Shanghai: the Fastest City?

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Shanghai: the Fastest City? Ricky Burdett (ed.) Shanghai: the fastest city? Report Original citation: Burdett, Ricky, ed. (2005) Shanghai: the fastest city? Urban Age. This version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/33359/ Originally available from Urban Age Available in LSE Research Online: May 2013 © 2005 Urban Age LSE has developed LSE Research Online so that users may access research output of the School. Copyright © and Moral Rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. Users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in LSE Research Online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. You may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. You may freely distribute the URL (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the LSE Research Online website. Urban Age is a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities SHANGHAI: NEW YORK/FEBRUARY 2005 SHANGHAI/JULY 2005 THE FASTEST LONDON/NOVEMBER 2005 JOHANNESBURG/SPRING 2006 MEXICO CITY/SUMMER 2006 CITY? BERLIN/AUTUMN 2006 WWW.URBAN-AGE.NET URBAN AGE CONTACT Shanghai Conference Contact T +86 (133) 9111 1890 Cities programme London School of Economics Houghton Street London WC2A 2AE United Kingdom T +44 (0)20 7955 7706 [email protected] Alfred Herrhausen Society Deutsche Bank Unter den Linden 13/15 10117 Berlin Germany T +49 (0)30 3407 4201 E [email protected] www.alfred-herrhausen-gesellschaft.de a worldwide series of conferences investigating the future of cities organised by the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the Alfred Herrhausen Society, the International Forum of Deutsche Bank ifty years ago Shanghai was an cracks between regimes. In large parts of the Getting to grips with a city that has been island of floodlit art deco cin- city, it was never entirely clear exactly who undergoing double digit economic growth THE SPEED emas, modern skyscrapers was responsible for enforcing any kind for more than a decade demands a set of and electric trams, marooned of legal system. conceptual tools rather different to the in the midst of a China that The long freeze on Shanghai’s develop- conventional repertoire employed by those had hardly changed in a thou- ment only lifted at the end of the 1980s, with who spend their time thinking about urban AND THE sand years.As the city petered the introduction of the market economy to issues. The inescapable fact is speed. Shanghai F out on the road to Nanjing, China. In terms of physical development is a city whose development over the last ten the neon signs and the street lights disap- and planning, this triggered a great deal of years has by any standards been extraordinar- FRICTION peared into the darkness of a medieval night. research into appropriate models for ily rapid. To drive across the city in those days, you Shanghai. Of course Hong Kong, with its The story of Shanghai’s speed and friction needed three different driving licenses to carefully managed state land bank and the can be told in summary. Since 1990, living Deyan Sudjic negotiate your way from the Chung Hwa government’s use of auctions to fundraise space per person has doubled to reach Road to what was then called the Boulevard and control development, was studied with 15 square metres per resident. In the same des Deux Republiques, to Edward VII Avenue care. But so was the experience of Barcelona period, the city has built 40% more roads. and Broadway.You could have worshipped in as it emerged from its transformation for the There are approaching two million cars. The your choice of onion domed Russian Olympics of 1992. Before the wave of new metro system has reached a daily capacity of Orthodox churches, the product of the army building really took hold, Shanghai staged 1.4 million people, and is intended to reach of White Russian refugees who sailed out of an architectural competition for a redevelop- five times that figure. The city has developed Vladivostock with the Bolsheviks at their ment strategy to deal with the whole Pudong an entirely new business district in Pudong in heels. It’s a history that suggests a city shaped area. It showed both the strengths and less than two decades and it has embarked on by a mix of pragmatism, opportunism and weaknesses of Shanghai’s position. Many the construction of a ring of satellite towns – anarchy. Shanghai was China’s window on the of the world’s leading architects - Toyo Ito, designed in German, Italian, Scandinavian world, its most industrially advanced and Massimiliano Fuksas and Richard Rogers and Chinese urban styles. In the rush to build commercially sophisticated city.And it still is, among them – were invited to take part. office towers to catch a perceived market, even as Beijing is working hard to re-establish They all put forward more or less radical speed has been the determinant of form. pre-eminence with a building programme in attempts at masterplanning, all of them Rather than give architects and engineers the capital that is just as frenetic as Shanghai’s. mutually exclusive in their approach to the time to produce considered technical Shanghai’s decision to hold an Expo in land-use and form. The city claims to have solutions to optimise net to gross ratios, 2010 is its own response to the 2008 Olympics adopted the best features of all the competi- developers have demanded instant starts. in Beijing. tors, and the development of a new business Without time to make sophisticated There is a tendency among western district in Pudong has proceeded at break- calculations, engineers have over-specified observers to look at China’s two great cities, neck speed, although along lines that bear structural cores. Buildings less than ten years Shanghai and Beijing, as vast urban agglom- little resemblance to anything that emerged old have aged with remarkable rapidity. erations that have broken the bounds of size in the competition. Some have become redundant even before and scale and so isolate themselves from con- Shanghai has moved beyond the first rush they are finished. ventional urban precedents. But in terms of of crude tower building, and the mood has In Shanghai, friction comes with speed. population size, Shanghai, with around 20 changed. In central Shanghai, the American It’s the kind of friction that comes as develop- million people is a city of the same order of architects led by John Portman who were ment accelerates, and decelerates, the friction magnitude as New York, and London, both responsible for many of the early high rises, that fills the gap between the imperatives of metropolises with a population of around have given way to a wider selection of design- what is still operating within the framework 18 million. The most striking differences ers, who are beginning to demonstrate a more of a Marxist control and command economy, between Shanghai, London and New York considered range of approaches.As demon- the actual results, and often unintended con- are political organisation and urban culture. strated by the property investment in the sequences. This provides an echo of the gaps Shanghai is effectively a city state, with the Bund, and in some of the surviving fragments between the administrations that ran the old powers of the central government at its of 19th century Shanghai, the city is also Shanghai.You can see the will to centralise in disposal to annex satellite towns and villages beginning to develop a more nuanced attitude the language of Shanghai’s plans. Not just in and to open up territory into its direct to its own past. Under the Pearl television the huge signboard that exhorts its citizens to control.We know Shanghai is big because tower you find the Mayor’s call to his citizens “Persist without wavering until it is done”, there is no obfuscation about the difference to “Rejoice in the present, while recalling the but even more in what the city calls “the six between the city in the political sense, and in past”carved in both Chinese and English into pillars”,not a Maoist call to arms, but a policy wider definitions of it as an entity. But, as a low granite wall. Shanghai is determined to build a strong economy based on cars, much as we are ready to analyse London or that every visitor knows all about what is semiconductors, petrochemicals, trade, New York as urban regions, the perception going on now, and expresses this in language finance, real estate and construction. is still shaped by political boundaries. that seems to recall the days of the Red After New York, Shanghai is the second Shanghai, where one in five of its popula- Guards.“Persist in the development of in the Urban Age investigations on cities. tion is made up of temporary in-migrants Pudong without wavering until it is done” It provides a chance to learn from a city in from predominantly rural China, is the key reads one giant billboard. The city is busy the midst of a spasm of change so violent that city setting the pattern for the explosive urban planting trees and even the flyovers are it questions the extent of human resilience, growth in Asia. It is as much a phenomenon fringed with planting boxes dangling green to explore the meaning of speed and friction. of our times as the equally rapid and – to its over the side of the road.
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