Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form

COMMENTARIES

“…Writing complex history and politics is definitely not easy. Reading

several of Non Arkaraprasertkul’s publications both in English and Thai in the last

few years has proven that it is possible to make these topics both interesting and

informative. His latest book Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form is

not an exception.

His curiosity about places, peoples and cultures is extraordinary and

matched so well with his capacity to ‘map’ complexities of history, urban

geography, physicality and politics with a simple discourse that is easy to follow.

He convinces us to see multiple layers of local realities beyond the ‘western’

perspectives on the global city of Shanghai. He describes the making of this

cosmopolitan city can complete in a globalized economic context despite its

fragmented urban fabric. It has undergone significant crisis, through challenges

from semi-colonialism, socio-political collapse by war and lack of coordination in

the planning process. Interestingly, the author suggests that the selling point of

Shanghai’s tourism in the early twentieth century was the elegant image that

replicated ‘western’ neo-classical styles. However, he proposes that a new Chinese

identity can actually be enhanced through a mixture of diversified sub-cultures on

Shanghai’s streetscapes. This book clearly points out that the absence of human

scale in the city streetscapes can diminish contact, the sense of security and the

pedestrian energy level of the city. In general, it answers two simple questions: how

a ‘global metropolis’, in particular Shanghai, is defined and transformed, and what

is to be expected from its changing images or representations. It is therefore

worthwhile to read this book especially as a case study for those policymakers,

urban planners, urban designers, architects, academics and scholars who would be

keen to learn more about urbanism of the global cities through different lenses in

order to see hidden dimensions. The Chinese largest urban ‘global village’ of

Shanghai has more historical complexity and dynamic development than arguably

any other world city in this century. For those wishing to broaden their

perspectives on all these issues, I highly recommend this book.”

Dr Polladach Theerapappisit Lecturer and Course Advisor, School of Social Sciences The University of Western Sydney, Australia

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

“Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form offers a well-thought-out

perspective in understanding the amazing transformation of urban Shanghai.

Having been a short-term visitor to Shanghai and overwhelmed as most, the book

offered me a framework for understanding what I have experienced and a platform

for exploring contemporary city questions. The historic Bund – lively, and with

fear of being run over by the traffic – and the dull Pudong New Development –

offers an intriguing comparison and an effective way of summarizing the new

urban China. My stay was short, and my background is curiosity in how and

where people live in cities, but clearly city centers give the starting point, the image

and the tone of a city. But this understanding brings new questions and issues for

reflection.

One wonders if the need for Shanghai to build a bigger Bund to herald its

arrival as a world city is a missed opportunity: it is a dynamic city of the present

but not a city of the future. The Bund was built before the internet, e-commerce,

and all the other technological wonders which question the need for a center as in

the past. Symbolic importance still remains in the more traditional sense, but the

need for proximity as a guiding principle is being increasingly questioned. The

time traveler today may see nothing particularly new in Shanghai, but perhaps

things that are only bigger and more grandiose. Shanghai had the opportunity to

demonstrate the future, instead of flaunting its newly acquired economic prowess

through a ‘the same but one better’ approach. The bigger high-rises, the more

advanced faster trains do not signal new concepts of city development.

One wonders if the current ‘tremendously dull atmosphere’ that confronted

the time traveler in Pudong is only a temporary state. As the traveler continues

onward in his journey, he may be confronted with a different Shanghai entirely. It

is unlikely that the city will stagnate, and new uses with new responses to urban

form most likely would take over – cities, as nature, abhor a vacuum. We read that

the Bund was built over a longer period which offered flexibility to respond to

changing circumstances and adjust to needs. Pudong is instant – it is a ‘one-shot’

effort, with little time to adjust while being developed – it is a belief in knowing

what is right and doing it. Could Shanghai be compared to a Disneyland with its

attempt at a better-than-real-life reproduction of reality?

One wonders if the same energy as seen in the center would have been

applied to housing. Housing represents the largest sector of a city, and has been

problematic historically as cities have growth rapidly from new economic realities.

Similar rapidly growing cities in history and today in the Third World exhibit vast

uncontrolled expanses of informal housing in accommodating growth – often as

squatters – which seems to have been avoided in Shanghai. One is so overwhelmed

by the center that the outer lying housing areas are forgotten, as the debate over the

spectacular center dominates.

One wonders if time is the critical factor – where we stand, and from what

time we observe offers only one perspective. We tend to look at things as a

‘snapshot’ as a key to understanding, and at great risk we look beyond as images of

the future. What would the future Pudong bring as it adjusts to real needs of the

city instead of symbolic imagery? As Shanghai matures, would the now dull and

often-unoccupied high-rise areas become vibrant with new energy and uses?

Would Shanghai fulfill its desire a vibrant model city?

Lastly, one wonders why Shanghai has chosen the European/North

American model for emulation, turning its back on its own rich culture. The need

to mimic and to do it bigger is more an element of insecurity than strength.

The book is an excellent foundation for exploring contemporary city-

building issues. Shanghai is unparalleled in growth and grandeur, and it is truly a

Global City, but of the past and not the future. It offers a clear lesson for

architects and urban planners: nothing is static, and the past, present and future

must be considered simultaneously when building cities. Flexibility with the

ability to adjust as circumstances change is the imperative. We cannot know the

future, but we should not be rigid as we embrace the present. The design challenge

is a city that responds and dominates the present, while allowing the unknowing

future with grace.”

Dr-Ing Reinhard Goethert

Director, Special Interest Group in Urban Settlement (SIGUS) Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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“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

http://www.eikongraphia.com/

http://www.eikongraphia.com/

For Victor Alexander Wong

SHANGHAI CONTEMPORARY THE POLITICS OF BUILT FORM

NON ARKARAPRASERTKUL

This book is an attempt to integrate research, architectural knowledge, and

fieldwork to understand the phenomenon of the urban transformation in

Shanghai, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Having once been a

lucrative treaty port city, Shanghai has re-embarked on the mission to become an

economic global city through a combination of assimilated industrialized cityscape

and the startling industriousness of Chinese pragmatism from 1980 onwards.

Driven by the momentum of free-market capitalism within the politics of a state-

controlled quasi-communist socialist entity, Shanghai’s built form and

environment have been conceived as a cultural construction of the conspicuous

consumption of global financial marketing and of ostentatious expenditure of the

elite. Nostalgic hearkening back to the glory days of foreign occupation does not

adequately explain the phenomenon that exists today. Central to the aim of this

thesis are the questions on how the global market was utilized, what internal and

external forces were at play, and the importance given to the perception of values.

By critically examining the history of the city’s planning process and the reality of

its urbanism, this book outlines the city’s pragmatic developments dominated

largely by its politics. The New Shanghai is a production of image, as it has always

been the façade of China by virtue of its strategic location for international trade.

The mediation between the representational built form, through politics, and the

internal social transformations, by means of its soft cultural infrastructure, has

created cosmopolitanism unlike anything else in the world.

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.

