Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics Of Built Form

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

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 citybuilding 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

For Victor Alexander Wong

S HANGHAI C ONTEMPORARY T HE P OLITICS OF B UILT F ORM N ON A RKARAPRASERTKUL 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 statecontrolled 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.

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.

C ONTENTS

Foreword iv Preface vii Introduction xiii Acknowledgements xix Illustrations xxvii Notes on Transliterations and Names xxxi Glossary of Chinese Terms xxxii

C HAPTER O NE : I NTRODUCING S HANGHAI 1 1

Critical Questions 7

2

Postmodern Society: The Critical Hypothesis 8

3

Structure of the Book 10

i

C HAPTER T WO : H ISTORY , P OWER , AND M ODERN S HANGHAI 13 4

The Opening: Pre-Colonial Shanghai 14

5

Treaty Port of the 1840s: The Semi-Colonial Shanghai 15

6

Late Nineteenth Century: The Bund 18

7

Shanghai in the 1930s: Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 20

8

Gateway to Modernization: Shanghai in the 1930s 23

9

Shanghai and China 28

10

Shanghai under the Sun: The Modernist Dream 30

11

Towards Twentieth-First Century Shanghai: From Mao to Deng 33

12

Open Door Policy: Shanghai as the Dragon’s Head 35

13

Shanghai 2000: Lujiazui 36

14

The Idealized Urban Form: The Making of Lujiazui 40

C HAPTER T HREE : P OLITICIZATION AND THE R HETORIC OF S HANGHAI U RBANISM 49 15

First Perspective: Urban Form 51

16

Second Perspective: Buildings and Urban Imagery 56

17

Third Perspective: Streetscapes 61

18

Fourth Perspective: Visualization of the Skylines 66

19

Summary: Means of Understanding 70

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C HAPTER F OUR : T HE P OLITICS OF B UILT F ORM 73 20

Shanghai Cosmopolitanism: The Cultural Infrastructure 75

21

The Politics of Built Form 77

22

Perceptions of Shanghai 80

C ONCLUSION 85 Afterword 89 Appendix 95 Notes 117 Bibliography 145

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F OREWORD

It is fair to consider this book as concise, rather than “short” — and this despite the wide-ranging concerns of the author. Yes, the subject is one city, Shanghai; but there is a history of the physical development of the city, closer consideration of the two periods of greatest development at the beginning and end of the twentieth century; an argument on the close relations of those two periods; and insights on the achievements and failures of current urban development.

Non Arkaraprasertkul is a bright and endlessly energetic young architect from Thailand. His ethnicity is Chinese; this, together with his ambition, led Non to seize the opportunity to study and visit Shanghai under the auspices of a design workshop on Shanghai urbanism in the spring of 2007. iv

Coming anew to the study of Shanghai, and this within the short time constraints of a Master’s degree program, Non’s work can only be a preliminary reading. Each of his topics certainly requires further development. Yet his work offers a bold, succinct, insightful view that provides an excellent introduction to the architecture and urbanism of Shanghai — and the lessons it offers.

Shanghai is a distinctive city within China — a small village that rose to international renown due to the global commerce that was thrust upon it by Western powers. The new surge of development at the end of the last century is also owing to, and reflects, global commerce, though this time programmed by the Chinese government. Thus, despite the evident physical difference of the Bund and Lujiazui, both can be seen as the creation of image in the service of political and economic forces. Arkaraprasertkul characterizes how the qualities of urban life are not well supported in the pursuit if image. But this does not deny the continuing fascination of this inherently cosmopolitan city.

Stanford Anderson, PhD Professor of History and Architecture Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts

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P REFACE

Cities are the product of myriad forces and uncountable individual choices large and small combining over a long period of time with unpredictable consequences for the form and operation of our built environments. The sheer complexity of phenomena converging on and constituting modern cities poses significant challenges to those of us endeavoring to “read” and “write” the city. The complexity of cities is not unlike the complexity of history itself: the clarity of outcomes tends to cloak the complex weave of contingency, individual choices, and random “acts of god.” The impending sense of multiple possibilities as we approach key moments fades quickly as the singularity of actual outcomes—verdicts rendered, wars won, elections called— becomes fixed and frozen in the historic record. It is a common human inclination to see a preordained destiny in the unfolding of events. The more subtle and insidious form of this tendency is when events are interpreted as being “natural” outcomes of forces too scattered and incremental to be usefully accounted for in detail. The work vii

of history is to offer a sufficiently detailed account of outcomes to push back the tide of “historical inevitability” that accumulates on the armature of events with the passage of time. Historians of the city are doubly challenged by the gravitational pull of deterministic interpretations due to the spatially and temporally dispersed pattern of choices that collectively constitute the form and operation of cities. Granting contingency to urban forces would appear to be constricted further under the influence of material determinisms after Marx and the methodologies of structuralism in general. Culture, variously defined, has proven a key counterforce to overly simplistic histories. To the challenge of reading the forces imprinted in the fabric of cities, cultural considerations have been at the core of a powerful set of methodologies driving the best work on cities in the recent decades.

Kevin Lynch’s contributions remain foundational in their capacity to account for a wide range of the complex forces operating in, on and through the physical arrangements of cities. In his ground-breaking Image of the City (1961), Lynch focuses on the physical attributes “identity” and “structure” of urban elements, postponing the much more complex operation of “meaning.” In his Theory of Good City Form two decades later, “meaning” takes on the central place through his “performance standards” that are articulated in explicitly cultural terms. In his three “normative cities,” Lynch identifies the genius of cities throughout history for exhibiting the attributes of human agency despite the absence of any singular human agent. In the place of any identifiable king, shaman, dictator, planner, etc. Lynch positions the tacit authority of collectively shared values and associated norms operating over time. Even his “city as an organism” accounts for the appearance of chaos by describing the viii

operation of discrete rules operating at scales difficult to observe except in aggregate. Urban historians, sociologists, geographers and a dozen other disciplines joining the “spatial turn” in the social sciences have developed and deployed these interpretive methods in the decades since their first articulation as a powerful set of tools offering reliable alternatives to the pulls of historical inevitability and material determinism.

This book emerges out of the scholarship of “cultural construction” as a significant contribution to the ongoing work of Chinese and foreign authors exploring the fertile territories presented by the remarkable recent history of Chinese urban formation and transformation. Whether it is historically appropriate to grant a certain “natural” quality to Shanghai’s pre-eighteenth century growth or the product of a sketchy historical record, both factors disappear with the appearance of the British. According to Amitav Ghosh’s recent historical novel, the Opium War that led to the founding of modern Shanghai was the opening salvo in an era of resource wars up to and including the 2003 American invasion of Iraq. 1 Mr. Arkaraprasertkul deftly gives credit to the entrepreneurial zeal that seems to be in Shanghai’s water supply while avoiding a sense of inevitability to its rise to twenty-first century prominence. The Bund’s picturesque visual history features coolies bustling along crowded quays, presented here as not just the exuberant mercantile dynamism of local entrepreneurs but also as the indentured cogs in the machinery of global economic power hierarchies photographed against a carefully staged backdrop of the Bund. Lujiazui is similarly conceived as the “natural” habitat for China’s newly minted white-collar/pantyhose entrepreneur-consumer class, internet savvy and considering the purchase of their 1

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008).

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family’s first car. Despite representing a tiny fraction of the population, this portrayal of sharp-eyed youth, western costume, and hyper-modern stage set, together stand as the iconic imagery of twenty-first century China. Separated by the eerie silence of Mao’s anti-urban policies, the two golden ages of Shanghai appear simultaneously different in origin and uncannily similar in affect and intent to position Shanghai on the global stage.

Of particular interest here is the spatial analysis of the Lujiazui financial district of Pudong. Arkaraprasertkul’s analysis of the urban design competition and subsequent hybrid proposal for Lujiazui, along with the design processes associated with each of the major towers, stand as powerful case studies of urban and architectural form in service to iconographic projections of power for domestic and international consumption. The Chinese pragmatism exemplified in Shanghai is less the small-scale pragmatism of the merchant on a bicycle, than it is the state-sponsored and globally financed pragmatism of the urban megaproject with precedents in London, Singapore, and emulated in Dubai. It is a build-it-and-they-will-comeapproach guaranteed to succeed by international trade agreements. The regime out of which Lujiazui rises is smaller and more flexible but still tied to the state socialism it devolved from.

As portrayed here, the “urban form propaganda” of Lujiazui operates in the background, and over time. The imagery of towers across the Huangpu works its way into the minds eye while we sleep. Before long, a habitual smile of recognition greets the once-dreaded sight of the “the Pearl” as if it was ever so. The Bund was a powerful x

manifestation of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century globalization, preserved in all its glory by the shock of the Japanese invasion and benign Mao-era neglect. Borrowing the literary device of Arkaraprasertkul’s “time traveler,” we can’t help but ask: Will Lujiazui fare as well in the twenty-second century?

Robert Cowherd, PhD Associate Professor of Architecture Wentworth Institute of Technology Boston, Massachusetts

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I NTRODUCTION

The first time I came to Shanghai more than twenty years ago, one could look from the Bund across the water to Pudong to see rice fields. Now that view is blocked by a sky clogged with towers and the rice fields have disappeared. The story of rampant expansion is the same in China’s other major cities. Not so long ago there were only two ring roads in Beijing. Now there are six.

I have been working and teaching in China for twenty years and each time I return I am always shocked and disoriented. Each time, more neighborhoods have been destroyed, more highways paved, and more distasteful high-rises built. The rate of change in China’s cities in this time has never been seen before in any country in recent history. The changes that have taken place in these cities in twenty years are equal to the changes in American cities over one hundred years.

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It is difficult to comprehend the complexities of these changes; however, it is easy to see the impact of physical, economic, and social transformations on the environment. Cities like Beijing and Shanghai have become almost unrecognizable. Citizens have been relocated into high-rise buildings, often destroying their social connections. Large groups of “floating populations” (workers relocated from the countryside) have moved from villages to find work in the city as laborers to building high-rises. This has radically changed family dynamics in the villages and contributed to cluttered skylines, producing a visual chaos.

Of course, it is fortunate that the economy of China has improved, at least for citizens in the cities – but these changes have been far from positive for all. The countryside villages are still economically depressed, partly due to young citizens leaving for the cities seeking better economic conditions. The villages are suffering from this migration, both socially and economically.

In both Beijing and Shanghai the physical environment has become a stark, lonely place almost devoid of human life. The “spaces between” buildings (what I refer to as the texture and life of a city) are windswept, vacant, full of highways, supporting little or no human interaction. The hundreds of high-rise towers in Beijing and Shanghai have become monuments to economic progress, but they do not really represent human advancement. They do not represent the high point of a civilization so rich in cultural history, but just the opposite, a step backward in human terms. Each tower is shouting to be seen, trying to be more fashionable than its neighbor, higher, with more glitter, but rarely recognizing the first credo of architecture, that I xiv

believe is important – to provide a “place of harmony” (what I refer to as places for a healthy life) for the citizens.

Of course, this is not the first time we have witnessed this kind of transformation. In the United States during the time of Urban Renewal and interstate highway construction, neighborhoods were destroyed, citizens uprooted and the fabric of many cities was damaged. In the United States it took a decade of public protest to turn this development in a more human direction, with the leadership of writers, activists, and urban design leaders such as Jane Jacobs and Kevin Lynch who helped to catalyze this movement. But, even in the United States, after fifty years the negative effects from this period of rampant growth are still felt very strongly, and cities are still struggling to correct the damage.

Part of this chaotic environment is the responsibility of architects and planners, who are the only professions that directly relate to the physical environment. The larger question posed is what is the role of the architect and the planner today? Are we merely technicians that follow the directions of developers, governments, and economic trends? Or can we provide a new kind of leadership based on being “care takers” (what I believe should be a credo of architects and planners) of the physical world?

Architects of the future need to be more than “exterior decorators,” making buildings for form’s sake, following the latest fashions in magazines without consideration for the people using the spaces we design. We need to be careful xv

listeners to the “messages” of the built world (a mirror of society and sometimes look through the mirror) and propose creative directions for the future of physical environments based on human values for a better life.

