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August 4, 2008
Shanghai - City of Terror and Delight
The Washington Post has a great Philip Kennicott story this morning on urbanization and Shanghai. I'm fascinated and terrified; I know I'd love to be there but I know I'd feel an ache for anyone who lives there. I have enough trouble with NYC.
The print story follows a great photograph of dozens of folks looking at a 1:500 model of the city - sad to say, I can't find it in the web version.
It is said that to get a sense of this, you need to visit "the map." It has become one of the strangest tourist attractions in this city that doesn't lack museums, shopping or the distractions of nightlife. The map is located in the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Center, a history museum and a shrine to all things urban, located in People's Square in the heart of downtown. It is a 1:500 scale representation of the city, sprawling over 6,400 square feet -- and even then it all won't fit onto a full floor of the exhibition hall. It is surrounded by walkways, and it can be viewed from a balcony above. With the flick of a switch, artificial night falls, and its thousands of lovingly rendered buildings begin to twinkle. It is surreal, and beautiful, a bit absurd, and it seems to offer, in one comprehensive glance, a sense of the city in its massive, skyscraping, outward-spreading totality. Here, perhaps, one can absorb what it means to build some 10,000 high-rise buildings in a quarter-century.
Huang Qi Min is a modelmaker, and it is his company that makes and maintains this mini-colossus. Modelmaking is a competitive sport in China, and that's how Huang got his start. But in the early 1990s, when Shanghai was released from the economic and social strictures that kept its potential in check for more than four decades of communist rule, city leaders decided they needed some way to get a handle on it. The map was an early effort to take the measure of the city. And it just keeps growing. Every few months, Huang says, he must swap out the "white" buildings, which represent projects in the planning or drawing-board stage, for finished models, rendered in color. When necessary, he will walk on the Huangpu River to get to the center of the city.
The map, although it makes the city comprehensible and puts man in charge of it -- the modelmaker walks on water-- misses so much else. There are, of course, no people and no traffic. The thousands of construction sites spread around the city are missing, too. New buildings, on the map, happen as if by magic, without cranes and scaffolding and fences to hide the gaping pits and buzzing hives of migrant workers.
It also leaves out the darker facts of Chinese urbanization: the 750,000 premature deaths (according to the World Bank) caused annually by China's choking pollution. The map shows only construction, and none of the destruction, the loss of old neighborhoods in the center of the city, and with them, the loss of tradition and community. The map doesn't show the massive relocations necessary to reconfigure Shanghai for yet more millions of people. The tens of thousands of residents who have been moved to make new green spaces, to construct new bridges, to build new high-rises, are not heard from.
You may remember me posting about Rome's similar map - the 1:250 version of Rome in A.D. 300, a time when Rome's population might have hit a million. Since I can't find a picture of Shanghai's model quickly, I give you Rome's.
Kennicott has it exactly right - these giant models fascinate, inform, and obscure. Rome can never have been so clean, Shanghai can never be so unthreatening. Both were built on the exploitation of labor on a scale almost unimaginable to recent Americans - one of the reasons we don't build this way any more is that we are unwilling to tolerate construction work deaths.
The article goes on at some length about the interior spaces of cities, as opposed to models. These models, with their insistence on the exterior features, obscure the ways people live inside the clean buildings. Kennicott explores this a little - the article is well-worth reading.
Posted by CrankyProfessor at August 4, 2008 7:43 AM