CONTENTS

Foreword iv

Preface vii

Introduction xiii

Acknowledgements xix

Illustrations xxvii

Notes on Transliterations and Names xxxi

Glossary of Chinese Terms xxxii

CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCING SHANGHAI 1

1 Critical Questions 7

2 Postmodern Society: The Critical Hypothesis 8

3 Structure of the Book 10

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CHAPTER TWO: HISTORY, POWER, AND MODERN SHANGHAI 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

CHAPTER THREE:

POLITICIZATION AND THE RHETORIC OF SHANGHAI URBANISM 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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CHAPTER FOUR: THE POLITICS OF BUILT FORM 73

20 Shanghai Cosmopolitanism: The Cultural Infrastructure 75

21 The Politics of Built Form 77

22 Perceptions of Shanghai 80

CONCLUSION 85

Afterword 89

Appendix 95

Notes 117

Bibliography 145

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FOREWORD

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.

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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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PREFACE

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

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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-come-

approach 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

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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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INTRODUCTION

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

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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

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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

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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 Ming-

Wei 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

ILLUSTRATIONS

1 A Bird eye view photograph of Shanghai’s Lujiazui

Courtesy Shanghai Municipality

25

2 A photograph of the Bund at dawn in the International

Settlement in the1880s

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

2 University)

17

3 The British Land Regulation Map of 1930s


2 University)

20

4 A photograph of the Bund in the 1930s, viewed from the

French settlement


2 University)

21

xxvii

5 A photograph of Paris waterfront in the 1900s

Courtesy anonymous photographer

26

6 Photographs of skylines of Manhattan waterfront, and the

Bund in the early 1990s


2 University)

27

7 A perspective rendering of 1929 Dong Dayou’s plan for

Shanghai Civic Center

Courtesy Shanghai Archive

29

8 A plan, perspective rendering, and detailed perspective

rendering of The 1942 Kunio Maekawa’s plan for Pudong

Courtesy Shanghai Archive

32

9 A photograph of the model of Richard Rogers and

Partners’ plan for Lujiazui in Pudong Pudong

Courtesy Shanghai Planning Museum

43

10 A photograph of the model of Dominique Perraults’ plan

for Lujiazui in Pudong


44

11 A photograph of the model of Shanghai Urban Planning

Institute’s plan for Lujiazui in Pudong


46

12 A Bird eye view of Shanghai in 1937


2 University)

52

xxviii

13 A perspective rendering of the proposed Century Avenue

by Arte, Jean Marie Charpentier et Associés


54

14 A photograph of the Century Avenue, looking toward the

Central Park in the East

Courtesy Peter G. Rowe

55

15 Photographs of Jin Mao Building and Kaifang Pagoda

Courtesy Wang Xuyuan

59

16 A photograph of the model of the original World

Financial Center, and a perspective rendering of the

revised World Financial Center with its top redesigned

Courtesy Kohn Pedersen Fox

60

17 A photograph of the Century Avenue


62

18 A photograph of the model of the proposed Century

Avenue by Arte, Jean Marie Charpentier et Associés


63

19 Photographs of the International Settlement in 1920s, and

London’s Fleet Street in 1906s


2 University)

65

20 A photograph of Shanghai’s street scenes in 1900s


2 University)

65

xxix

21 A photograph of the Century Avenue’s sidewalk

© Author

66

22 A Bird eye view photograph of Lujiazui’s Central Park

Courtesy Peter G. Rowe

68

23 A photograph of the famous Pudong skyline


69

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

of Pudong

© Peter Morgan

72

26

27

A photograph displaying the panorama of Shanghai’s two

shores

© Sun Penghui

Model of Shanghai showing the mixing of high-rise

buildings and low-rise lilong neighborhoods

© Author

82

98

xxx

NOTES ON TRANSLITERATIONS AND NAMES

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

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Mandarin

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_name

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Given_name

xxxii

GLOSSARY OF CHINESE TERMS

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 世纪大道 Zhu Rongji 朱镕基 Cultural Revolution 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 董大酉 Pudong 浦东 Great Leap Forward 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

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCING SHANGHAI

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 neo-

classic 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 high-

tech 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


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


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.

SHANGHAI URBANISM

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


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 “semi-

colonization”), 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


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.

CRITICAL QUESTIONS

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


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.

POSTMODERN SOCIETY: THE CRITICAL HYPOTHESIS

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


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


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.

STRUCTURE OF THIS BOOK

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


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 Introducing Shanghai

12 12

CHAPTER TWO

HISTORY, POWER, AND MODERN SHANGHAI

“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.

THE OPENING: PRE-COLONIAL SHANGHAI

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 commonly-

held 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


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 self-

contained 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.

TREATY PORT OF THE 1840S: THE SEMI-COLONIAL SHANGHAI

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


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


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


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

LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY: THE BUND

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 high-

rise buildings. By 1949, there were 38 buildings of more than ten floors in

Shanghai – more than any other city in Asia.16

18


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


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.

SHANGHAI IN THE 1930S: RISE AND FALL OF A DECADENT CITY

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


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


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


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

GATEWAY TO MODERNIZATION: SHANGHAI IN THE 1930S

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


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


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


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


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


SHANGHAI AND CHINA

After the Qing were overthrown by the military force of Sun Yat Sen and

succeeded by the Republic of China in 1912, China’s politics went into turmoil.34

Sun Yat Sen resided in Shanghai for six years from 1918 to 1924 to secure the city,

which, as his financial base was crucial to his provisional government and the

newly established Kuomintang (KMT) party. In 1927, the committee appointed

by Chinese City Powers (not to be confused with the Shanghai Municipal Council

run by the foreigners in the International settlement) produced a semi-official plan

for the city, which focused on the urban development of the northeast district as an

extension of the existing urbanized international concessions.35 The proposal forced

the population of the downtown Puxi area to be dispersed onto the west bank of

the Huangpu in order to avoid the overcongestion of the business center and the

collapse of the city’s outdated infrastructure.36 This “Metropolitan Plan for

Shanghai,” however, remained on paper due to the war against Japan.

In 1929, the Nationalist government decided that it wanted to reconsider

the idea of a master plan for Shanghai – a plan that would create a modern

industry and “diminish the power and the presence of foreign enclaves.”37 The idea

was not new; rather, it revisited Sun Yat Sen’s Metropolitan Plan for Shanghai,

which extended toward the north of Shanghai, on west bank of Huangpu River –

the area remained untouched by any development.38 The primary objective of this

extension was to “build a metropolis that would be large and modern, both in its

structure and function, to reestablish Shanghai as the Great Port of the East.”39

Dong Dayou, a Chinese architect trained in a prevailing Beaux-Art style

architecture, was recruited by the KMT government to accomplish this task. Dong

28


proved to be the perfect man for the job, not only through his extensive neo-

classical architectural projects in Shanghai but also his bonded connection with

prominent influential architectural firms which gave him essential access to the

political core.

Figure 7: Dong Dayou’s Plan for Shanghai Civic Center, 1929.

The dominant trends, derived from the educational institutions from which

the first generation of modern Chinese architects graduated from abroad, did not

have any competing choices.40 Assimilation had already dictated the trend of neo-

classical style with its advanced construction technology. While a northern city

like Beijing was partial to the so-called “adaptive architecture” of American

architect Henry Murphy, Shanghai and the southern cities still favored eclecticism,

a foreign style, which had become “intrinsically” traditional for urban Shanghai in

the 1930s. The KMT leaders’ ambition to expand the city to Pudong,

notwithstanding the massive cost resulted in a constraint on the project by the

financial instability of the Nationalists. Dong, now working for Chiang, relied on

29


the civic design of Puxi’s already constructed infrastructure as he proposed the

northern axial expansion.