This is our task and

responsibility to all citizens of the world. And this is crucial if we are to preserve land, cultural values, and be the voice for the citizens who are being affected.

For many years I have been working with students from MIT to provide alternatives to present trends in development that prioritize human values over economic ones. I first met Non Arkaraprasertkul, as a student in the MIT/Tsinghua University Design Workshop where we were studying and designing alternatives to the rapid rate of development occurring in Beijing. Later he was my teaching assistant for a Design Studio studying urban villages in China. Since that time he has taught with me in China and Thailand. I saw in Non an outstanding designer with great sensitivity for human development and a unique ability to articulate the forces that are changing our built world.

Non Arkaraprasertkul has written an excellent account of the transformation that has occurred in China’s cities by using Shanghai as a case study, and analyzing physical, social and cultural conditions. He has a keen eye for understanding the changes of China and his work will undoubtedly become a valuable reference for others to understand in the future.

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Non represents a new generation of architects who have the potential to become creative leaders of a new future in design. This book is an important step towards that future.

Jan Wampler FAIA Professor of Architecture Department of Architecture Massachusetts Institute of Technology Cambridge, Massachusetts

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Like everyone who is excited by China’s speed of economic growth, my interest in Shanghai finds form in the skyline of China’s economic powerhouse. The new skyline Shanghai is Lujiazui, the Central Business District (CBD) of Pudong located across the river from the Old Shanghai, consisting of a series of skyscrapers, reflective high-rise towers, and monumental urban boulevards. This new image is impressive. I cannot avoid asking many questions about the economic underpinnings of the city. Considering the newness of Lujiazui, the scale of the development is too huge to believe that it was only the capitalist market demand that has created this city of skyscrapers. If it was not just the economics, then what was it? If it was not just the need for space for service industries and financial sectors, just like any Western metropolis, the question that remains is what was the stimulation for this new city? To assert that this wild growth was generated by its favorable global financial position and facilitated by the ease of financing would be simplistic. Something greater had to xix

induce the building of a new city on vacant land across the river from the existing settlement. So, my assumption is that there are forces that underlie this unforeseen consequence of urbanism. It seems like architecture and urban form are, and will continue to be, utilized as tangible representations of the city’s expected growth – the physical articulations of the perceptions of global progress. This paper will identify the rationale for this phenomenon and point out the conditions that not only underlie the making of Shanghai urbanism, but also characterize the reality of the city. In this study, I seek to examine the role of architecture and urbanism as instruments in the transformation process of the city to the metropolis as a result of cultural, political, and economic perspectives, all of which hopefully uncover new potential, rather than discussing fait accompli.

This research began when I was in China as a graduate student from America taking part in the celebrated Massachusetts Institute Technology (MIT)-Tsinghua’s Beijing Urban Design Studio in the summer of 2006. Before the studio, I had no particular interest in Shanghai or China. I even deliberately avoided being involved in the discourse due to my lack of interest in any of the ‘trendy topics.’ Everybody in the school seemed to be attracted to China. These faddish topics, to me, tend to die out after the excitement dies down. Thus, the initial decision to take this China study was merely about my interest in urban design, not China. I arrived in Shanghai for a few days before the Studio and traveled in the city with keen curiosity and eyes wide open. Like someone who was born a hundred year ago, frozen in a time capsule, and one day awakened to face reality; I was amazed by basically everything I saw. The urban

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symbolism made the city difficult to read. I felt like I was in a dreamland where everything is embellished for visual pleasure.

At the time, I was not aware that the deep structure of Shanghai’s urbanism is more than just what we see on the façade of spectacular buildings. Shanghai was not love at first sight. I was not immediately interested in Shanghai, but my interest in the city grew the deeper I probed. It was not until I went back for the second time in the Winter of 2007 for MIT Professor Stanford Anderson’s workshop on the city’s morphology that I decided to work on the topic, which continued to bring me back to Shanghai for a couple more times in less than six months of my first visit. For some reason – and, of course, a good reason – I went to Shanghai four times that year and continued to question whether the façade of Shanghai was real. When I was young, I lived with a Chinese family and was told that when we have guests over, no matter how hard, we have to slap our face to make it look red – as a red face is considered a healthy and wealthy face for Chinese. We would be poised to do it in order to show the guests that we are in good shape. It occurred to me that perhaps Shanghai was a Chinese self face-slapping.

Along the process of writing this book, I have been helped, inspired, and mentored by people, perhaps unknown to some of them, whose interests lie in the mutual understanding of culture. First of all, to my History teachers: Professors Stanford Anderson, John W. Dower, and Robert Cowherd.

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Architects and historians who care about constructive criticism owe a great debt to Stanford Anderson, perhaps the most globally influential History Theory and Criticism teacher. Stan taught me not only how to think and critique as a process, but also how to write methodologically. His profound clarity and simplicity at points of complexity has been the model for my literary development. Whatever I have learned about architectural history and whatever I believe about architecture as a socio-cultural practice will be rooted in his teachings. John W. Dower has been instrumental in teaching me the excitement of history, and moreover, the enjoyment of writing history. I was extremely fortunate to have been mentored by him during my final semester at MIT. His enthusiasm for Shanghai motivated me to dig deeper with depth and intensity. I have learned from him the writing that exhibits clarity must start with planning, resulting in historical narratives that are direct, simple, and elegant. Robert Cowherd’s strong faith in my capability was the catalyst of my deep curiosity in East Asian urbanization, which was the incentive to write this book. His seminar, Cultural Construction of Asian Cities, enticed me to be interested in the way architecture works in the urban context – not only in a physical sense, but also in a spiritual, emotional, and psychological one. Bob’s constant support, intellectual guidance, and rigorous criticism have been invaluable. He also deserves thanks for his continuous belief in this book and the introduction to this book.

Along the way, I was fortunate to know Professor Jan Wampler. Under his tutelage, I went to China three times and was given an opportunity to go to Beijing for one extra time to conduct the fieldwork for this book. As a student and colleague, I was grateful to have been taught by a great professor who is not only superb in xxii

teaching techniques, but also is an anthropologist architect who understands the nature of architecture vis-à-vis nature. Teachers will try to emulate him and all will fail – Jan educates from the heart. Mention must be made of Professor Reinhard Goethert for his energetic support and constant encouragement. At the darkest moment of my time in Cambridge, it was he who gave invaluable guidance and hopes for me to carry on till the time when the clouds were gone and the sky was, again, open: Reinhard Goethert is my mentor.

I would like to thank Professors Yung Ho Chang, Mark Jarzombek, Peter G. Rowe, Shigeru Miyagawa, and Douglas Webster for their sincere and direct advice, especially concerning the issues of applications of ‘Chinese pragmatism.’ Dr Saipin Suputtamongkol, Anne Warr, and Dr Gregory Bracken are owed my thanks for reading the entire manuscript and making professional suggestions for improvement. Ben Matteson and Andy Gulbrandson provided a vital sounding board for ideas about the global-local relationship, the practice of an urbanist, and especially the critique in writing about history and theory.

It is my great pleasure to mention my colleagues to whom, in various capacities, I owe my thanks. First, I could not have produced the set of writing tools to tackle the issues of this thesis without the timely assistance of Reilly Paul Rabitaille, who also proved to me that there is indeed, an architect who knows how to write about complexity with great clarity. Reilly is my friend extraordinaire. I thank Melissa MingWei Lo whose sensibility and intensity in writing are totally admirable: I am indebted to her for assistance in many ways throughout my writing of this book. I would not xxiii

have been able to write this thesis without consistent help, moral support, and inspiration from the writing consultants and editors of the MIT’s Writing Center: Jane Dunphy, Patricia Brennecke, Dr Robert Irwin, Marilyn Levin, Bob Doherty, and Dr Steve Strang. Many ideas came from formative conversations with friends, and colleagues from China, who taught me to believe that architecture is a social activity. So I thank Winnie Wong, Jimmy Chen, Wenjun Ge, Yan Lin, Ruan Hao, Sun Penghui, Wang Jue, Laing Sisi, Liu Jun, Yan Lin, Jiang Yang, Huang Jianxiang, Li Hou, Har Ye Kan, Lin Jin Ann, Lin Yingtzu, Feng Jie, Chen Shouheng, Dr Zuo Yan, Dr Shao Lei, Dr Lin Peng, and Dr Li Xiangning.

Closer to my home in Thailand, I have also had the benefit of advice and encouragement from several colleagues and fellows who share my interest in Asian cities including Dr Polladach Theerapappisit from the Universities of Melbourne and Western Sydney in Australia, and Dr Chuthatip Maneepong from Arizona State University. Dr Vimolsiddhi Horanyangkura, Dr Peeradorn Kaewlai and Dr Supreedee Rittironk, especially, have taught me the value of self-criticism and planning, helping me to stay on the right track and to put my self-motivation to work. I would not have courage to do what I did without their encouragement in many ways; I thank them for being my great intellectual brothers.

This book would not be possible without generous funding and research grants from the United States Department of the State’s Fulbright Fellowship Program, the Thailand-United States Educational Foundation, the Institute of International Education (IIE), and the Asian Cultural Council (Affiliate of Rockefeller’s Brothers xxiv

Fund). Starr Foundation Research Fellowship in History and Cultural Studies awarded a grant to support my fieldwork in Asia. Research for this study was also substantially supported by Harvard-Yenching Institute Fellowship, MIT’s Graduate Student Council Research-Travel Fellowship, the Avalon Travel Fellowships, and the Merit-Based Research Grant from Thammasat University.

It all started ten years ago when I was an exchange student in Oklahoma City, where I was sent to the home of Victor Alexander Wong, my first intellectual teacher. In every respect, my comprehension has been shaped by his sharp, succinct and logical advice. His fingerprints appear on many of my arguments and writing. I thank Victor for teaching me how to think with a critical mind, how to listen with critical ears, and how to see with critical eyes. His inspiration brought me back to America. He always wanted me to go to MIT, so I went to MIT. His moral support continues to give me strength and his thorough understanding of both Chinese and American cultures serves as a constructive sounding board. I am grateful to always have his wonderful support. This book is dedicated to him.

There is no one I am more grateful towards for everything in life than my parents, Kongkiat and Arunee Arkaraprasertkul. They always believe in me, in my capability to achieve, and in my comprehension of the world at large. Finally, I extend my warmest thanks to Supawai Wongkovit who is always by my side.

As a second thought, perhaps, it must be something in my Chinese roots that caught my interest in Shanghai. I grew up in a family of Chinese immigrants in the xxv

northeast of Thailand. My grandparents were born in the south of China not so far from Shanghai, and moved to Thailand during the late Qing Dynasty turmoil. As a second generation Thai-born Chinese son raised by the first generation, I was acquainted with Chinese pragmatism, in which one relies on the tangible value and the permanence of things as opposed to investing in ideas. It was not the calculation or abstract numbers that counted, but the physicality – as a clear tangible return – that should satisfy the mind of the business owner.

When I saw Shanghai for the first time, I thought of this concept of Chinese pragmatism, which is embedded in my mentality. It is the perhaps for this reason that I can understand myself through cultural construction. The ancient Chinese built the Great Wall of China to keep out foreign invasion. The modern Chinese built the Great Façade of Shanghai to lure them back. Both are monumental, permanent and tangible.

