use of material (from
wood to brick, and from brick to concrete), and the typology of the basic unit (smaller
and more defined over time). The success of the first series contributed to the demand
for the next, and thus, not so long after the first building stage, within less than a
hundred years, more than 200,000 lilong dwelling units (of approximately 60 – 150
square meters per unit19) became the dominating characteristic of Shanghai’s urban
fabric. The major change emerged from the inflexible control of the district housing
bureaus, as the central government guaranteed housing for every worker and limited
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the right of citizens to own property. Developers then had to make the existing and
the continually built lilong houses economically feasible. The notion of affordability –
it was rental affordability – was emphasized, as it was one of the socialist tenets. Each
row house was often leased by one family and then subleased to many.20 The result
was the change of the social structure both in the single unit and the neighborhood–
each unit was sub-divided to house more families, and commercial activity was widely
decreased due to the demand for residential programs.
In the situation of urban housing in Shanghai today, lilong no longer provide
enough density to be economically self-sustained. The change of life-style and the
inadequate maintenance resulted in deterioration of many of them. In addition, since
lilong were built as housing for workers, it was not initially built to be permanent.
Most of them, particularly those that were built in the early twentieth century are in
severe need of total upgrading, which is very unprofitable from the point of view of a
developer, who prefers to demolish and rebuild with, at least, ten times higher density.
The preservation of the lilong in Shanghai is doomed in light of the decay of existing
structures and the fact that modern standard high-rise can accommodate more people.
RE-DEFINING LILONG: THE CONCEPT OF NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE
[For lilong,] the physical condition of the house was secondary. It was the
uniformity in neighborhood structure that constitutes the embryo of lilong.21
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Literally, the meaning of lilong is “neighborhood lanes” as li is for
neighborhood and long is for lane – an abstract concept of space making use of public
realm to reinforce the sense of the community.22 Properly, lilong is not a noun, but an
adjective; thus, “lilong housing” is a form of dwelling in a lane-structured
neighborhood – to the extent that neighborhood means more than just an area, but a
community where members interact with each other on a regular basis.23 It is this
distinctive concept of formation of locality that is prominently imbedded in many
Asian cultures. One can recognize similarities to lilong in the cho of Toyko,24 the
hanok of Seoul, the hutong of Beijing, and the soi of Bangkok,25 to name a few. These
concepts of East Asian neighborhood influence the everyday life of inhabitants. These
concepts appeal to local government for the neighborhood and its culture as a
collective force, and serve individuals in providing for their safety and amenity as a
group.26
For lilong in particular, the distinctive style of spatial occupation comes out of
the constraints of space. Every living function is condensed in a small and compact
box-shaped row house for the Shikumen Style, and a narrow strip for the New Style.
Because each unit does not have much living space, and the lilong rows are laid out
parallel to each other in a close proximity, lanes are used by lilong inhabitants as a
living space, which is common to the Chinese who see outdoor activities as prominent
to communal life. These activities that take place in the lanes range from exercises –
particularly Tai-Chi – to commercial activities, hawker business, barbers; to
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recreational activities as well as service, mahjong, cooking, laundry drying, outdoor
eating, sewing, food preparation.27 The main lane is utilized predominantly for
circulation and delivery (Huang categorized it as a semi-public area as the roads that
surround the lilong block are public28) and the branch lanes are for individual
activities. The entire ground floor is only semi-private space. Although there is the
division of plan, separating the living space from the kitchen and bathroom, both
functions always associate with activities that take place in the lanes. For instance,
people usually cook their food outside their houses to accommodate the smoke; so,
the lane at the back of the house naturally becomes an outdoor kitchen. And since
cooking is usually a communal activity, it draws people from houses nearby to come,
exchange, and discuss everyday life’s news and so on, forming a small neighborhood
forum. Also, because each house has a small courtyard as a transitional space between
the house and the lane, the dwellers tend to expand their usage to the lane, sharing
their private space to the public realms. In other words, they interiorize the lane and
exteriorize their private space, disguising the distinction between public/private space,
interiority/exteriority, and most importantly, private/communal life. Therefore, not
only the lanes themselves become public realm, but also the entire ground floor of the
lilong neighborhood. Qian Guan presumes:
…[B]y allocating at least one courtyard and a portion of usable open space for
each family, and by allowing a spatial fluidity through them, the daily
communication can be conducted while doing housework, and socializing
pleasure can take place in an elastic way everywhere and enjoyed by all.29
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According to interviews conducted by Morris, he claims: “lilong provides an intimate
environment where one is not alone”30 – the human scale and the arrangement of the
several row houses in the lilong block allow people to both physically interact with
each other, at the same time, provide a “neighborhood watch” sense of security that is
conducive to the development of social networks. All of which was not the intention
of lilong; it is a result of their intensive use, as Louisa Lim narrates: “the warren of
alleys and the layout of traditional houses – with their communal kitchens – all
created a unique sense of community.”31
Furthermore, this sense of security is reinforced by the protective wall of shop
houses that are located around the block: access by the gateways to the internal part of
the block is taken care of by at least one shop house on each side. Assuming that
everyone in the neighborhood knows each other, it is nearly impossible for strangers
to go into the area without being noticed. Nevertheless this does not necessitate the
notion of a complete gated community, the porosity given by the typical linear
arrangement of row houses permits lanes to be partially seen from the outside, which
visually links the interior of the neighborhood to pedestrians and the exterior streets.