Dong’s plan embraces several “city beautiful elements,” such as symmetrical

axial planning, grand boulevards, open green spaces, an obelisk monument in the

center, and classical buildings of a uniform height. However, it represented a shift

in the way the “city” was perceived, from being a portrait of commercial power,

like Manhattan, to institutional power, like Washington D.C. That is, while the

Bund was maintained as a commercial corridor in the south, the new governmental

district would be located in the north. Despite the fact that the civic plan for

Shanghai was completed, it was not implemented due to the course of the second

Sino-Japanese War, resulting in the Japanese occupation from 1937-45.

There were two other important events that substantially impacted the

development of the city after the glorified period of the 1930s: World War II and

the founding of the People’s Republic of China (P.R.C.). While World War II

introduced Japanese control into the hybridized cosmopolitan and equation, the

founding of the P.R.C. and the subsequent strict control of the Communist party

delayed the re-organization of the city’s economic system. The concessions had

been handed back to the Chinese during the war.

SHANGHAI UNDER THE SUN: THE MODERNIST DREAM

The subsequent Japanese occupation during 1937-1945 brought about one

of the most ambitious plans for Pudong. This was to turn Shanghai into the East

Axis’ capitol, resembling the ambition Adolph Hitler had for Berlin.41 The

30


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


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


Communist Party of the north marched down to Shanghai and overthrew the

KMT government in 1949. In 1946, after World War II, Shanghai was handed

back to a single Chinese government under the KMT. The liberation of this semi-

colonial city involved merging the French concession and the international

settlements. The foreigners and their extraterritoriality status were expurgated from

Shanghai.

TOWARDS TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY SHANGHAI:

FROM MAO TO DENG

As the city came to life in response to the challenge of Deng Xiaoping in the

late 1980s, the inspiration was Manhattan…[Deng, by ways of central

government and local authority,] carefully cultivated propaganda by the

authorities, preparing the people for a spectacular transformation – a

mission for the modern city. 45

Shanghai under Mao was a period of transition. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap

Forward and Cultural Revolution both greatly constrained the way in which the

socialism developed during this time.46 The so-called “adaptive Marxist-Leninist

socialist economy,” whose aim to achieve social equality operated through the

absolute control of labor and products, brought about the most negative change in

the social structure of Shanghai. Similar to other socialist cities, the differentiation

between social classes was reduced by leveling of consumption patterns and lifestyle

imposed by the socialist government. The number of agricultural enterprises was

minimized and Shanghai became a true “industrial powerhouse.” Spurred on by

Mao’s famous quote, “I want to see smokestacks everywhere,” heavy manufacturing

33


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


economic dependence; and establishing China’s diplomatic isolation vis-à-vis the

West and relative closure to foreign trade; and shutting out significant investment

in Shanghai.49

Buildings on the Bund were thus allowed to deteriorate; but no more than

any other buildings in the city. In fact, the Bund buildings were used as

government offices, including the Mayor’s office. After the victory of Chinese

Communism, “foreigners and wealthy Chinese fled, the drug trade and nightlife

vanished, and the Paris of the East became a depressed industrial city forgotten by

the world.”50 Though the city itself did not produce much profit, the newly

nationalized industries created an unprecedented financial flow within the Chinese

orbit. Despite rigid Communist control, Shanghai still contributed the largest

revenue in the country to the central government. Mao’s socialist views focused on

social structuring through the diminishing of class conflict, making the physical

planning of the city secondary. There was, however, a plan to make a part of

Pudong a riverside park.51 This plan, however, died with Mao in 1976 and the

passing of the control of China to Deng Xiaoping, who would play a critical role in

the development of Shanghai in his own right.

OPEN DOOR POLICY: SHANGHAI AS THE DRAGON’S HEAD

Deng Xiaoping’s era-defining “Open Door Policy” of the 1980s is pivotal to

the birth of the new Shanghai.52 The shift from self-reliance, which had been

China’s policy for thousands of years, to the “new” policy that did not restrict the

admission of foreign imports was the manifestation of the leap towards capitalism –

global capitalism to be precise – boosting the long-struggling process of Chinese

35


modernization from the end of the Opium Wars.53 The policy’s key strategy was

the establishment of special development zones, which originally did not include

Shanghai. In 1984, however, through a long and intricate process of lobbying

among the country’s top leaders, Shanghai was given special status as part of the

fourteen coastal cities designated to encourage capital flow through business

transactions.54 The quantitative success of the early days of the Open Door Policy

produced enormous profits for China, making it possible for Shanghai to become a

bastion for both industrial and service-sector business. Massive amounts of funding

for both short- and long-term infrastructural improvements were given to Shanghai

from the early 1990s onward. According to Richard Marshall, “Shanghai invested

three times more in its urban infrastructure [over the] last five years than the total

invested in the previous forty.”55 The “1984 Master plan,” initiated by Former

Mayor Jiang Zemin, compellingly set comprehensive guidelines for both the

redevelopment of the central city, and the establishment of satellite towns. Yet the

plan did not immediately receive the substantial support from the central

government essential to its implementation. The plan was delayed for six years

before receiving significant attention from the President himself.

SHANGHAI 2000: LUJIAZUI

The return of foreign investment in the opening of this jewel of the Far East

was quickly matched and surpassed its old days. The Bund, although not

reclaiming its past status, had been partially revived and used as headquarters for

foreign financial institutions in order to set up their new business base in the East.

Neo-classical buildings on The Bund were revitalized to support service-sector

business. The demand for space, however, had increased drastically and become

36


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


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


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


As observed in the early development of the Bund, the nature of assimilating

skylines of Western metropolises was already embedded in the tradition of

Shanghai from its early days.

In order to make sense of Shanghai’s urban form, we must understand

urbanism of the city from both ideological and physical perspectives. In the

ideological perspective, the next section explores the controversy over the

international competition for Lujiazui in the 1990s, demythisizes the politics, and

reveals the pre-conceived ideas that underlie “pragmatic nationalism.”

THE IDEALIZED URBAN FORM: THE MAKING OF LUJIAZUI

Underlying the selection of Lujiazui’s master plan, the politics of the

conceived urban form became the reality of Shanghai today. The sense of

nationalism embedded in the political interventions sparked a dramatic dialogue

between the reality of the situation and the fabricated dream of the authority.65

The planning of Lujiazui offers a dramaturgy of Chinese nationalism in response to

changes in the country’s international circumstances.66 While patriotism is

mandatory to regain esteem from several decades of decay, the connection to the

rest of the world via cultural transactions and foreign policy is a complex weave.