Non Arkaraprasertkul Harris Manchester College Oxford, UK

xxvi

I LLUSTRATIONS

1

A Bird eye view photograph of Shanghai’s Lujiazui

25

Courtesy Shanghai Municipality

2

A photograph of the Bund at dawn in the International

17

Settlement in the1880s Courtesy Virtual Shanghai, Editor: Christian Henriot (IAO - Lyon 2 University)

3

The British Land Regulation Map of 1930s

20

Courtesy Virtual Shanghai, Editor: Christian Henriot (IAO - Lyon 2 University)

4

A photograph of the Bund in the 1930s, viewed from the French settlement Courtesy Virtual Shanghai, Editor: Christian Henriot (IAO - Lyon 2 University)

xxvii

21

5

A photograph of Paris waterfront in the 1900s

26

Courtesy anonymous photographer

6

Photographs of skylines of Manhattan waterfront, and the

27

Bund in the early 1990s Courtesy Virtual Shanghai, Editor: Christian Henriot (IAO - Lyon 2 University)

7

A perspective rendering of 1929 Dong Dayou’s plan for

29

Shanghai Civic Center Courtesy Shanghai Archive

8

A plan, perspective rendering, and detailed perspective

32

rendering of The 1942 Kunio Maekawa’s plan for Pudong Courtesy Shanghai Archive

9

A photograph of the model of Richard Rogers and

43

Partners’ plan for Lujiazui in Pudong Pudong Courtesy Shanghai Planning Museum

10

A photograph of the model of Dominique Perraults’ plan

44

for Lujiazui in Pudong Courtesy Shanghai Planning Museum

11

A photograph of the model of Shanghai Urban Planning

46

Institute’s plan for Lujiazui in Pudong Courtesy Shanghai Planning Museum

12

A Bird eye view of Shanghai in 1937 Courtesy Virtual Shanghai, Editor: Christian Henriot (IAO - Lyon 2 University)

xxviii

52

13

A perspective rendering of the proposed Century Avenue

54

by Arte, Jean Marie Charpentier et Associés Courtesy Shanghai Municipality

14

A photograph of the Century Avenue, looking toward the

55

Central Park in the East Courtesy Peter G. Rowe

15

Photographs of Jin Mao Building and Kaifang Pagoda

59

Courtesy Wang Xuyuan

16

A photograph of the model of the original World

60

Financial Center, and a perspective rendering of the revised World Financial Center with its top redesigned Courtesy Kohn Pedersen Fox

17

A photograph of the Century Avenue

62

Courtesy Shanghai Municipality

18

A photograph of the model of the proposed Century

63

Avenue by Arte, Jean Marie Charpentier et Associés Courtesy Shanghai Municipality

19

Photographs of the International Settlement in 1920s, and

65

London’s Fleet Street in 1906s Courtesy Virtual Shanghai, Editor: Christian Henriot (IAO - Lyon 2 University)

20

A photograph of Shanghai’s street scenes in 1900s Courtesy Virtual Shanghai, Editor: Christian Henriot (IAO - Lyon 2 University)

xxix

65

21

A photograph of the Century Avenue’s sidewalk

66

© Author

22

A Bird eye view photograph of Lujiazui’s Central Park

68

Courtesy Peter G. Rowe

23

A photograph of the famous Pudong skyline

69

Courtesy Shanghai Municipality

24,25 Photographs of Puxi high-rises scape, and loose cityscape

72

of Pudong © Peter Morgan

26

A photograph displaying the panorama of Shanghai’s two

82

shores © Sun Penghui

27

Model of Shanghai showing the mixing of high-rise buildings and low-rise lilong neighborhoods © Author

xxx

98

N OTES ON T RANSLITERATIONS AND N AMES

In this book, I use standard Pinyin system of transliterating Chinese words. It is today’s most commonly used Romanization system for Standard Mandarin, which might not be fully accurate when it comes to pronunciation. For instance, “Xiaoping” in “Deng Xiaoping” is pronounced “Shiao-ping.” Therefore, readers who want to pronounce the name with full accuracy may consult a modern Chinese language pronunciation guide. In Pinyin system, most letters resemble their English pronunciation. And for names, since a Chinese name is written with the family name (surname or last name) first and the given name next, which often causes confusion among those from cultures where the family name usually comes last; therefore Deng Xiaoping’s surname was Deng, and his first name is Xiaoping.

xxxi

G LOSSARY OF C HINESE T ERMS

Shanghai

上海

kaifang (pagoda)

开封(祐国寺塔)

Beijing

北京

lilong

里弄

Canton

广东

Lujiazui

陆家嘴

Century Avenue Cultural Revolution

世纪大道

Zhu Rongji

朱镕基

文化大革命

Mao Zedong

毛泽东

danwei

单位

Nanjing

南京

Deng Xioping

邓小平

Open Door Policy

门户开放政策

Dong Dayou Great Leap Forward

董大酉

Pudong

浦东

大跃进

Puxi

浦西

Huangpu River

黄浦江

Suzhou Creek

苏州河

Jiang Zemin

江泽民

The Bund

外滩

Kaifang

开封

Tiananmen Square

天安门广场

xxxii

C HAPTER 1 I NTRODUCING S HANGHAI

If a Shanghai man who lived seventy years ago traveled through time and arrived at Shanghai today, he would not have any idea that he had arrived in the city of his birth. He would be astonished by what he saw, despite the fact that Shanghai in the early twentieth century contained stylistically and stereotypically sophisticated urban elements, such as The Bund and the neoclassic buildings in the French Concession. First, he would find that The Bund, the famous commercial corridor constructed in the early twentieth century running north-south along the West bank of the Huangpu River, was no longer the city's primary image – no longer constituted his familiar identification of the city. Shanghai was now dominated by the bigger, bolder, and more hyperbolized Lujiazui, the new skyline across the river. While the old skyline might remind him of the city's colonial past, this present visage epitomizes an otherwise unimaginable future. 1

Introducing Shanghai

Moreover, he might find that not only was the appearance of the city changed, but also its urban pattern. Surrounded by the incredibly tall, big, wide, and long structures of Lujiazui, he might have lost his sense of scale and security. Shanghai, he felt, had become unfriendly to pedestrians. He could no longer bike or walk freely across the neighborhood. The "land of swamps" of the time from which he came has now been turned into a hightech financial district - something that exceeded his wildest imagination. The first challenge that confronts him is to figure out how to survive in this tremendously dull atmosphere. This adaptation is so dramatic that he would feel nostalgic for his old hometown. This is not unlike many Shanghainese who experienced first-hand the drama of the delirious change of Chinese commercial and cosmopolitan culture. It would be difficult to associate himself with either the surface level of what he saw, or the deep structure of the new city's conception.

Shanghai – China’s largest city – is strategically situated along the banks of the Yangtze River. Once serving as a major Treaty Port, Shanghai represents China’s colonial legacy as well as the point of origin for the country’s recent phenomenal economic growth. Its relatively short urban history had its genesis in the late 19th century with the arrival of European and American investors and their enormous influx of capital and expertise. After 1949, Shanghai was transformed by the Communist government into a centrally-planned industrial powerhouse. It was not until 1978 that the Open Door Policy stimulated Shanghai’s potential as a gateway to wealth and modernity. Today, this topographically flat city accommodates some 15 million people (which continues to float) within an area of 2

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form two thousand square miles. Shanghai’s gross domestic income is higher than that of Beijing, and its growth rate is higher than China’s national average. The Pudong New Development Zone, where the Lujiazui CBD is located, opened for business in 1992. This area is the portrait of a modern China for the rest of the world, appearing in mainstream media, most notably in 2006’s Mission Impossible 3. As a city with unabashed global ambitions, Shanghai has been among the fastest growing cities in the world, especially during the last decade of the 20th century. Recently, according to a research conducted by Mastercard Worldwide, Shanghai moved up swiftly into the top 25 from #32 in 2007 to secure its place among leading global cities. Its economic stability, legal and political framework, and an increased quality of life; and China’s booming economy have been Shanghai’s major advantages demonstrating its importance not only to Asian economies but also to the world at large as a sustainer of global growth according to United Nation’s World Urbanization Prospects 2007 Revision. Although Shanghai’s population growth has slowed considerably since 2000, the city is still expanding, chasing Bangkok as the consumer-driven cosmopolis of Asia.

Shanghai’s rapid population growth, driven primarily by immigration from other (more rural) parts of China and made possible by a relaxation of the hukou system has allowed massive domestic migration, usually to where employment is plentiful. The hukou system, in particular, is a registration system that afforded residents access to local government benefits like education, health care, and welfare, but restricted in-country migration as these benefits were only available in the locale where a citizen was registered (e.g. if you were a resident of Beijing, you could not move to Shanghai and receive government benefits nor easily gain employment, and vice versa). As China has modernised and opened its borders per 3

Introducing Shanghai se, the hukou system is fading into obscurity, allowing massive in-country migration, usually to where employment is plentiful. This has created unforeseen consequences on urbanism and urban form. In addition to China’s de facto leader Deng Xioping’s economic and political modernisation, the progressive politics of Shanghai’s local government furthered to strengthen these consequences. The term “Open Door” does not mean that China will open itself to the world but that the world will be brought into China’s entrepreneurial and economic sphere of influence in order to modernize the economic system under the authoritarian rule of the Communist Party.

The unique sensibility of the Chinese, nurtured by the pragmatism of its integration of socialist nationalistic marketing principles, further enabled change to take place. Yet, Shanghai’s Pudong area ultimately owes its existence to the soft cultural infrastructure of Shanghai’s cosmopolitanism and its facilitation of the city’s heterogeneous nature. It seems like architecture and urban form are, and will continue to be, utilised as tangible representations of the city’s anticipated growth – the physical articulations of the perceptions of global progress. This book aims to present a series of observations identifying its rationale, pointing out the conditions that not only underlie the making of this urban complexity, but also to characterise the reality of the city. From an urbanistic point-of-view, Shanghai is a city where two distinctive urban characteristics, the contemporary post-Mao high-rise and the pre-Mao 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. 4

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form We, however, have learned and experienced from the unsuccessful precedents in the West and the extensive literature that criticizes the impact of a city without diversity. Although high-rise development might logically and efficiently solve the problem of accommodating large numbers of people, it has concomitant long-term problems such as a diminished sense of community.

S HANGHAI U RBANISM

Shanghai’s urbanism is not conventional; and it never has been. Never so quickly has a settlement transformed from a simple mud village into a metropolis famous for its spectacular foreign architectural and urban cultures. Some call this urban phenomenon “hybrid urbanism”1signifying the unique heterogeneity of urban form. Urbanism of Shanghai began with Puxi on the west side of the Huangpu River to be followed by Pudong on the east. If the attempt to build Puxi in the 1930s was to resemble a historic and romanticized Paris,2 it was obviously Manhattan that is the model for the planning of Pudong. 3

As urbanization complicates every scale of the city’s physical and cultural restructuring, Shanghai today is not only Chinese, but also the world’s “Fast City,” capable of accommodating a massive entrepreneurial economy, cosmopolitan culture, and an attractive aesthetic designed to entice a creative workforce to sustain economic growth.4 Shanghai’s built form and environment are not merely expressing the logic of inhabitation; instead, they also purposely embrace a certain set of global forces, shaping urban form and experience in space and time.

5

Introducing Shanghai

Figure 1: Shanghai’s Lujiazui, photograph taken from the old part of Shanghai.

For the operation of this plastic surgery of cultural urbanism to function, political agents are notably conscious of the consequential action and impact given by the new appearance. They must also take into account the cultural system of the “receivers” in order to be flexible to dramatic change; otherwise, this operation would fail. Shanghai, however, works economically. That is to say, Shanghai, since its opening to the world as a Treaty Port in the 1840s (arguably a “semicolonization”), has been a city with soft cultural infrastructure. This organizational structure allows the diverse architectural cultures to represent different cultural norms while still maintaining their representational integrity by means of its

6

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form architectural and urban orderings. The vast diversity of symbolism and iconography in the appearance of Western built forms has complicated the social and cultural milieu of the city, leading to an active amalgamation of architectural and urban form. Shanghai’s city form has never been truly traditional; instead, growth and expansion has always been dictated by the distinctive patchworks of forms representative of the myriad urban influences brought to the city over time.