This porosity gives “a sense of a whole” to the entire lilong district. Zhao considers
“lane-living style” the essence of lilong dwelling. 32 From informal neighborhood
cohesion, the form of community organization develops further to formal
organizations such as residents committee, neighborhood co-op, community
awareness team, and so on.33 Although these organizations do not have power to
negotiate with the municipal government, they support the sustainable growth of the
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community. They respond to dwellers’ needs to solve common problems and address
common goals in their local lanes.34
A redefinition of lilong would not be confined to its physical aspect but to the
notion of “neighborhood life.” This paves the way to deal with urban housing
development today – since it recognizes a condition that is not achieved on any other
of today’s housing types. The term lilong, although associated with the row house that
constitutes the primary living space in Shanghai, entails – in a deeper sense –the
“abstract concept of space” that provides close proximity to the dwellers with mixed-
use programs and transparency of public and private realms. This proximity
encourages dwellers to communicate with each other dynamically, connecting them to
the outside and the urban environment. The notion of urban dwelling form lies in the
strength of the bonded community. It is not the physicality of building that is the
meaning of housing to the dwellers; instead, it is the intangible notion of “belonging,”
the public space is as important as one’s own house; to use an old Chinese saying – the
sense of belonging possesses inherent qualities of lilong.35 It is this “neighborhood life”
that makes lilong a physical mediating agency between the form of Western modern
housing and traditional Chinese dwelling culture. This social-support community is
what I think Kevin Lynch means by:
[A] legitimate feature of good settlements, within which one can organize
politically when the need for control arises…apart from that, the fact of being
in an identifiable settlement which has quiet, safe internal lanes, easily
accessible daily services and vital street-life in close proximity, has made the
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living so pleasurable. Every one is aware of the diversity around him or her, and is
in visual contact with other ways of life.36
For Lynch, this is visually the quality of a “good city form.”
CONCLUSION: THE NEW LILONG
As pointed out in the beginning, I seek to derive a way to rethink LMRHD
housing in Shanghai through the concept of neighborhood – the essence of lilong
housing. Although the concept is not being seriously taken into consideration by the
residential developers, it has been proven to have potential by the successful Xintaindi
(2001), a series of renovated original Shikumen lilong houses that is now a bustling
retail-shopping district. The architect Ben Wood took nostalgia for the traditional
Shanghainese lilong house as the selling point and re-designed it for a sole commercial
purpose.37 Xintiandi’s developer and the designer spurred us along with the example
of the creative approach to reuse the form of lilong neighborhood, showing us the way
to rethink the real estate economy of the low-rise.38 Greg Yager and Scott Kilbourn
attest to its success:
It works because it has a design that is geared to the appropriate human scale
and texture. The master plan responds to the context of Shanghai’s streets,
providing open space in additional streetscape. The district as a whole is
dynamic and well landscaped, and well managed – all elements of good
design.39
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Xintaindi’s take on the concept of lilong’s “neighborhood life” and the structure of
lilong that gives close proximity and coziness of the entire area, are what constitutes
the project’s astronomical success – they are the qualities, the “fine grain” of the old
lilong pedestrian neighborhood that fulfill the need of the people of Shanghai. There
have been some experimental projects to renovate old – particularly the Shikumen and
the New Shikumen types – lilong neighborhoods for residential purposes such as Lane
252 and Futian Terrace. The result of both projects does not demonstrate a
convincing potential for the renovation to be a strategy to revitalize lilong. In
particular, both projects fail to generate enough funding to subsidize the houses’ rent.
The unfortunate result is the inclination toward less-affordable housing. The
constraint of renovating lilong is that the structure and orientation of the existing
lilong houses in Shanghai are not supportive to either horizontal or vertical expansion,
thus the only renovation that can be made is the condition improvement, which gives
no profit to the current development since it will not increase the density.
Therefore, for the new LMRHD, we must return to the very basic concept of
neighborhood life and take it as a point of departure. I, nonetheless, argue for the
viability of the “spine and ribs” structure of lilong neighborhood since it gives strong
social control to the area and helps maintain the system of neighborhood organization.