The tension between nationalism and “globalization,” is a path which Shanghai

must negotiate.67 The distancing of Shanghai’s image from being China through

the making of new urban forms was a bold national strategy and an international

maneuver. Globalization is a reciprocal product of this particular kind of

nationalism. In contrast to Shanghai in the 1930s, which was prosperity-driven,

40


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


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


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


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


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


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


their own environment of economic institutions, Shanghai people seem to know

and are accustomed to their own rules, which have proven to be reliable based on

their wealth and success in the last ten years.”78

Zhu, a mastermind of China’s global economy, expected Shanghai to gain

instantaneous global attention from this “rigged” contest, and intended to immerse

Chinese architects in the planning practice internationally in order to broaden their

professional horizon.79 Resonating Fulong Wu’s argument on the influence of

globalization on Shanghai’s urban development, the competition created an

expected “catalytic effect,” which helped to break the ice for the new milieu of

contemporary built form and environment.80 That is, Zhu substantially succeeded

in both ways – no competition in the world was more noted than the Lujiazui in

the early 1990s, and truly, the Shanghai Urban Planning Institute had learned a

valuable lesson, which they used as a model, and professionally exploited

throughout the remaining years of the twentieth century.

As Shanghai’s new financial center, Lujiazui is located at the tip of the

Pudong shore with a strong visual connection to the old Puxi. The dialogue

between the two shores is not just the interaction between “now and then,” but the

encounter between the two faces of the city built in two different ways. While the

Bund had been eclectically built to become a symbolic façade of Shanghai, Lujiazui

was pre-conceived and erected to emulate the impression made from a series of

skyscrapers laid across the vast landscape. The expressiveness of urban form lies in

its “boldness.” American architect Benjamin Wood critically asserts: “Pudong is all

about show – it’s designed to create plots of land for monuments to corporate

power, the global economy.”81 What is considered as an urbanist strategy does not

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48

seem to fit the purpose of showing the authority of Shanghai in the contemporary

time. Both the Bund and Pudong are case studies of how complicated uses of

architecture as visuals in a city re-construct meaning vis-à-vis a global narrative.

Despite the fact that the new development of Pudong was given a green

light from Beijing, the authorities had not seriously discussed the project for a

decade due to the investment risk. This was the case until the era of the Zhu

Rongji.82 Mayor Zhu ambitiously pushed the development of the plan, advocating

its accordance with the establishment of the municipal finance and trade company.

The new mega-infrastructure has been assigned to the west side of the city in

several master plans of Shanghai to support the establishment of Pudong, including

the extended subway lines, roads, highways, high-speed trains, and a new

international airport. As meticulously studied by Kris Olds, Richard Marshall and

Peter G. Rowe, the politics of the building of Lujiazui necessitates a replication of

the image of the great Western metropolises. This politics is a direct response to

the “pragmatic nationalism,” which is evidently immense in the making of new

urban space and architectural form.83

Whether the reinforcement the pragmatic nationalism using built form and

environment fail or succeed what we have learned is a series of ambitious attempts

to communicate certain messages of power to the world at large using visual

cultural symbols. The importance of the juxtaposing skylines of the Bund and

Pudong is not to be debated, but to be accepted. To understand Shanghai today,

given its relationship to its history, the next section will delve further into the city,

the heart of the New Shanghai – Lujiazui.

CHAPTER THREE

POLITICIZATION AND THE RHETORIC

OF SHANGHAI URBANISM

Despite the complete change of the Bund’s shoreline, the Bund has

remained remarkably intact stylistically. Yet, the time traveler felt the

dynamism of diverse modernities at work. The time traveler then made a

trip to the Planning museum, where he could see the whole city from a

bird’s-eye view. He was so shocked when he saw urban form of his city in

the “Great Model.” The planning staff came to him and gave him two

information pamphlets. First reads:

“Shanghai is better and better. The twenty-first century is full of promise. In

the new century, we will build Shanghai into the largest economic shipping

center in China, placing it in the first rank of historical cultural cities.

Furthermore, we will gradually build the city into one of the international

Politicization and the Rhetoric of Shanghai Urbanism

central cities of economy, finance and trade: “the global metropolis of the

twenty-first century.” We firmly believe that with all the efforts that are

currently being made by the municipal government and the people of

Shanghai, we will be able to carry out our plans and bring all our goals to

fruition.”1

It is first useful to understand the goals of the city as underpinning the

specific “cause” that transforms its physicality. Can Shanghai really be the global

metropolis for the 21st century? The answer to this question lies in how “global

metropolis” is defined and what is to be expected from it. According to Sociologist

Saskia Sassen, a global city is:

An urban space with new economic and political potentialities, which

formulates the transnational identity and communicates … connecting sites

that are not geographically proximate yet are intensely connected to each

other.”2

By this measure, even without advanced technologies, Shanghai has always been a

global city.

The definition of a “global 21st-century” city, however, is ambiguous,

although it can be thought of as a future of free-market competition. In this sense

the extensive Chinese workforce can also be added to the equation.3 In order to

achieve the goal in a theoretical sense, the development of Shanghai’s urbanism

corresponds to the parameters of a compact urban place that provides the soft

cultural infrastructure, the organizational structure that allows diverse architectural

cultures to represent different cultural norms while still maintaining their

representational integrity by means of architectural and urban orderings. The

50


integrity of “form,” or urban identity, is required to establish a tangible perception

to which everyone can relate. The result of this process is the making of a

cosmopolitan city that can compete in a globalised economic context.

This chapter discusses the ways Shanghai might be understood through its

urbanism. The purpose is to realistically check the actuality of built environment in

relation to its history and political presence through first-hand primary sources,

which is to fill unanticipated voids that surfaced in the understanding of Shanghai

in a physical sense. This can be done from four following perspectives – urban

form, individual buildings and urban imagery, visualization of the skylines, and

streetscape. Using the city as a primary source, this chapter presents specific

information derived from my observations needed to authenticate the research.

That is, whereas the history is a cursory look of the city, this chapter presents

analytically microcosmic views of the city.

FIRST PERSPECTIVE: URBAN FORM

An aerial view of Puxi, which faces Pudong across the river to the west,

reveals a series of high-rise commercial towers and highways that are superimposed

on the old fabric of lilong, low-rise row houses adapted from the Western tradition

to accommodate the families of Chinese workers.4 The stark contrast between low-

rise lilong houses and corporate high-rises is primarily a result of lax (and/or absent)

zoning practices and height restrictions at the beginning of Deng’s economic

reform. As polar opposites of urban form – old low-rise fabric and the new high-

rise buildings – the current fabric creates a problematic discourse between old

forms of inhabitation and the new corporate culture. Whereas the gridiron

51


structure and the fabric of existing lilong houses could have been used by

contemporary developers as cultural elements upon which to expand, they were

instead considered as obsolete and, as such, prime targets for demolition.

Figure 12: Bird's-eye view of Shanghai in 1937.

What epitomizes this perspective is Charpentier’s Century Avenue,

Lujiazui’s main spine. The false premise of the avenue begins with the determina-

tion of its width to be exactly ‘one meter wider than the Champs Élysées’ in order to

denote the triumph of the making of this physically significant urban element. Its

penetration through the diagonal super block of parallel housing in Pudong creates

irregular plot shapes. The programming and anticipated use of the space in Pudong

has never been made clear. Although the Municipal Planning Bureau has

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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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54

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


Figure 14: Century Avenue in reality.