C RITICAL Q UESTIONS

Taking into account the representational form of Shanghai’s cityscape as impacted by its internal economic and political systems, this book seeks to deliver pragmatic answers to two conceptual questions. The first involves the conception of the hybrid urban city, by examining the transformation of the cityscape.5 The second analyzes how the politics of built form impact the transformation of the city. These queries will unravel the course of urban phenomenon, clarifying the working impetuses that affect practice and production of architecture in this particular context. “Politics” in this sense, however, is not confined to the governance of China, or the authoritarian rule of a communist state. Rather, the term seeks to identify the architectural means of power and status, and the position of society in a global system – specifically, in the architectural and urban planning of Shanghai. For such a city of abrupt transitions,6 the impact of the changing environment can be understood as a part of the larger political dialogue between East and West.7

Urban Theorist Mario Gandelsonas points out that the radical restructuring of Shanghai’s infrastructure and urban fabric represents China’s search for an alternative modernity, “a modernity tailored to meet the contemporary forms of 7

Introducing Shanghai cultural, political and economic conditions.”8 The product of this purposeful departure from the traditional past to the culturally construed future, and the resulting representation of the built form and environment is the focus area of investigation. For instance, as Richard Marshall observes: Lujiazui presents an uncompromising vision of the future of [the] Chinese city…[presenting the fact that] China is now seeking to capture a larger role in world affairs [and] Lujiazui is one of the primary instrumentalities to propel this emergence.9

Using Gandelsonas’ term in this context, it can be understood that this transformation is the condition of a Chinese modernity, which gives birth to the inexplicable development phenomenon in Shanghai. In the same way, as the history of the Bund cannot be thought of as the result of a particular pattern of urbanism separated from that of the foreign concessions’ district; the making of Lujiazui cannot be thought of as an expression from within.10 Using this as the basis for studying the contextualized relationship between Shanghai’s architecture and urban orders beyond the surface façade of fancy buildings and embellished urbanism, it is possible to see and discover the architectural and urban history of Shanghai from the beginning of the twenty-first century through the lenses of history, theory, and criticism.

P OSTMODERN S OCIETY : T HE C RITICAL H YPOTHESIS

The culture of a consumption society, the desire to have a venue to the international market economy (and socialist economy), and an ideology mimicking 8

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form a capitalist society are the main forces that are altering the physicality of the city.11 As urban culture cannot be detached from this physical environment, the phenomenon of “Postmodern China” might best be characterized as the terrain of diversely rendered cultural norms. The emergence of spatial plurality, hybridity, and inclusiveness are strategies of survival for the international preeminence of China in response to a new globalized environment.12 The making of urban architecture is influenced by political independence, or “pragmatic nationalism,” which is the act of liberating China from others by means of economic superiority after Deng Xiaoping’s reform in the 1970s.

In Shanghai, contemporary architecture has become a bold symbol of development – a signifier of progress in the discourse of urban semiotics. The changing of Shanghai’s “postcard scenery” from the colonial-style of the Bund on Puxi side to the New Commercial Development District on Pudong side, particularly the Oriental Pearl telecommunication tower and the Jin Mao Tower, within less than a decade is an absolutely astonishing urban phenomenon. The fact that this phenomenon is not unexpected, but has been carefully planned and ambitiously encouraged is the impetus for this search. Because the built form and environment are mediated by its populace understanding the political agendas or programs of Shanghai’s ethnically diverse inhabitants and, the relationship between them is crucial to the understanding of its urban culture and physicality. While researching Shanghai’s past, it is tempting, like our previously mentioned time traveler, to make expected recommendations for Shanghai to maintain its urban heritage as a significant component. More important than dwelling on such an expectation is to concentrate on the key transformations that offer critical views that will serve as a springboard for the future design and development of the city. 9

Introducing Shanghai This research will contribute to the theory of the conception and experience of the architecture and urbanism of every hybridized city in a practical manner from the perspectives of both the pedestrian and architect-planner, which is critical to the understanding of Shanghai and similar cities.

My book is an attempt to integrate research, architectural knowledge, and fieldwork to understand complex phenomenon of the recent urban transformation of Shanghai, one of the world’s fastest growing cities. By using a multi-disciplinary approach, the goal of this research is to inform a practical relevant practice of architecture in various empirical dimensions – believed by me to be the core of History, Theory, and Criticism as opposed to the obsolete criticism of the past or an ideal recommendation that ignores reality. That is, my criticism by no means seeks to dichotomize the past and the present of Shanghai through the justification of social value; rather, it tries to draw attention to the intrinsic relationships and trends of development, revealing a potential direction for further investigation. I believe that the potential of the simultaneity of practice and theory can be rendered through the definitive findings of a constructive research program.

S TRUCTURE OF THIS B OOK

This book consists of four chapters; which together form a coherent analysis answering the queries posed above. This introduction gives a brief rationale of the research, presenting the methodology of the research and discussing the critical hypotheses. The two following chapters state the important points on the politicization of built form and environment of the city, leading to the third chapter which cross-examines findings from the previous two using the politics of 10

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form built form as a framework. The second chapter, “History, Power and Modern Shanghai,” begins with a historical account for understanding Shanghai as a city of spontaneous growth. It sketches Shanghai’s urban timeframe. In this chapter, I critically assess the long-standing hybrid condition of Shanghai’s urbanism. In the third chapter, “Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism,” I present a set of observations on the expression of politicized urban form, and contemporary architecture as a means of urban iconography. In the fourth chapter, “The Politics of Built Form,” after a brief summary of the findings of the previous chapters, I reflect upon a number of issues brought up by the previous chapters concerning both physical and economic consequences of Shanghai’s urban form. I will show that the context of Shanghai Contemporary is an internally ordered system of built form and environment that balances the singularity of architectural image and the plurality of urban image as influenced by politics.

11

Introducing Shanghai

12

C HAPTER T WO H ISTORY , P OWER , AND M ODERN S HANGHAI

“We know that Rome was not built in one day; but sometimes I think Shanghai could be re-built in one night,” said a Shanghai historian whom our time traveler ran into and discussed his interest in the new city’s image while looking across the river to the hyperbolic skyline of Pudong. She was looking at the new World Financial Center, which will become one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers in less than a year. Her words strike our time traveler as contemporary version of Shanghai’s outlook in the flavor of H.J. Lethbridge’s classic introduction to the best-selling 1934 All about Shanghai and Environs: a Standard Guidebook: “Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, and the fishing village on a mudflat, which almost literally overnight became a great metropolis.”1

Of course, she was being ironic about the rapid transformation of her birthplace, which has occurred during the last twenty years of her life as a

History, Power, and Modern Shanghai Shanghainese. Being a typical visitor to the “new Shanghai” – like our time traveler – one would be overwhelmed by the image of elegant Western style buildings, and would not have any idea that the history of Shanghai de facto dates back to more than a thousand years ago, which is a “reasonable misunderstanding” given the conspicuous absence of a visible traditional Chinese architectural heritage in Shanghai.

This chapter presents the history of the growth of the city and the urban phenomenon of the Bund and Lujiazui and their relationship to both the national and the global.2 The objective of this chapter is to analyze how Shanghai came to be what it is today through a study of its history.

T HE O PENING : P RE -C OLONIAL S HANGHAI

Although Shanghai is old, its urban history is recent. Written records of Shanghai prior to the Sung Dynasty (960-1279) were limited because it was commonly thought of as a relatively “small rural fishing village.” This commonlyheld view of Shanghai, however, appears to be just a myth. Recent research shows substantial evidence that Shanghai was, in fact, a medium-size market town.2 Its strategic location as a coastal port was self-evident. Since the early years of Yuan Dynasty (1279-1368), Shanghai had become the capital of the coastal county. Its close connection to the Huangpu River3 and network of waterways such as Suzhou Creek give clues as to how this small city might have had a strategic location. Shanghai’s favorable economic positioning slowly established it as an administrative city of the coast.4 As a result, urban infrastructure including roads,

14

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form local ports, and commercial hubs were built, and people from other parts of China traveled to this city searching for economic opportunity.

Until the seventeenth century (late Ming Dynasty), there existed no record of maps of Shanghai. This seems to support the assumption that Shanghai had not expanded much during the course of four hundred years. Numbers of people from outside were not large enough to alter the city from being a medium-sized selfcontained market town enclosed by a wall, typical of traditional Chinese cities. A major intervention, however, took place around the mid-nineteenth century through the coerced opening of the city to the outside during the Opium War. In 1842 – the signing of Treaty of Nanjing legitimized the foreign interventions in China for the first time. The first party of English traders arrived in Shanghai on November 17, 1843, followed by the French. The city was subsequently divided into spatial territories. There were 3 foreign land parcels to start with; British, French and American. The American and British sectors combined later to for the International Settlement. Shanghai was gradually re-built and transformed under foreign rulers with superior weaponry. It is astounding that absolute dominance of the extraterritoriality was seized forcibly from the Chinese in their own city.

T REATY P ORT OF THE 1840 S : T HE S EMI -C OLONIAL S HANGHAI

What Shanghai had to offer to those foreign powers was access to ports. Foreign investors gravitated toward an extensive waterfront that gave access to Suzhou Creek, a strategic transportation route to other parts of China.6 The Puxi area on the west bank of the Huangpu was transformed from agricultural land into the international port city of the Far East.7 The 15

History, Power, and Modern Shanghai concessions brought about by foreign treaties did not colonize Shanghai in the traditional sense. As historian Leo Lee asserts, “[a]lthough Shanghai did not face the same colonial situation as in colonial India [,]…the discrepancies between the privileged and the rest of the city, levying on the Chinese, could be worse than the strict colony.”8

Not only did foreigners build, but they also dwelt in and developed the city using particular architectural and urban forms derived from their diverse origins. The overall structure of the city was planned to satisfy not just living accommodations, but also commercial, industrial, and recreational demands. The domination of foreign planning was absolute. The internal social formation of the locals was powerless to resist the planning culture. A local workforce needed to sustain the infrastructure caused the most salient planning feature foreign developers introduced to the city. This was the “lilong,” a low-rise row house adapted from the Western-style to accommodate the families of workers, mostly villagers fleeing the rebellion in the countryside, who preferred to work for the foreign industries, and to insure “the rule of law and the safety of the foreigners’ enclaves.”9

In terms of planning, the gridiron structure of the city’s urban blocks was then defined by the geometry of this modern housing – straight lines and perpendicular angles were convenient for the division of the land, for the laying of plumbing infrastructure, and for electric tramway and bus traffic. Not so long after the first building stage in the 1870s, more than 200,000 lilong dwelling units were built and became the dominating morphological characteristic of Shanghai’s urban fabric. This structure constituted the urban form of Shanghai which became the model for the spatial organization for other parts of the city.10 16

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form

Figure 2: View of the Bund at dawn, International Settlement part of Shanghai in the 1880s. Westerners also introduced modern facilities to the Chinese who readily accepted these concessions, including gaslight, electricity, running water. Automobiles, another Western intrusion, were mostly limited to only the concessions area. The lines between different concessions, and between them and Chinese lands were clearly delineated by physical barriers such as roads and waterways. Such an abrupt leap from rural to urban was unparalleled in China, and as such, loosened the characteristics of Shanghai from the rigid confines of tradition. The first decade of the boom brought prostitution, gambling, and drug smuggling, which would become the major face of Shanghai until the Communists took over in the mid-twentieth century. Stella Dong, dysphemistically describes:

17

History, Power, and Modern Shanghai Shanghai at the time ranked as “the most pleasure-mad, rapacious, corrupt, strife-driven, licentious, squalid, and decadent city in the world.11

A decade after the turn of the twentieth century, foreign wherewithal and the flowering of treaty port business gave Shanghai a dual structure of “cosmopolitanism and entrepreneurialism.”12 Advantages that Shanghai had over other Far Eastern metropolises included foreign technology, proximity to raw materials (especially cotton-growing lands), cheap electricity, reliable financial institutions for “handling increasingly sophisticated transactions, and an extensive and already-skilled labor force.13 Moreover, the accelerating financial circulation in Shanghai at the time had disconnected the city culturally from the rest of China, accentuating the confrontation between modernized Shanghai and the rest of the traditional country.14 Several iterations of urban development were part of the process of making Shanghai the regional business center of the Far East. The necessity for an access point for the port caused foreign investors to choose a linear waterfront on the riverbank in the British settlement, which was eventually become known as the Bund.15

L ATE N INETEENTH C ENTURY : T HE B UND

By the end of the nineteenth century, Shanghai had become the center of construction technology in the Far East. Composite, reinforced concrete, and steel structures were brought into use, leading to the emergence of highrise buildings. By 1949, there were 38 buildings of more than ten floors in Shanghai – more than any other city in Asia.16

18

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form The muddy tow-path of fifty years ago which has magically become one of the most striking and beautiful civic portals in the world, faced from the West by an impressive rampart of modern buildings and bounded on the East by the [Haungpu] River.17

With the “Land Regulations” of 1849, the Bund was subdivided into British and French concessions for commercial investment.18 The Bund was not originally planned to be an iconic skyline. It was a utilitarian waterfront, a point of reception for trade. The emergence of the treaty port was a major factor that stimulated all large-scale developments in Shanghai. This included foreign trade and commercial production for export, established the groundwork for Western-style higher educational institutions, as well as steered the city toward modern banking investments.19

The first important building on the Bund was the British Consulate, built in 1873. In this period, Shanghai’s dynamism started to attract large numbers of people from around the world. This was the first time that Shanghai surpassed Canton in the seaport business – both in numbers and in entrepreneurial atmosphere.20 The Bund was not only a point of physical transactions, but also a point of “visual reception” by virtue of its emerging skyline. Twenty buildings formed the Bund’s skyline beginning with Edward VII Avenue (Yan'an Road) in the south, and ending with the Garden Bridge (Waibaidu Bridge) on Suzhou Creek.21

19

History, Power, and Modern Shanghai

Figure 3: Land Regulation Map showing the proposed Urban Structure of Puxi. Buildings on the Bund were perceived as proclamations of business prestige and prosperity. Thus, the Bund was quickly filled with monumental Western-style buildings and became a truly representative image of business to the outside world.