It is defensible because this structure has proven to be conducive to the urban life of
the Shanghainese for more than one century. However, it needs to be adjusted in
order to accommodate higher density and better sanitary condition. I propose to re-
orient it by changing the row orientation from having the front of the rows facing the
back of the previous row, to having their backs facing each other so that dwellers can
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share their service areas. In this case, not only will this organization optimize the
service area of the entire site, but it will make the sanitary control less problematic.
This service corridor will still be a communal space for people, at the same time
providing an easier control of garbage, plumbing system, fire escape, as well as safety.
Moreover, this corridor will serve as a light well that provides southern exposure to the
internal units. Density can be increased by a greater number of floors. Since,
structurally we can reduce the depth of beams with modern construction technique
and material, the building then can accommodate more floors with the same or
slightly greater height. It may be possible to increase the height to four or five stories.
Also, the front of each row house – living area – will then face each other, making the
entire lanes a living area for the neighborhood. Since a small courtyard in the front of
the house (for instance, that of the Shikumen) is not used for individual purposes but
is utilized as another semi-public space, this will then minimize unnecessary individual
open space, and maximize space for public activity, encouraging a community sense.
This structure also allows areas along the main internal spines, along the main external
road, and the lower floor of the mixed-use building to be used for commercial
activities like the traditional lilong. This will provide adequate employment
opportunities to the members of the community, balance incomes/revenues, initiate
long-term investment plan, encourage entrepreneurship, and strategically plan a
community-based – domestic— tourism.
For the unit type, it is a top-priority need for a self-contained – studio type –
unit due to the change of life-style during the last quarter of the twentieth century.
Therefore, lilong’s single-family housing unit then has to be modified to a smaller unit
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with individual facilities, which must also be modularly flexible for prospective
modifications. However, it is reasonable to acknowledge some needs of the single-
family housing, so types of housing should still be mixed. A single-family house might
occupy the unit on the ground level and other self-contained unit can stack on top of
it. I suggest “elevated corridors” on each floor providing an access to each unit, to
which open spaces – small garden, common area – can be attached, serving not only as
a community area, but also a transition space from public (corridor) to private (room)
so that moving from public to private area will not be too sudden. Also, to efficiently
make use of the space on the upper levels, each unit can still share an exterior wall in a
row-house style. As long as there is open space attached to at least one side of the
shared wall, natural lighting and ventilation are accessible. In addition, to reinforce
residents’ community sense and liveliness, building blocks must be de-solidified; in
other words, made porous. Porosity of the rows allows natural lighting and ventilation
into the dense block. This will give residences a semi-enclosed sense allowing them to
visually interact with activities and services conducted at the other side of the lanes, as
well as give them a sense of security by the neighborhood watch.
To sum up, I am convinced there are physical aspects of lilong that are still
valid for today’s housing situation in Shanghai derived from the understanding of the
most basic concept of this form of settlements, “neighborhood sense.” More than a
hundred years of lilong history has made it a culture of “modern Shanghai.” My
proposal to rethink this modern urban housing lies in the neighborhood concept as
well as the functionality based on requirements of the modern life-style. Lilong houses
have to be rethought in order to cope with the demand of an individual life, at the
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same time provide the dynamic communal life. The balance of commercial and
residential programs can sustain the economy of the New Lilong.
Although I have never lived there, I have been to one of the original Shikumen
lilong neighborhoods, in which I enthusiastically felt the sense of dynamic
community. Everyone knows and cares about each other. I thought it was my
imagination that I felt I heard constant greetings in Chinese when I walked through
that neighborhood. I am aware that this research might not completely fill the
noticeable void in contemporary thinking on architecture and urban housing in
Shanghai, but it will serve to denote the existence of that void, and thus make a
contribution to the development of a theory of urban housing in China, which I hope
will revitalize the lilong houses by which I am enthralled.
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NOTES
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCING SHANGHAI
1. The term “hybridity” emerged in academic discourse at the turn of the
twentieth-first century regarding the issues and major challenges traditional
settlements were facing, i.e. massive urbanization and suburbanization, the
spread of consumerism, the internationalization of labor, and the growth of
expatriate migrant populations and ethnic minorities. According to Nezar
AlSayyad, “hybrid environment” simply accommodates or encourages
pluralistic tendencies or multicultural practices, which should be turned on
its head.” Accordingly, to say that urbanism of Shanghai is hybrid might be
problematic since what it represents are two separate environments, rather
than a fusion of different elements that creates a new entity. For details, see
Nezar AlSayyad. “Hybrid Culture/ Hybrid Urbanis Pandora’s Box of the
Notes
“Third Space,” in Nezar AlSayyad, ed., Hybrid Urbanism (Westport,
Connecticut; London: Praeger, 2001), 1-20, and “Identity, Tradition and
Built form: The Role of Culture in Planning and Development,” A
Description of 1996 International Association for the Study of Traditional