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This monotony of the urban space is the result of a lack of development at

the pedestrian scale, which might have something to do with the attempt to make

Lujiazui into another Manhattan. Yet, while downtown Manhattan’s dense

skyscrapers are absorbed within the grid, and its lively street life directed by the

hyper-dense environment of a financial-scape, Pudong’s skyscrapers stand out as

scattered markers of individual buildings. The substantial distances between the

buildings, between the building and the open space, and between the building and

the pavement creates a lifeless street scene, almost depriving the city of its

exuberant life. While these actions have served to order the amalgamation of the

city’s urban form, in practice they have overlooked a more important concern

about the social stratification of a newly developed urban place.

SECOND PERSPECTIVE: BUILDINGS AND URBAN IMAGERY

Confronted by a jungle of glittering high-rises reminiscent of a science-

fiction movie, visitors to Shanghai might easily come to the conclusion that it is a

very rich city. Although there was, perhaps, one stage these buildings probably were

occupied; yet, since 2007, they are far from being fully occupied, and thus from

this perspective, the tall buildings in Lujiazui become purely symbolic. The

decision to position a handful of iconic skyscrapers side by side as a means of visual

competition with other dense cities in the West is telling. The original master plan

called for some skyscrapers to be grouped together in the heart of the CBD, while

other high-rise buildings were to be scattered randomly on both the eastern and

western sides of Century Boulevard. Such a distribution would have accentuated

the role of the towers as signifiers explicitly reinforcing an instant identity. These

skyscrapers do for Shanghai what the Eiffel Tower does for Paris. As Roland 56


Barthes puts it, not only does built form generate meanings that constitute the

conception of the city, but the impact of the materialization of ideas also prompts

the creation of a new civic realm.6 The idea of making a great cityscape consisting

of high-rise buildings and monumental elements is essential in the making of

Lujiazui. Yet, this district’s tall buildings were not built to satisfy the need for

vertical expansion due to any lack of horizontal space, rather they were built for the

purpose of generating monumental symbolic value.7 The monumentality of these

urban elements are the unsubtle evidence of the actions taken by municipal

government, and fulfilled by the developer and designer, in the making of the

particular ‘form’ that recalls the patriotic past of China. It is not surprising that

their pragmatism would lead to the easiest way of establishing a level economic

playing field, if not a superior economic playing field, by building the highest

skyscrapers: the players being Shanghai’s competitors seeking global-city status.

This is evident from the attempt by Shanghai’s authority, and its

development partner, to make the Jin Mao Tower and the World Financial Centre

the tallest buildings in the world, and to be located in the Lujiazui master plan.

Both designs come from elite American architectural firms, and are programmed to

be mixed-use developments, consisting of office space, hotel rooms, conference

halls, observation decks, with shopping complexes on their ground floors. For the

Jin Mao Tower, the upper part of its trunk is simply an ultra-high atrium

surrounded by the corridors of hotel rooms, wrapped by a curtain-wall skin. The

elevation of the building to that extreme height is an obvious manifestation of

monumentality. Considering that labor in China is inexpensive, the construction

of both these buildings does not require as much financial investment as would

have been the case if they were to be erected in America or Europe.8

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

59


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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THIRD PERSPECTIVE: STREETSCAPES

The skyline iconography makes one wonder how people on the street

experience it. Leaving aside the issue of mimicking Manhattan, since we cannot

assume the planner of Lujiazui had in mind the necessity of socialization at the

pavement level, one can conclude that the streets in Lujiazui are not efficiently used

given their excessive width. Century Boulevard has eight traffic lanes, one traffic

island, four bicycle lanes (two each way), and two pavements that are as wide as the

traffic lanes, all comprising a total width of more than 330 feet. All the streets that

branch off the Boulevard are half this width. The district is not dense; hence, the

public activity encouraged by urban theorists such as Jane Jacobs does not exist.13

This problem has been observed by the Shanghai municipality, which has since

retrofitted the pavements by embedding them with a series of pocket landscape

parks in order to humanize their size.

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62

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


Figure 18: Model of the proposed Century Avenue by Charpentier, showing the relationship between the sidewalk to the high-rise buildings along the avenue, and from the buildings to the low-rise residential fabric as one moves further away from the avenue.

63


Despite the fact that Lujiazui is deserted at first glance, what might shed

light on the situation is a comparison between the condition of streets in Lujiazui

and “pre-Lujiazui” Shanghai. Street life is fostered by human-scale elements (both

planned and ad hoc) corresponding to the nature of the dwellers’ norms of

inhabitation. This observation takes the methods by which the street was

functionally and culturally conceived in pre-Lujiazui Shanghai as a point of

reference. Prior to the development of Pudong in the early 1990s, Pudong was

basically an undeveloped territory with warehousing and industry in the early

twentieth century and ship building in the latter half of the century. To understand

the interaction between architecture and the urban form in terms of how its people

perceive their city, it is essential also to look at how streets in Puxi have historically

formed and performed over time.

In 1930’s Puxi, the main interactions between the building and the street

were business transactions. Pavements served as the mediation. Beyond the

mediating pavement, however, labor activities, as well as various modes of

transport, were taking place. There were always Chinese laborers loading and

unloading cargo from ships, pulling rickshaws and, waiting for customers, walking

along the street hoping to get itinerant employment. The Bund was usually

crowded, but it was never over-crowded, since the major public and commercial

spaces were located in the inner parts of the city, in the foreign settlements. One of

the most fashionable vistas was from the top of a building on the West Bund,

looking down to a street that curves to the east. Here, the Custom House and the

Bank of China were the monumental landmarks. Five modes of transportation

were used on the Bund, according to the status of the passengers: foot, bicycle,

rickshaw, tram, and car. In contrast to the streets of the Bund, the streets of

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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

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Figure 21: Empty sidewalk of Century Avenue during rush hours.

FOURTH PERSPECTIVE: VISUALIZATION OF THE SKYLINES

Both skylines, facing each other across the river, are important icons of this

former Treaty Port city. The similarity between the two is that the images of both

are meant to display the expectant future of this urban place. For the Bund, it was

the commercial value of individual business on the Treaty Port’s shore, which the

appearance of a Western environment could reinforce. The making of the Bund

skyline comes from an internal need: the need for visual representation using built

form was necessitated by the establishment of the various external cultures that

existed in Shanghai from the opening of the Treaty Port. In contrast, the visual

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representation of Pudong is a result of an external push. As the Bund is a linear

corridor, the appearance of the building is vividly experienced as a panorama – the

height of a building is not as important as the degree to which it can be seen from

afar; a building can be clearly perceived no matter where the viewers are. But for

Pudong, with a setting that spans the large urban space, the height and size of

buildings are essential, which is why the planning of Pudong favours high-rise

buildings. Though specifically designed for effect, their effect is weaker than that of

the ad hoc Bund.

In Kevin Lynch’s terms, this understanding resonates with the “pre-

conceived imagery – something to which the observer can relate by virtue of its

spatial relations to the observer.”16 The Bund is a skyline that allows both visual

and physical interactions between the city and its people, for the image one sees

and the physical interactions with the buildings are firmly reinforced by its

inhabitable quality. Pudong’s skyline, however, is relatively abstract. Not only is

the composition of the Pudong skyline too complex to be perceived

comprehensively (only outlines and gestures are expressed through visuals), but the

human scale is also lost in the overwhelmingly vast and pedestrian-unfriendly

planning of its public space. For instance, Century Avenue is too wide given the

height of the surrounding buildings, and its lack of public functions. Considering

the vastness of the space unrelated to Everyman’s sense of scale, it is difficult to

imagine how a person would be able to coherently conceive and remember the

physical space by its urban characteristics. Yet, Pudong is not without living beings.