S HANGHAI IN THE 1930 S : R ISE AND F ALL OF A D ECADENT C ITY

Marginalized by its internationality and lack of historical bond to the rest of China, Shanghai was an autonomous business entity operating under a massively diverse population of both rural migrants and foreigners. The composition of private economic joint-ventures by both Chinese and foreign corporate groups and 20

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form political society, which was systematically established during the course of roughly fifty years since the end of the Opium War, was the impetus for the development of the city in every respect, prompting it to take its place on the global economic stage. Yet, the city became “heaven built on top of a hell”22 as the aggregation of crime, violence, guns, gangsters, drug trafficking, and prostitution reached its peak in 1933. Shanghai at the time was as elegant as Paris, as booming as Manhattan, and as rowdy and pugnacious as Chicago.

Figure 4: The Bund in the 1930s.

The population of Shanghai in the 1930s consisted not of the indigenous Shanghainese, but of the foreign “Shanghailanders” and the Chinese immigrants who recognized the business value of the port city established by treaty. 23From the 21

History, Power, and Modern Shanghai outset of this period, the outsiders had determined Shanghai’s urban history. Marie-Claire Bergère

observes that Shanghai was the “Other China.”24 The

contradictory urban scenes were brought about by the abrupt change of the city from rural to urban.

While one might initially imagine a romantic cityscape not unlike Paris when seeing Western style shops and glamorous foreigners in British-style suits, this romanticized Westernized scene would be rudely interrupted by the crowds of shirtless beggars and poor rickshaw pullers in the background. It was the first time that the population of Shanghai was close to other large cities – the population was more than three million, about 60,000 of whom were foreigners.

The city’s zoning was more defined than it had ever been. The residential districts occupied the inner part toward the western side of the Bund. There was a single elected municipal council that administered Shanghai’s public infrastructural investment, collected revenue, and acted as the main juridical authority. Although the council was meant to represent the de jure rights of the Chinese in regard to the extraterritoriality of the foreigners, it actually reinforced the ruthless suppression of the Chinese in their own enclave. That is to say, from the beginning of the treaty port, the entire built environment of Shanghai was controlled by the foreigners – either Western-style or hybrid, but with no traditional-style Chinese buildings.

The majority of people were not native, but Chinese immigrants and refugees. As a result, the city was a place of cultural amalgamation, where people from all over China came to seek opportunities to cultivate modern life and be 22

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form entertained by what was perceived as the Western version of the cultural norm. While there were a large number of Chinese, ranging from those who were at the bottom of the economic system to the bourgeoisie, small groups of foreigners held the key not only to political but also juridical and cultural powers, dominating over the class struggles and the “complexity of social distribution”25 in modern China. Poverty, in contradistinction to the foreign elitism, was the dominant characteristic of the city that abruptly leapt from rural to urban. Although there were many wealthy Chinese, Most of the Chinese in Shanghai were poor, but some succeeded in becoming part of the foreign society and their cultural enterprises elevated themselves to a so-called “bourgeoisie,” living a relatively comfortable life.26

G ATEWAY TO M ODERNIZATION : S HANGHAI IN THE 1930 S

During this time, the waterfront area was considered a jewel for any kind of business. From the 1920s up until the early 1940s when the Japanese attacked the British base on Huangpu River, the Bund was indisputably the iconic façade of Shanghai. Often rhetorically contrasted to the “fishing village” myth, the grand appearance of the cityscape was an investment and tourism magnet; every wealthy man wanted to see the city that was “built in a day.” Originally no more than a shoreline for common access to international trading, the Bund was beautified to become a riverfront boulevard, due to the greater emphasis on finance in service of trade. Consequently, buildings in the Bund quickly came to represent the prestige of Shanghai business to the outside world.

The subdivided strip was made available to business owners to build their offices and headquarters. It continued to grow along the shoreline – to the old city 23

History, Power, and Modern Shanghai wall in the south and the bank of Suzhou Creek in the north. Foreigners had Chinese working in their firms, and there were firms run by Chinese architects on the design of individual buildings in the Bund area. International Beaux-arts style buildings soon dominated Shanghai’s mile-long commercial corridor. Buildings 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.

25

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 S HANGHAI AND C HINA

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 neoclassical 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 neoclassical 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.

S HANGHAI UNDER THE S UN : T HE M ODERNIST D REAM

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 semicolonial city involved merging the French concession and the international settlements. The foreigners and their extraterritoriality status were expurgated from Shanghai.

T OWARDS T WENTY - FIRST C ENTURY S HANGHAI : F ROM M AO TO D ENG

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.

O PEN D OOR P OLICY : S HANGHAI AS THE D RAGON ’ S H EAD

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.

S HANGHAI 2000: L UJIAZUI

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.

38

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

39

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.”

T HE I DEALIZED U RBAN F ORM : T HE M AKING OF L UJIAZUI

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 41

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 42

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 43

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 46

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 47

History, Power, and Modern Shanghai 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.

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C HAPTER T HREE P OLITICIZATION AND THE R HETORIC OF S HANGHAI

U RBANISM

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 50

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 lowrise 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 highrise buildings – the current fabric creates a problematic discourse between old forms of inhabitation and the new corporate culture. Whereas the gridiron 51

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 determination 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 52

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

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Figure 13: Century Avenue, as originally designed by Arte, Jean Marie Charpentier et Associés. 54

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.

S ECOND P ERSPECTIVE : B UILDINGS AND U RBAN I MAGERY

Confronted by a jungle of glittering high-rises reminiscent of a sciencefiction 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 57

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

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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form

Figure 15: Left Kaifang Pagoda, and Right Jin Mao Building.

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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

T HIRD P ERSPECTIVE : S TREETSCAPES

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.

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Figure 17: Century Avenue and its oversized sidewalk. Seen from this photograph is a series of linear pocket parks retrofitted into the deserted sidewalk.

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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.

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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 64

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.

F OURTH P ERSPECTIVE : V ISUALIZATION OF THE S KYLINES

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 66

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 “preconceived 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 67

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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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

69

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

S UMMARY : M EANS OF U NDERSTANDING

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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Figure 24, 25: Above Hyper dense high-risescape of Puxi – the “Old Shanghai,” and Below Sparse cityscape of Lujiazui.

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C HAPTER F OUR T HE P OLITICS OF B UILT F ORM

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 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 75

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. 76

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T HE P OLITICS OF B UILT F ORM

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 socalled “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 77

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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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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 79

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.”

P ERCEPTIONS OF S HANGHAI

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 82

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 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.

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C ONCLUSION

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 onesided reflection on the radical change of urbanism essential to the examination of 86

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 87

Conclusion 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.

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A FTERWORD

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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Afterword 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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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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 93

Afterword 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

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A PPENDIX T OWARDS S HANGHAI ’ S U RBAN H OUSING : R E -D EFINING S HANGHAI ’ S L ILONG

If one is to define the dominant characteristic of urban pattern in the hypergrowth 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 96

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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 97

Appendix 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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R ATIONALE : L ILONG AND M ODERNITY

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 wetwalls), 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, redefined 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 100

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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 101

Appendix 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.

L ILONG : A C RITICAL H ISTORY

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, 102

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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 103

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 104

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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 sevenstory 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 105

Appendix 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.

R E -D EFINING L ILONG : T HE C ONCEPT OF N EIGHBORHOOD L IFE

[For lilong,] the physical condition of the house was secondary. It was the uniformity in neighborhood structure that constitutes the embryo of lilong.21 106

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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 107

Appendix 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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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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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Appendix 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 mixeduse 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 110

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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.”

C ONCLUSION : T HE N EW L ILONG

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.39 111

Appendix 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 reorient 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 112

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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 113

Appendix with individual facilities, which must also be modularly flexible for prospective modifications. However, it is reasonable to acknowledge some needs of the singlefamily 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 114

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 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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Appendix

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N OTES

C HAPTER O NE I NTRODUCING S HANGHAI

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 Environments (IASTE) Conference in Berkeley, CA (http://arch.ced.berkeley.edu/research/iaste/1996%20conference.htm (accessed 16 April 2007) 2. Shanghai was once called “Paris of the Orient” by the English Tour Book All About Shanghai (1935). It was also called the “Paris of the East,” and the “Queen of the Pacific.” Although the names seem to pronounce particular prestige, one cannot conclude that they do not have any negative connotation. For instance, “the Paris of the East” was somehow associated with “the Whore of the Orient,” while the “Queen of the Pacific” was linked to the name the “Emperor’s Ugly Daughter.” Moreover, Lee Khoon Choy asserts interesting comments: “[t]he name Shanghai conjures an image a city where quick riches could be made, and a tumble of vice, swindlers, gamblers, drug runners, the idle rich, dandies, tycoons, missionaries, gangsters and backstreet pimps.” Nonetheless, Shanghai has been a remarkable city that drew attention from people from all over China and the globe. See Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City (New York: Perennial, 2001), Shiling Zheng, “Architecture Before 1949,” in Balfour, Shanghai: Wolrd City (West Sussex, U.K., Wiley-Academy, 2002), 88, All About Shanghai: A Standard Guidebook, Hong Kong; New York: Oxford University Press, 1935) republished in 1986 with an introduction by H.J. Lethbridge. Repr., and Lee Khon Choy, Pioneers of Modern China:

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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form Understanding the Inscrutable Chinese (Singapore: World Scienctific, 2005), 409 3. In 1993, Mayor Huang Ju of Shanghai proclaimed his intention to make the city to be “a metropolis equal to New York and London.” The city’s development plan under his direction was designed to create an “oriental Manhattan…to become an international metropolis of the 21st century.” “City of Future,” Shanghai Star (2 July 1993, front-page headline) as cited in Jos Gamble, Shanghai in Transition: Changing Perspectives and Social Contours of a Chinese Metropolis (London, Routledge: 2003), 10 4. Shanghai is one of 30 cities identified by The Economist as “Fast Cities” based on several criteria such as economic opportunity, cultural and intellectual infrastructure, ethereal creativity, and so on. It describes Shanghai as “a city of 14.5 million people, where foreign investors have sunk $73 billion into Shanghai-based projects. It is a chaotic, crowded, noisy-and wildly, crazily creative. China's historic center for innovation has emerged more recently as a magnet for Western-owned corporate design centers and research labs.” See Andrew Park, “Fast Cities 2007,” The Economist (Jul/Aug 2007, 117): 90-103 5. The choice of the term “hybrid” is in keeping with the use of this term in architectural and urbanist writings on the histories of cities and their cultures. The elaboration of this term can be found in Robert Cowherd, “Hybridization Between an Imagined West and the Presistence of Everyday Life,” in Robert Cowherd, Cultural Construction of Jakarta: Design, Planning, and Development in Jabotabek, 1980-1997, Ph.D. dissertation. Massachusetts Institute of Techology, 2002.

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Notes 6. Jos Gamble, “Preface: Ethnography of a City,” in Gamble, Shanghai in Transition, I-XXVI 7. Yawei Chan, “Shanghai Pudong: Urban Development in an Era of GlobalLocal Interaction” (Ph.D. dissertation, Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, 2007), 43 8. Mario Gandelsonas, Shanghai Reflections: Architecture, Urbanism, and the Search for an Alternative Modernity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002), 22. 9. Richard Marshall, “The Focal Point of China: Lujiazui, Shanghai,” in Richard Marshall, Emerging Urbanity: Global Urban Projects in Asia Pacific Rim (London, New York: Spon Press, 2003): 87. 10. Peter G. Rowe, East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City (London: Reaktion, 2005) 11. Louisa Schein, “Urbanity, Cosmopolitanism, Consumption,” in Nancy N. Chen, Costance D. Clark, Suzanne Z. Gottschang, and Lyn Jeffery, eds. China Urban (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 225 12. Anne-Marie Broudehoux presumes that the condition of Postmodernity in China was pushed by the cultural fever of the 1970s by Deng Xiaoping’s “Open Door” policy. Forefront Chinese intellectuals, searching for “the” ideological means of culture and art of the time, held intellectual discourses on cultural production and repositioning of Chinese modernity, including architecture. For details, see Arif Dirlik and Zhang Xudong, “Introduction: Postmodernism in China,” Boundary 2. Vol. 24 No. 3 (Autumn, 1997): 118. This essay is a proceeding of Fredric Jameson’s lecture at Beijing University in 1985, Wang Mingxian and Zhang Xudong. “Notes on Architecture and Postmodernism in China,” Boundary 2. Vol. 24. No. 3 120

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form (Autumm, 1997): 163-175, Anne-Marie Broudehoux, “Learning from Chinatown: The Search for a Modern Chinese Architectural Identity, 1911-1998,” ,” in Nezar AlSayyad, Hybrid Urbanism, 156-80, and Xudong Zhang, “Part 1: Cultural Discourse,” in Chinese Modernism in the Era of Reforms (Durham; London: Duke University Press, 1997): 35-70

C HAPTER T WO H ISTORY , P OWER , AND M ODERN S HANGHAI 1. H.J. Lethbridge, All About Shanghai and Environs: A Standard Guidebook (London, Oxford University Press, 1934): 1. Republished as on-line version on “Tale of Old Shanghai” website. “All About Shanghai: Chapter 1 Historical Background.” http://www.talesofoldchina.com/library/allaboutshanghai/t-all01.htm (retrieved 17 April 2007). The full paragraph reads: “Shanghai, sixth city of the World!,Shanghai, the Paris of the East!, Shanghai, the New York of the West! – Shanghai, the most cosmopolitan city in the world, the fishing village on a mudflat, which almost literally overnight became a great metropolis.” 2. When we talk about the history of a Chinese city, we tend to think of some general categorizations such as Early Imperial China (from Qin to Han Dynasty), Three Kingdoms China, Late Imperial China (Ming and Qing), Communist, and so on; these periods base on the sharply-definition of sovereign rules’ times. However, for Shanghai, as the history of the city has been mostly dependant, it maybe more appropriate to look at its history as an outcome of the overlapping periods of urbanization driven by the 121

Notes

3. This claim is made by an intensive study of Shanghai’s history prior to the arrival of the Westerners by Linda Johnson. See Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai, From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995). “A small fishing village” rhetoric was made by foreigners. Despite the exhaustive historical accounts that possibly leads to this major misunderstanding, is to make the story of the city’s transformation more dramatic. 4. Also called “Whangpu River.” 5. Ibid. 6. There was also a connection to the hinterland and the spillover benefits from proto-industrialization in the neighboring provinces, along with the buoyancy of regional commerce that contributed significantly to Shanghai’s prosperity. See Weiping Wu, The Dynamics of Urban Growth in Three Chinese Cities (Washington D.C.: Oxford University Press, 1997): 66 7. As Shiling Zheng describes: “Shanghai in its prime during 1930s-40s could not find any match to its sophisticated cosmopolitanism, not even Tokyo or Hong Kong. See Balfour, Shanghai, 89. 8. The classic example is a sign "No Dogs Or Chinese Allowed" at the entrance of a park in foreign-leased-territory (i.e. race court and the Bund waterfront) in Shanghai, which fought with the strong sense of “ethnic nationalism” – an articulation of “Han Chinese” identity, dealing with the pre-conceived notion that they were the initiators of the civilization. Therefore, throughout the course of semi-colonization, Chinese had to struggle to overthrow the 122

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form aliens (the white imperialists for Shanghai, the alien Manchu rulers for the rest of the country). This was, of course, before the founding of the Republic of China under Kuomintang leadership. Har Ye Kan, email message to the author, 22 March 2007. 9. It was around the 1860s, not only political upheaval, but also better job opportunities that attracted an increasing numbers of migrants from the hinterland to Shanghai – the number of Chinese inhabitants in the International Settlement rose from 75,000 to half a million within less than three decades. The design of the lilong is a combination of a Western terrace house tradition with the Chinese courtyard house in a manner that perpetuated the narrow lanes of earlier Chinese settlement. See Lei Huang, Housing Development in the Context of the Modernization, Urbanization and Conservation of Chinese Traditional cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou. D.Des. dissertation. Harvard University, 2000: 89, Tess Johnston and Deke Erh, A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai (Hong Kong: Old China Hand Press, 1992):8, and Peter Rowe and Seng Kuan. Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002): 40-1. Critical reading of lilong housing can be found in Non Arkaraprasertkul, “Toward Shanghai’s Urban Housing: Re-Defining Shanghai’s Lilong” Proceeding of the Sixth China Urban Housing Conference in Beijing, P.R. China, Hong Kong: Center of Housing Innovations at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Ministry of Construction, P.R. China. 2007: 885-97 10. This structure remains the main structure of the city today, although not as dominant due to the new planning and the new zoning regulations. 11. Dong, Shanghai, 1 123

Notes 12. Bryan Goodman, “The Golden Age of Chinese Bourgeoisie, 1911-1937 by Marie-Claire Bergère,” book review, The Journal of Asian Studies, Vol.46 (3, August 1987): 631-3, and

Duanfang Lu, “Architecture and Global

Imaginations in China,” Journal of Architecture, 12 (2, 2007): 139 13. Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architecture Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002): 36 14. Rhoads Murphey, “The Treaty Ports and China’s Modernization” in The Chinese City Between Two Worlds, Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974): 17-71. 15. The name Bund was used right from the moment Captain George Balfour stepped ashore with his Indian regiment. Bund is a Anglo-Indian word meaning embankment. 16. Zheng Shiling, “Architecture Before 1949,” in Balfour, Shanghai, 95 17. H.J. Lethbridge, All About Shanghai and Environs 18. In a series of rather romantic panoramic paintings, two elements were clearly depicted: the buildings and the ships. Horizontally divided by the shoreline, the water and the earth were clearly separated. The buildings looked identical. With an impressionist sky, the Bund in such early paintings was seen more as a peaceful city than a bustling trading port. In contrast to these panoramas, the famous photo of the early Bund shows a street that was not even asphalted and a waterfront that was no more than an inclined slant with some small boats tied up alongside. Its early photographs of the Bund right after the establishment of the Treaty port shows no more than a series of low-rise Western-style buildings in very simplified forms on the “muddy towpath” of the Huangpu River.

124

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 19. Murphey believes that the Treaty Port did not give a substantial impact on the technological and industrial advancements, which were the factors of modernization in the Western worlds. He actually makes a claim that the emergence of such ad hoc urban place like Shanghai de facto “hurt China psychologically,” more than it helped her economically. To me personally, this has been a debate and has not yet been finalized. See Murphey, Treaty Ports, 17-71 20. Canton, the capital of Guangdong province, was the leading industrial and commercial center of southern China at the time. It is also called Guangzhou (or Kwang-chow). 21. 12 of which were considered iconic due to its existence over half a century (the rest were built and re-built over time). There was also the French Bund extending southwards but they were not regarded as part of the Bund. Zhang Zaiyuan notes a few standards that underlie the architectural development of Shanghai in the period: “Politics – architecture as a symbol; economics – the display of family or corporate wealth; culture – the reminiscence of European international metropolises; landscape – as a sign of entrance to Shanghai; technology – comprehensive performance in design, constructing standards, the use of new materials and facilities.” See Zhang Zaiyuan, “From West to Shanghai: Architecture and Urbanism in Shanghai from 1840-1940,” A + U: Architecture and Urbanism. no. 273 (1993): 93 22. M. Christine Boyer, “Approaching the Memory of Shanghai: The Case of Zhang Yimou and Shanghai Triad (1995),” in Gandelsonas, Shanghai Reflections, 57 23. Thanks to Lu Hanchao’s Beyond the Neon Lights, we know that Shanghai streets in the 1930s were animated by a heterogeneous population. Lu also 125

Notes tells us that the reality of Shanghai was not always like what we see from movies or advertisements, which was a common misunderstanding. See Lu Hanchao, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley, Calif. :University of California Press, 1999) 24. See Bergère, Golden Age 25. Jeffrey N. Wasserstrom, “Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Life in Early Twentieth Century Shanghai by Lu Hanchao,” Reviewd Work, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, vol. 32 (2; Autumm, 2001): 277 26. Notwithstanding the elegance of the waterfront corridor, the ambience of “The Bund or Yangtze Road” was heterogeneous to the core. See Bergère, Golden Age, and Wasserstrom, Neon Lights, 263-79 27. The buildings were in an international Beaux-arts style, but mainly designed by foreigners from colonial powers. The monumental appearance of the Bund attracted both local and foreign investments. It was the objective of business owners to have buildings that proclaimed prestige and prosperity, and Western neo-classicism was chosen to this end. 28. Murphey, Treaty Port, 65 29. The hierarchical association between foreigners and the Chinese in Shanghai reinforced the impression of a fragmented entity. 30. Jonathan Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990): 348-354 31. This diversified ethnicity made Shanghai the Manhattan of China, echoing the fact that Manhattan in its early days was the land of refugees who traveled thousands of miles for opportunity in the metropolis. 32. Bergère, Golden Age 33. Zhang, From West, 93 126

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 34. It was a time when nothing was certain and the country was closely watched by its unfriendly neighbors, ready to exploit any weakness. Shanghai did not suffer any major effect from this political shift. 35. Ning Yuemin, “City Planning and Urban Construction in the Shanghai Metropolitan Area,” in The Dragon’s Head: Shanghai, China’s Emerging Megacity, eds. Harold D. Foster, David Chuenyan Lai, and Naisheng Zhou, Canadian Western Geographical Series 34 (Victoria, Canada: Western Geographical Press, 1999): 229, and K.L. MacPherson, "Designing China's Urban Future: the Greater Shanghai Plan, 1927-1937," Planning Perspectives 5 (1990): 39-62 36. Chan, Shanghai Pudong, 51 37. Alan Balfour, “Twin Cities,” in Balfour, Shanghai, 75 38. During the time when the Nationalist government used Nanjing as a political capital, Shanghai was being considered economically because of its trading ports. 39. Christian Henriot, Shanghai, 1927-1937: Municipal Power, Locality, and Modernization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993): 75 40. Dong went to University of Minnesota and Columbia University. Most of the first-generation Chinese architects went to the University of Pennsylvania and studied under the Beaux-Art direction of Paul P. Cret, such as Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, and Yang Tingbao. 41. Hitler hired Albert Speer to design the new city that embraces a series of monumental buildings and boulevards. See Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (New York: Overlook Press, 2003)