Coming up from a subway station, visitors encounter the lack of directional

indicators; they might not even have any clue that they have arrived in Pudong.

Despite the clarity of Pudong’s high-rise buildings when viewed from the Puxi

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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

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need is critical. This causes new cities to look like one another. A fact re-asserted by

The Economist:

No wonder that swathes of Seoul look like swathes of Shanghai. Even the

most ambitious buildings, many designed by trophy architects who flit from

one country to the next, often seem alien to their environs.17

Whether they fail or not, it is certain that they are trying to convey to the world

their own messages of monumentality in service to a larger agenda of the identities

of power. Observed by Jennie Chen: “It [Shanghai] has been torn asunder by

colonialism, war, political exhaustion, economic ebbs and flows, and social

implosions. Yet look at it now; it is spectacular by all visual standards.”18

SUMMARY: MEANS OF UNDERSTANDING

The selling point of Shanghai’s tourism in the early twentieth century was

the elegant image that replicated Western neo-classical styles. The insistent focus

on the monumental, iconic representation of Shanghai consistently obscured its

human scale, especially the sense of inhabitation of the city. Historically, the Bund

was on the tourist map because of its iconographic nature. Its accommodation of

many intruding cultures did not succeed in mediating between tradition and

modernity, but rather inclined toward abrupt representations of external cultural

norms. Also apparent in a microcosmic perspective, the inherent contradiction

between local and foreign notions of open space – observed from the street scenes –

represented the other notion of a modern Chinese city, particularized by the

tension between the leap towards Western modernity and finding a new Chinese

identity through a mixture of diversified cultures. 70


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.

71


72

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

CHAPTER FOUR

THE POLITICS OF BUILT FORM

Eventually, our time traveler’s reactions went from surprise to fascination.

He then took a walk from the Bund toward the West side on Nanjing Road,

expecting to find the Racecourse; he instead found the People’s Square.

After wrestling with the automatic ticketing machine, which he surprisingly

liked, he took Shanghai Subway line three – which was now comfortable for

him – to Lujiazui. Coming out at the new landscape of Century Avenue, he

was totally disoriented and lost. The scale of the road was too big. The

imaginary landscape of coherent built forms, which had excited him when

viewing it from the other side of the river, decomposed into the vast and

gigantic fragments upon arriving in Lujiazui’s district.

Not wanting to be influenced by nostalgia nor be branded as a conservative

“old Shanghainese,” he asked the question: “how can I understand this place

for its contemporary value?”

The Politics of Built Form

Fundamental to the argument of this book is the undeniable presence of the

“New Shanghai” – the term that evokes an image of a city enmeshed in capitalism,

high-tech infrastructure, and contemporary architecture. It is the fabrication of a

so-called “instant urbanity”1 that responds to the culture of a capitalist-oriented

market economy. The ascendancy of the new skyline of Lujiazui is the outcome of

the move toward “Open Door” modernization (as opposed to the earlier

modernization during the treaty port era). The Open Door policy in the late 1980s

made the development of Lujiazui unprecedented in speed of construction,

approach to marketability, and urban form. The new spatial organization is viewed

from a different angle as a result of the shift in market strategy. Fulong Wu

describes:

“..[U]rban growth…[in Shanghai]…is a result of a profound shift from

‘developmental’ state to the ‘entrepreneurial’ city, which takes its place [in

this case, Lujiazui] as a spatial commodity.”2

Shanghai can be understood not only as a city of physical expression, but also as a

breeding ground of cultural modernizations compelled by the onslaught of

commercialization from the 1840s onward. For instance, the Treaty Port, the

regional center for commerce and industry, and the focal point of China’s

economy can only be operational where the arbitrariness of cultural resistance

persists through an ethnically diversified environment. The urgent needs of the

new urban identity pushed incrementally by the so-called “socialist market

economy” resulted in obviously exorbitant urban experimentation. Shanghai is

always a natural choice for the experiment because, as commented by Zheng

Shiling, throughout the history, “Shanghai has always been an open city.”3

74


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


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



By constructing new but false images of Shanghai that does not exist,

planners and architects are “manipulating history” by manipulating

geography, resting the city’s future on an edge between the pain of historical

reality and the futile hopes of a city that yearns for the reshaping of history.7

The issue of politics is essential to the understanding of Shanghai not as an

ordinary Chinese city, but a city that China desires to exploit. I have been building

my argument on Rhoads Murphey’s and Jeffrey Wasserstrom’s analytical notions

of “Shanghai exceptionalism.”8 Politics in this sense is confined to the

understanding of “individual or collective choices” driven by aspirations to greater

status and power that inform the design of this particular built form and

environment. The establishment of a “Shanghai special economic” zone in 1984 is

one such choice yielding both a political statement and a physical form,

demonstrating the aim to make Shanghai an economic powerhouse of international

trade. Again, as implied in Bergère’s accounts on the breakneck pace of Shanghai’s

urban development, Shanghai was a southeastern city along with other cities in the

Pearl River Delta that was chosen in the 1990s to operate as the “head of the

dragon.”9 This imagery was deployed by Deng in the confrontation with the so-

called “conservative bureaucracy in Beijing”10 in the Post-Mao era. In keeping with

William Skinner’s 1964 model of China’s political cognitive geography, the

Beijing-centric view of the regime’s power in the 1980s would have required

keeping the capital city a mere symbolic city, shielded from any intervention which

might disturb alignments of Chinese cosmology and power recognized by the

Chinese from the ancient time.11 In other words, Deng realized that Beijing had to

77


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

78


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


wondering who built them, who occupies them, and who pays the rent? (Four

hundred skyscrapers at, say, two hundred million dollars apiece - what does that

come to and how can it be justified?)”13 The final plan of Lujiazui reflects the

politics of built form through the “international presence in response to a new

globalized environment,” which, according to Zhang Xudong – or even Fredric

Jameson – is postmodern to the core.14 Peter Rowe reflects on this as a “missing of

the middle ground.”14

Taking away the political interventions and mobilizations that have created

it, Shanghai would either decline, as many scholars have hypothesized, due to its

moral decay (the support from working class, and intellectuals would no longer be

there to sustain the presence of liberality) or, at the other extreme, it would

“organically grow” and, at the same time, heal itself from the mortal wounds to

become a Western metropolis like Manhattan or Chicago. Lujiazui would still be

built, but in a less aggressive way since there would be no need to oppose the

established skyline. Its job would be to support the demand for the reallocation of

the financial sector, providing an opportunity for the short-sighted rationalized

economy of scale, rather than the steroidal “economy of speed.”

PERCEPTIONS OF SHANGHAI

So, how should we perceive Shanghai, considering its condition of hybridity

and the abrupt leap from rural to urban and from urban to “hyper-urban” as a

result of the government’s desire to make an instant image for the city? The

answers are twofold. The first comes from a historical angle. The development of

Pudong as a whole is an “inflation” of Shanghai’s urban development. Despite the 80


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.