127

Notes 42. “Shanghai [under the Japanese occupation] would become a central instrument of Japan’s “Asian Co-prosperity Sphere.” See Alan Balfour, “Japanese Occupation,” in Balfour, Shanghai, 101. 43. Alan K. Lathop, review of In the Shadow of the Rising Sun: Shanghai under Japanese Occupation. by Christian Henriot and Wen-Hsin, eds., China Information 19, no. 521 (2005): 521-3 44. Balfour, Shanghai, 98-105 45. Alan Balfour, “The Communist City” in Balfour, Shanghai, 109 46. Phillip Short, Mao: A Life (New York: Henry Holt, 1999) 47. Gambe, Transition, 8 48. Duanfang Lu, Remaking Chinese Urban Form: Modernity, Scarcity, and Space: 1949-2005 (London: Routledge, 2006): 82-3, and Richard Gaulton, "Political Mobilization in Shanghai, 1949-1951." in Shanghai: Revolution and Development in an Asian Metropolis, Christopher Howe, ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press): 46 49. Ibid. 50. Gandelsonas, Reflections, 22-8 51. Marshall, Emerging, 93 52. Due to a handful of interpretations on the actual meaning of the Open Door Policy, this book follows that of the Modern China: Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism, which reads: “a collective foreign effort to maintain access to China’s fabled markets…[the kind of policy has been favored by many giants such as United States and Great Britian. However,] it had conflicting implications for Chinese nationalism. On one hand, it aimed to prevent the dismemberment of a weak China by aggressive foreign powers and to maintain respect for China’s territorial and administrative 128

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form entity or integrity, the terms generally used to refer to China’s sovereignty.” Wang Ke-Wen, ed. Modern China: Encyclopedia of History, Culture, and Nationalism (New York: Garland, 1998): 250 53. Yehua Dennis Wei and Chi Kin Leung, “Development Zone, Foreign Investment, and Global City Formation in Shanghai,” Growth and Change, vol. 36 (1, Winter 2005): 17 54. Yawei Chen elaborates the lobbying process, which involved not only the President of the P.R. China (at the time was Yang Shangkun), but also the Premier Li Peng, and several top officials. Interested readers can look into these details. See Chen, Shanghai Pudong, 54-65 55. Marshall, Emerging, 88 56. Gregory C. Chow, “China’s Economic Reform and Policies at the Beginning of the Twentieth-First Century,” Speech presented at the Fourth International Investment Forum, 8 September 2000. See also, He also comments that “[t]he rapid economic growth of Shanghai since the early 1900s is the most spectacular phenomenon in city development in history.” See Gregory C. Chow, Knowing China (Singapore: World Scientific: 2004): 183. Likewise, My definition of “economic transformation” in the Chinese context relies on Professor Chow’s account. For details, see Gregory C. Chow, China’s Economic Transformation (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2002) 57. Ibid, 93 58. “Shanghai Lujiazui Finance & Trade Zone Development Company,” advertising brochure, 1994, as cited in Chia-Liang Tai, “Transforming Shanghai: The Redevelopment Context of the Pudong New Area” (M.Sc. thesis, Columbia University, 2005), 5, and Sean Kennedy, “Beijing Sheds some Weight,” The Banker (March 1995), 48, as cited in ibid., 22 129

Notes 59. Robert Lawrence Kuhn, Made in China: Voices from the New Revolution (New York: TV Books, 2000): 252-3, and Lee Khoon Choy. Pioneers of Modern China: Understanding the Inscrutable Chinese (Singapore: World Scientific, 2005), 140-4 60. Chen, Shanghai Pudong, 66-7 61. Zhu later defined another new era of contemporary economic reform by gaining China’s membership to the World Trade Organization (WTO). He was also the Dean of the Tsinghua University’s School of Economics and Commerce in Beijing. 62. Chao Zhang, “Geographical Construction in the Pudong New Area” in Foster, Dragon’s Head, 275-8 63. City of Future, Shanghai Star (2 July 1993, front-page headline) as cited in Jos Gamble, Shanghai in Transition: Changing Perspectives and Social Contours of a Chinese Metropolis (London, Routledge: 2003): 10 64. Yuemin, City Planning, 243-5 65. I would like to note that nationalism did not exist before the nineteenth century when China was still an empire. Chinese political elites begin to embrace modern nationalist doctrines for China’s defense and regeneration only after China’s disastrous defeat…in the 1840-1842 Opium War. The result of today’s Chinese Communist party’s process of building a nationstate to assure vital national interests is “pragmatic nationalism.” Its consideration of the nation as a territorial-political unit gives the Communist state the responsibility to speak in the name of the nation and demands that citizens subordinate their individual interest to China’s national ones. See Suisheng Zhao, “China’s Pragmatic Nationalism: Is it Managable?” The Washington Quarterly (29; Winter 2005-06): 131-44 130

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 66. Christopher R. Huges, Chinese Nationalism in the Global Era (London: Routledge, 2006): 2-5 67. I rely on the definition of “globalization” as multi-national phenomenon, which involves highly complex interaction between varieties of social institutes across geographical scales estabalishing a vast landscape of urban network. See Saskia Sassen, “Identity in the Global City, Economic and Cultural Encasements,” in Patricia Yaeger. ed. The Geography of Identity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996) 68. Chen, Shanghai Pudong, 59 69. Marshall, Focal Point, 94 70. Richard Rogers as cited in Kris Olds, Globalization and Urban Change: Capital, Culture, and Pacific Rim Mega-Projects (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001): 224-5 71. Ibid., 229 72. Marshall, Focal Point, 100 73. Olds, Globalization, 220 74. Wang, Lujiazui, 11, and Peter G. Rowe, “Advanced Research Seminar: Pudong New Area, Shanghai, China” Harvard University Graduate School of Design, Fall 2003, Course Syllabus. http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/people/faculty/rowe/courses.html (accessed July 12, 2007). Also, the issue to consider here is whether the plan was “taken” or “stolen.” This brings up an interesting point-that the Chinese did it to get Western expertise without seriously compensating for it. Since all plans were privately held in secret, there is no way of knowing whether the Chinese took the best of the plans submitted and created their own, effectively using them without having to acknowledge the use of them. 131

Notes 75. Jorge Otero-Pailos, “Bigness in Context: Some Regressive Tendencies in Rem Koolhaas' Urban Theory.” City 4 (3, 2000): 379-389. 76. That is, buildings are tangible. They are solid and obviously exist. Chinese pragmatism is based on tangible value. Lim, Shanghai Urban 77. Yung Ho Chang uses the term “critical pragmatism” as a respond to the developing mentality of the Post-Mao era, derived from the key idea “Black Cat, Black White” by Deng Xiaoping. For details, see Yung Ho Chang, “The Necessity of Banality,” Volume, 8 (2006): 86-8 78. Chow, Knowing, 186 79. Olds, Globalization 99-101 80. Fulong Wu, “Globalization, Place Promotion and Urban Development in Shanghai” Journal of Urban Affairs 25, no. 1 (2003): 55–78 81. Benjamin Wood, the author or a bustling shopping and entertainment district In Shanghai, is the principal of a successful design firm in Shanghai. See Lim, Shanghai Urban 82. Zhu’s goal to demonstrate the massive success of Shanghai in his era later granted him a position as China’s Premier. That is to say, Zhu followed the footsteps of his predecessor, Shanghai’s former mayor Jiang Zemin who later became the President of the People’s Republic of China. 83. The condition of nationalism in Shanghai has been evolved from the socalled “ethic nationalism” in the early period of the establishment of the Treaty Port, to a “liberal nationalism” in the founding of the Republic of China in the turn of the century, and to Mao’s “state nationalism,” foreshadowed by the impact of the Great Leap Forward policy and the Cultural Revolution.

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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form

C HAPTER T HREE P OLITICIZATION AND THE R HETORIC OF S HANGHAI U RBANISM

1. Balfour, Shanghai, 148 2. Saskia Sassen, Cities in a World Economy (London: Pine Forge Press, 2006): 73 3. Jyoti Thottam, “On the Job in China” and “The Growing Dangers of the China Trade,” Time 170, no. 2 (2007): 27-31 4. For a detailed study of lilong see Non Arkaraprasertkul, ‘Toward Shanghai’s Urban Housing: Re-Defining Shanghai’s Lilong’, in Proceeding of the Sixth China Urban Housing Conference in Beijing, P.R. China, Hong Kong: Center of Housing Innovations at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and Ministry of Construction, P.R. China. 2007; and Non Arkaraprasertkul and Reilly Rabitaille, ‘Contemporary Lilong: Revitalizing Shanghai’s Ingenious Housing’, Proceeding of the Fourth International Conference of Planning and Design in Tainan, R.C.China. Tainan, Taiwan: College of Planning and Design, National Cheng Kung University, 2007. 5. In Urban Planner Tingwei Zhang’s research, he refers to these levels in the administrative structure of Shanghai as the municipal government (for the Municipal Planning Bureau), urban district (a district may have more than one million population; the largest district in Shanghai has 1.6 million population; for District Authority Control), and street offices (sub-district government, with a size approximately to a company in U.S. cities; for Controlled Detailed Planning Section). See Tingwei Zhang, “Urban Development and a Socialist Pro-Growth Coalition in Shanghai,” Urban Affairs Review 37, no. 475 (2002): 485 133

Notes 6. Dong Nan Nan and Stephanie Ruff, “Managing Urban Growth in Shanghai,” in City Strategies, 58 (2007): 32 7. Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, and Other Mythologies. Richard Howard. trans. (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1997). Also partially republished in Leach, Rethinking, 172-80. 8. Ma Qingyun asserts “Pudong has certain existing dimensions of symbolic quality, to represent ambition and achievement in its new form of urbanization.” See Louisa Lim, Shanghai Urban Development: The Future Is Now,

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6600367

(accessed July 8, 2007) 9. Read more about criticisms and comments on modern towers in China in Layla Dawson, “Towers to People,” in China’s New Dawn: An Architectural Transformation (New York: Prestel, 2005), 16-33 10. Rowe, East Asia, 137 11. Howard French, “Shanghai Journal; In World Skyscraper Race, It Isn't Lonely

at

the

Top,”

The

New

York

Times,

May

8,

2007.

http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=FB0A15F83D550C7B8CD DAC0894DF404482 [retrieved 11 May 2007] 12. Ibid. The core of the article reads: ‘while diplomatic, the explanation strains creditability, especially for anyone who knows the history. The Shanghai building was originally designed to have 94 floors, rising to roughly 1,509 feet, but has quietly grown since then, with more floors added, as well as more height to each floor, resulting in about 105 extra feet.’ 13. See detail about the projects, renderings, and criticisms of both buildings in Xing Ruan, New China Architecture (Hong Kong: Periplus, 2006), 125-31,

134

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form Dawson, New Dawn, 74-7, and Bernard Chan, New Architecture in China (New York; Merrell, 2005), 6-15 14. Jane Jacobs, ‘The Use of Sidewalks: Contacts’, in The Death and Life of the Great American 15. Rowe, East Asia, 134-7 16. Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (Cambridge; MA: MIT Press, 1960): 8 17. “In Place of God: Culture Replaces Religion,” The Economist No. 383 (8527, 5-11 May 2007): 14 18. Jennie Chen, “Urban Architextures: A Search for an Authentic Shanghai” (M.A. thesis, McGill University, 2003), 59

C HAPTER F OUR T HE P OLITICS OF B UILT F ORM

1. Marshall, Focal Point, 105 2. This raises both meta and implicative questions in many issues, e.g. relationships between capital and labor, environment, massive consumer market, and so on. For details, see Fulong Wu, Urban Development in PostReform China: State, Market, and Space (London: Routledge, 2007) 3. Zheng adds: “[t]he competitive tradition underlies its dynamic and progressive nature, an entrepreneurial spirit that sets it apart from other Chinese cities. But, as with any city that occupies a strategic global position, its future lies not only in the hands of its architects and policymakers, but in the national policy for growth and development. See Zheng Shiling, “Shanghai: The Fastest City?” Urban Age: A Worldwide Investigation into the Future of Cities, 135

Notes http://www.urban-age.net/03_conferences/conf_shanghai.html [retrieved 15 May 2007] 4. Yan Zhongmin, “Shanghai: The Growth and Shifting Emphasis of China’s Largest City,” in Chinese Cities: The Growth of the Metropolis Since 1949. ed. Victor F.S. Sit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985): 94-125 5. Considering that the term “Chinese cities,” according to a contemporary narrative and research account of Lawrence J. Ma, implies “the sharing of certain common characteristics or the constitution of a single cohesive socioeconomic, spatial, or political entity,” Shanghai differs from the rest of China by all means. See Lawrence J. Ma, “The State of the Field of Urban China: A Critical Multidisclipnary Overview of the Literarure,” China Information, No. 20(2006): 377 6. Louisa Lim, Shanghai Urban 7. Chen, Urban Architextures, 76 8. Rhoads Murphey, “The Treaty Ports and China’s Modernization” in The Chinese City Between Two Worlds, Mark Elvin and G. William Skinner, eds. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1974): 17-71,

Jeffrey N.

Wasserstrom, “Locating Shanghai: Having Fits about Where it Fits” in Remaking the Chinese City: Modernity and National Identity, 1900-1950, Joseph W. Esherrick, ed. (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2000): 192-201 9. Marie-Claire Bergère, Histoire de Shanghai (Paris: Fayard, 2002) 10. Marcia Reynders Ristaino, “Histoire de Shanghai by Marie-Claire Bergère,” Book Review. Project Muse, http://muse.jhu.edu [retrieved 16 April 2007] 11. William G. Skinner, “Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China,” Journal of Asian Studies 24, no. 1 (1964): 3-43 136

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 12. Carol Willis, Form follows Finance: Skyscrapers and Skylines in New York and Chicago (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1995.), Paul Goldberger, The Skyscraper (New York: Knopf : Distributed by Random House, 1981) 13. Michael Masterson, “How to Grow Your Business Like China: A 3-Part Confucian Strategy, Part 1: What a Difference 20 Years Can Make” Early to Rise, http://www.earlytorise.com/archive/html/062706-2.html [retrieved 22 April 2007] 14. Jameson criticizes and questions the images of contemporary urbanism, lacing social and economic issues into the propaganda of progressivism of the developing regions. See Fredric Jameson, “Future City,” NLR, No. 21 (May/June, 2003): 65-79. And Fredric Jameson, “The Politics of Utopia,” NLR, No. 25 (Jan/Feb, 2004): 35-54. My main argument significantly emerged from a fruitful seminal discussion I had with my colleague at Harvard University’s East Asia Studies Program, Har Ye Kan, whose principal reflections on the politics of built form is: “Governance, and discipline and knowledge of the population, thus firmly rests upon the layout and built forms of the city, to control and configure the spaces in which people flow, so as to regulate them with this information of flows.” Har Ye Kan, email to author, March 23, 2007 15. Rowe, East Asia, 153-7

137

Notes

A PPENDIX T OWARDS S HANGHAI ’ S U RBAN H OUSING : R E -D EFINING S HANGHAI ’ S L ILONG

1. Apart from many analyses on the situation, and a “common sense” for everyone who visits Shanghai today, I also recommend these concise studies: Haiyu Bao, High-rise Housing Development in Shanghai Since 1972. M.Arch., McGill University (Canada), 2000. Zhigang Tang, The Urban Housing Market in a Transitional Economy: Shanghai as a Case Study. Ph.D. dissertation. Indiana University. 2006. And Stanford Anderson. “HighDensity Housing.” Dialogue 101 (Taiwan). 2006: 109 2. One of which is of course Jane Jacob’s The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961). 3. Population of Shanghai in 2005 is 17,780,000. 4. Peter G. Rowe, Modernity and Housing. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993): 47. 5. Chunlad Zhao, “From ‘shikumen’ to New-Style: a Rereading of "Lilong" Housing in Modern Shanghai.” Journal of Architecture, vol. 9. Spring 2004: 49. 6. Normally, there are two main lanes and a series of side lanes. See Qian Guan, Lilong Housing: A Traditional Settlement Form. M.Arch Thesis. McGill University, Canada. 1996: 25. 7. Roger Sherwood, Modern Housing Prototypes. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978): 17 8. Not only Shanghai, but also China as a whole had never been part of Modern discourses, since most of the foreign architects who worked in 138

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form Shanghai had been trained in a Beaux-Art tradition, such as British Hong Kong-based architectural firm Palmer and Turner, Spence Robinson and Partners, Atkinson and Dallas.1 Also, the first generation of Chinese architects educated abroad from the Boxer Rebellion funds, despite the fact that none of them was trained in a Modern school had not return to until late 1920s and mostly worked in the northern part of China, which includes Zhang Bo, Wu Liangyong, Chen Dengao, Zhang Kaiji, Dai Nianci, and Xiong Ming. In addition, most of the Western-educated architects went to University of Pennsylvania, a school which, at the time, was led by the famous Beaux-Art architect Paul Philippe Cret. See Peter G. Rowe and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003): 49. 9. Louis D. Morris, Community or Commodity?: A Study of Lilong Housing in Shanghai (Vancouver, Center of Human Settlements, 1994): 8-12. Also, Some authors note that there was a vacumm moment in the development of lilong, between 1941-1949; the period when China was under the control of the Japanese. However, since the houses were being occupied by the same group of people, it is assumable that there must be an internal development – the organic improvement from within. See Guan, Lilong Housing, 29 10. Around the 1860s, not only political upheaval, but also better job opportunities that attracted an increasing numbers of migrants from the hinterland to Shanghai – the number of Chinese inhabitants in the International Settlement rose from 75,000 to half a million within less than three decades later. See Huang, Housing Development, 5-8 11. The emergence of lilong relates directly with the vicissitudes of the Western architectural development. Trading and commercial activities and the 139

Notes establishment of restricted settlements – concessions – areas provided a unique set of circumstances for the development of pattern of occupation. See Lei Haung, Housing Development in the Context of Modernization, Urbanization and Conservation of Chinese Traditional Cities: Beijing, Shanghai and Suzhou, D.Des dissertation, Harvard University, 2000: 5-2 12. Zhao, From Shikumen, 57 13. Junhua Lü, Peter G. Rowe and Zhang Jie, eds., Modern Urban Housing in China: 1840-2000. (Munich ; New York : Prestel, 2001): 63. 14. Xing Ruan, New China Architecture (Hong Kong, Periplus, 2006): 163 15. The “hybridity” of lilong is expressed through the combination of a Western terrace house tradition with the Chinese courtyard house in a manner that perpetuated the narrow lanes of earlier Chinese settlement. See Rowe, Architectural Encounters, 40-1. 16. Shi-ku-men literally means “stone framed door.” Tess Johnston and Deke Erh, A Last Look: Western Architecture in Old Shanghai (Hong Kong: Old China Hand Press, 1992):11 17. Lü, Modern Urban Housing, 67. 18. A study shows that the depth of most lilong houses built after World War II (1945) was reduced by 20% (from 10-14 to 8-12 meters) See Huang, Housing Development, 5-29 19. Peter G. Rowe, East Asian Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City (London: Reaktion, 2005):124. 20. Johnston, Last Look, 12. 21. Zhao, Shikumen, 57. 22. “Lilong” (sometimes called “li-nong”) is the Shanghai dialect for nongtang

140

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form (弄堂)— nong means “alley way,” and tang stands for the front room of Chinese courtyard houses – in other words, a space in front of the courtyard house which is the “lane.” There are some changes in the meaning for “lilong” – li refers to the basic urban neighborhoods, which varied in size from 25 to 100 households. It was commonly used for naming alleyway-house compounds that, by the twentieth century, became equivalent to “alleyway house.” Also, according to the Great Chinese Vocabulary Dictionary, li is a word that has been always associated with human settlements in different way, such as a place where people live, a hometown, dwellings in a neighborhood, and a basic organizational unit in residential management in ancient China (the same meaning that Lu refers to); for long, also according to the same dictionary, it literally means “small street” in a basic sense. See Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Light: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley; London; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999): 143-5. And Guan, Lilong Housing, 1-2, and Jianxiang Huang, email message to the author, 20 December 2006 23. Although “lilong” is an adjective, it is often used as abbreviation of “lilong housing neigborhood.” According to Zhao, it refers less to the materiality of this dwelling form, but more to the vivid social life within and around it. The term can be pronounced as li-long, in the Shanghai dialect, or li-nong, in Mandarin. So, what Leo Lee calls linong is the lilong houses. Rowe, Architectural, 238, Zhao, From Shihumen, 50., and Leo Ou-fan Lee, Shanghai Modern: The Flowering of a New Urban Culture in China, 1930-45 (Cambridge, MA; London: Harvard University Press, 1999): 32-5. 24. I used the term cho, an adjective, as a abbreviation of a noun “chokai.” According to Hiroto Kobayashi, it means: “a unit of neighborhood 141

Notes organization in Japanese cities that has influenced everyday life of inhabitants in urban history.” Nevertheless, it is also referable to Theodore C. Bestor’s larger definition: “ the term chokai and chonaikai (literally, ‘town association’ and ‘within town association’) are used most interchangeably. There is no scholarly consensus on preferred usage or any standard translation of these other terms referring to the units of local government and

community

structure…Therefore,

I

translate

both

terms

as

‘neighborhood association.’” See Hiroto Kobayahi, Cho: A Persistent Neighborhood Unity Maintaining in Microculture in Japanese Cities, D.Des dissertation, Harvard University, 2003: iv. And Theordore C. Bestor, Neigborhood Tokyo (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989): 289 25. These concepts are described in Rowe’s East Asia Modern. “Soi” literally means “small branch streets” is a noun used to describe residential neighborhood that is formulated around the small branch street. It is where I have been living for more than twenty years. 26. The structures of these East Asian neighborhoods are similar; situating in a city block, most of the shop houses are located the sides that are close to the main roads, and narrow interior lanes porously go through the block of residential units. 27. “No place can one get a better image of daily life in Shanghai than in the alleyway-house neighborhoods that spread across the city…For them, these back alleys were not only where they lived but also where they worked, entertained, socialized, and conducted most of their daily transaction – in short, the neighborhood was the city to these people.” Hanchao Lu, Beyond the Neon Lights: Everyday Shanghai in the Early Twentieth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press. 1999): 189. 142

Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form 28. Hang, Housing Development, 5-23 29. Qian Guan, “Lilong Housing: A Traditional Settlement Form” (M.Arch thesis, McGill University, Canada, 1996), 116. 30. Morris, Commodity, 20 31. Louisa Lim, “Shanghai Builds for the Future: A Cinematic Ode to Shanghai's Vanishing World.” N.P.R. Morning Edition, 14 December 2006,

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6616570

(accessed 15 December 2006) 32. He uses the term “alley-living style” which I am not convinced that it is what he means since the term carries a negative connotation. Ibid.., 68. 33. Morris, Commodity, 22-26. 34. Ibid., 24. The change of unit type has been indeed the factor that determines the size of the lanes – the smaller the unit type (private) is, the larger the required space for lanes (public). In other words, the transformation of unit type constitutes the structural change of the neighborhood, moving towards a collective life of the people of urbanized Shanghai. 35. "[In lilong community] there is such close contact between people, everyone helps each other," says Shanghainese filmmaker Shu Haolun. See Lim, A Cinematic 36. Kevin Lynch, Theory of Good City Form (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981): 248-9, 303. 37. Xintaindi is not considered an appropriate model for the development of a new LMRHD because it neither provides a way to re-approach housing design with the economy of residential program nor to challenge the highrise housing with the innovative low- and medium-rise strategy. 143

Notes 38. Nevertheless, if every lilong is renovated to serve a sole commercial purpose like Xintaindi, the city will soon become lifeless because of the diminishing of mix-used program and diversity of urban activities. 39. Greg Yager and Scott Kilbourn, “Lessons from Shangahi Xintaindi: China’s Retail Success Story,” Urban Land Asia, December 2005: 36.

144

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