81


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


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.

83


84

From the city scale, Shanghai enjoyed the coexistence and incorporation of

different planning elements, including the super block, central public recreational

space, commercial boulevards, and the lilong. Thanks to the massive immigration

of the foreigners who had made the city a cosmopolitan urban place, the

unprecedented Westernized plans of the city were accepted by the citizenry who

were not attached to the old Shanghai. Lujiazui’s existence does not hybridize

Shanghai. As a financial center “out there” to serve a particular purpose of the

government, this “Chinese City for the Twenty-First Century” is autonomous by

nature. Apart from the fact that it was built out of a field of swamps across the river

from the Bund where there was no cultural significance, its programs and functions

were solidly defined by the planning bureau to be separated from those of Puxi. Its

unique infrastructure was ambitiously put forth toward becoming the “Other

Shanghai.” Its purpose was to attract global flows of capital through its financial

service sector.15 The city image of Lujiazui was expected in the same way to

displace the image of the existing Shanghai, the Bund.

To pursue this argument further, Shanghai has always been the economic

engine of China; therefore the fabrication and construction of the new global

economic culture are logically rationalized by the way in which the city extends this

perception. If there was genius loci at any given time of urbanized Shanghai, it

would be the being “Non-Chinese China,” or the hybrid culture of cosmopolitan

Shanghai.

CONCLUSION

The making of both The Bund and Lujiazui can be conceived as a

production of image, supported by the demand for economic advantage. The

purposes of the making of both skylines are confined to a single keyword,

“foreigners.” But in a different way: foreigners built the Bund for themselves, while

Lujiazui was created by the Chinese to attract foreign flows of capital. Setting aside

an issue of urban heritage versus the new high-tech urban elements across the river,

it is obvious that the planning of Lujiazui is less concerned with the tastes of the

public.

Although the making of the Bund skyline during the early twentieth century

was superficial to the extent that the chosen forms of the “design templates” were

derived from the Western precedents to replicate particular images, the abstract

quality of urban space imbedded in the spatial organization of the Bund waterfront

facilitated its acceptance by the society as discussed earlier in this book. This

Conclusion

mediated the different internal social factor in social structure between the

foreigners and the Chinese who lived in Shanghai. This is not the case for Lujiazui.

Notwithstanding the fact that a particular “form” was pre-determined by the

authority, several famous architects were invited to submit their design proposals in

order to provide some fresh ideas, which were to be judged for their “formal”

quality rather than the quality of the plan conceived in the manner of

contemporary urban design.

The politics behind the rejection of the favored plan by Richard Rogers

reinforces the argument that the idea of the building of the “new image” was

already pre-conceived. There is no attempt to implement any urbanistic elements

proposed by Rogers. Reading through the physical urban form of Lujiazui, it is

difficult to find the relationship between forms of buildings and the urban

structure as far as their integrity of urban expression. The abrupt changes in the

scale of the building to the streets disturb the urban morphology. The lofty

political ideals opted for superlative image, the “tallest skyscrapers,” the “longest

bridge,” the “largest boulevard.”

In this book, I have sought to understand the nature of the driving global

forces that are propelling the production of Shanghai’s Lujiazui today in

relationship to its semi-colonial past represented by the Bund in the 1930s, and to

call attention to the emergence of Shanghai in the world through its intrinsic

potential, setting aside the issue of its diminishing “historical authenticity.” By

tracing the history and politics of Shanghai, this thesis shows the set of conditions

that have forged Shanghai. “The man who lived seventy years ago,” provides a one-

sided reflection on the radical change of urbanism essential to the examination of

86


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

88

construction, and internal social transformations, as the cultural value “from within”

that are subject to the way the city works beyond the gaze of the artificiality of the

built environment. This book suggests no balance exists between these two orders

due to the impossibility of judgment on this qualitative (conceptual) consideration,

but rather outlines the sets of social and cultural conditions by which the city has

been transformed throughout its short but complicated history dominated by its

politics while represented by its urban form.

Our time traveler never liked the “Ugly Pearl” – neither did I – but he could

not avoid seeing it. Its overwhelming scale and the notorious form

distinguished it from the rest of Shanghai’s cityscape. It was everywhere, in

the postcards, magazine, advertisements, and billboards. He started to realize

that this was propaganda using the entire environment to promote a

particular point of view!

The hyper-modern environment can be captured and remembered not only

by the lens of the camera, but also by the lenses of every visitor’s eyes. Before

he realized it, he started to embrace its impressive silhouette, as it gradually

replaced his initial perception of Shanghai. It was a déjà vu – the Bund was

not likable when it was first built but later became the symbol of the Old

Shanghai. After looking beyond the ostentatious appearance of the New

Shanghai, by virtue of its politicized history, the Pearl stands as a true

symbol of its “own task,” making sense of the city’s new identity as Shanghai

Contemporary.

That is to say, he began to like Contemporary Shanghai – so do I.

AFTERWORD

It is my honor to write an afterword for my former exchange student from

Thailand. When Non Arkaraprasertkul first arrived in Oklahoma, USA, the only

thing I knew about Thailand was that it was an exotic Asian country. A young boy

arrived at my home with black hair, Asian eyes and the slimness typically associated

with Asians. Other than the physical characteristics which were similar to mine,

there was very little with which I could make a connection. Although my own

parents were immigrants from China, the cultural difference was still dramatic.

Non was understandably shy and struggling with a language and culture vastly

different from his.

An early sign of his excellent artistic talent was an original drawing of my

house. I noticed his intense concentration and his rapid paint strokes. It seemed

that he preferred his artistic communication to verbal communication. By

November, sparks started to shine from his previously hidden personality. He

Afterword

made friends rapidly after that and even organized the other exchange students

with activities. He designed a T-shirt for everyone which further cemented their

friendship. Non became a true ambassador of Thailand to his friends and to me.

His adeptness at finding friendships has been an asset in his career. He has been

able to make contacts with brilliant people. His tremendous artist talent shows up

not only in his drawing and architectural renderings, but also in his ability to

recognize great artists and great architecture. This combination of conviviality and

master artisanship cannot but lead him to the most exciting architectural

happenings in the world in a short time.

Had Non confined himself to an architectural career in Thailand, it would

have been a loss to the rest of the world. His first bold step was to apply and be

accepted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

As noted in his dissertation, he almost missed the opportunity to study

Shanghai and its fascinating architectural history. This study has particular

significance because Shanghai is a city that, as the economic center of China, has

particular influence in global economics.

I suspect that it is rare for students of Asian countries that have not had a

close association with a western country to venture into Western academics. For

Non to understand higher level thinking in English is not just the mere translation

of Thai to English. The thinking process is very different. Non is able to give his

eastern creativity to a Western world.

90


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.

91

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

92


did not stop the desire to excel. All of my grandfather’s children lived successful

lives and had children who integrated successfully into the American fabric.

Most important of the Chinese culture is the notion of saving face. The

public image was to be maintained even with deception, if necessary. If disgraced,

suicide was often the only course of action. This concept may illuminate many of

the actions that China chooses in its interaction with foreign powers. The Shanghai

façade has become China’s business face to the world. No more is this concept of

face more clearly demonstrated than in China’s hosting of the 2008 Olympics.

Despite internal difficulties, China presented the most spectacular display of

wealth, optimism, and health to the world. This notion of saving face also has a lot

to do with pragmatism. Whatever will expedite the possibility of saving face is

more important than internal consequences. In other words, if outsiders see

everything as going well, it is more important than if everything is going well to

insiders. This reasoning also creates a culture of secrecy. This secrecy is playfully

used in the United States by the phrase, “Whatever happens in……., stays

in……..” This is a good philosophy as long as it does not give license to immoral

or illegal pursuits.

This culture fears criticism from outside sources. When studying China, it

can be seen that this extends to the nation in its dealing with foreigners. Its many

attempts to shield itself has met with varying successes. The concession made to the

British and French in the opening of Shanghai is remarkable, but it can be said that

it was most practical means to preserve the rest of China. Actually, it was brilliant

to cede a very small part of China to protect the rest of the vast country. Did the

Chinese consider that opening a small hole in the economic dike would eventually

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94

open a flood of foreign economic invasion? Paradoxically, it did open a flood of

foreign economic business, but it was the Chinese that did the invading. Can this

be seen a foresight or is it merely the Chinese taking advantage of everything in the

most practical way?

China has become a major player in the economic crisis that faces the world

today. The country has survived when other civilizations have toppled. Perhaps

there is a lesson to be studied and learned.

Victor Alexander Wong Oklahoma City, USA December 2008

APPENDIX

TOWARDS SHANGHAI’S URBAN HOUSING:

RE-DEFINING SHANGHAI’S LILONG

If one is to define the dominant characteristic of urban pattern in the hyper-

growth city of Shanghai, apart from the contemporary high-rise buildings of the sterile

development in the past two decades, it is the lilong, the low-rise neighborhood

housing crisscrossing large urban blocks. Shanghai is a city where two distinctive

urban characteristics – the contemporary high-rise and the traditional low-rise buildings

– create a paradoxical pattern of unevenly developed urban fabric. This pattern

continually raises tremendous concerns not only on a macro-structural level of the

city, e.g. urban land-use and expansion, but also street life and the living environment.

It is understandable that high-rise development is unavoidable due to the massive

demand and exorbitant land value.1 We have learned and experienced from the

Appendix

unsuccessful precedents in the West and the extensive literature that criticizes the

impact of a city without diversity.2 In other words, although high-rise development

might logically and efficiently solve the problem of accommodating large numbers of

people,3 it will cause problems such as a diminished sense of community. I agree that

the traditional lilong house is no longer the most appropriate urban housing for

Shanghai. However, I propose that a viable solution is low-/medium-rise high-density,

multi-functional, community-oriented urban housing that will preserve the unique

nature of individual vibrant neighborhoods. Shanghai’s lilong is chosen as a

typological precedent for this study not only because it reflects a clever overarching

housing and landuse economy, but also because it provides the linkage to an urban

setting and public realm (accessibility and connectibility); the consolidation of the

sense of security (in other words, neighborhood watch); interior openness; diverse

dwelling environment; and perhaps the most salient quality, “lanes” living style.

Lilong’s uniqueness lies in the combination of these vibrant qualities, and the “order

and efficiency,” which are the principles of modern housing.

I will exemplify both the traditional and the modern aspects of lilong

neighborhood housing, aiming to re-define the abstract concept of the lilong, arguing

for its potential to be re-thought as a typology of high density housing today. In

particular, this essay seeks to deliver a practical answer to a conceptual question: how

does lilong provide the dwelling identity of Shanghai, taking into account its form,

meaning, and culture? The emergence of both lilong and Western modern housing is

rooted in a crisis of space and the economic drive of modern cities. Lilong architecture

was a convincing housing development strategy in modern Shanghai. I seek to

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examine in what way the lilong is a “mediating agency” between Chinese locality and

Western modernity? My hypothesis is that the architecture of lilong does not confine

itself to certain forms or physical configurations; instead it is an “abstract concept” of

an urban neighborhood. This dynamic concept addresses the spatial organization, the

architectural practicality, the casual formation of semi-private space, and the

community lane-life. I am convinced that we must understand this concept and use it

as a point of departure for the design of urban housing today.

This essay embraces four main parts concerning the critical understanding of

lilong vis-à-vis opportunities to develop the new Low and Medium Rise High Density

(LMRHD) housing in Shanghai. The first part is the analysis of lilong’s modernity, its

representational issues with an emphasis on how the modern housing programs are

adapted for the lilong and how the lilong – its users and its condition – respond to

those programs. The second part concerns lilong history, from which I seek to clarify

the developmental process of lilong from its emergence to its demise, emphasizing the

pattern of growth, the factors that had caused the shift in style and orientation, and

the causes of decline: drawing upon some exhaustive accounts on the history of lilong

that are written in English, this part will succinctly paint the picture of its historical

lineage, placing lilong in the context of capitalist Shanghai. Then in the third part, I

will re-define the abstract concept of lilong; in other words, what makes lilong a

physical mediating agency between the form of Western modern housing and

traditional Chinese dwelling culture. Broadly speaking, the hypothesis is that the

success of the lilong as a Chinese modern culture is not so much because of its

physical style but because of its idea of “neighborhood,” which is grounded on local

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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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RATIONALE: LILONG AND MODERNITY

Minimal maintenance and maximum use of the land were the two

considerations of the foreign developers when lilong were originally built. Like many

other modern housing precedents in Europe and America, lilong has a systematic

structure conforming to the programmatic, functional, and economical needs of a city.

Shanghai’s abrupt leap from “rural” to “urban” was expeditious because of the rapid

increase of foreign investment. The emergence of this particular type of housing is

analogous to that of the West: mainly, the need for collective housing for the masses.

It was the condition of modernity4 – the change from an agricultural to an industrial

society under capitalist impulses – that gave birth to this housing type. The normative

program for living was then shifted from an aim to sustain a communal life –

represented in the clustered inward opening style of the traditional Chinese courtyard

house – to an individual life, an economical life of a modern worker whose need was

an adequate living space, and convenience to work. This was, at the time,

unprecedented in China, a country known for its abundant land resources. To a

degree, the designing of lilong can be seen as no more than just an assimilation of a

typical European row house building type. Notable common aspects are single-family

houses with party walls, private entrances, and the system of spatial hierarchy from

public to private. Moreover, it is also in the extreme efficiency and functionality of

lilong that modernity is reflected. The unit plan had become smaller over time,

according to Zhao, “from clan/family-based courtyard-centered living to the

community-based alley-centered [lane-centered] living, from a self-conditioned

traditional living style towards a more open, more independent modern urban living 99

Appendix

style, reflecting a shift from a metaphoric to a more functional layout.”5 The layout of

the lilong neighborhood was by all means the most efficient layout for the highest

density, the main lane running all the way or half way across the block as well as

branch lanes connected perpendicularly to the main lane.6 Dwellers had basically been

forced to spend more time outside because of the tightness and less sanitary conditions

of the interior space, resulting from the condensation of the unit for economic

purpose. Relating to the traditional Chinese house, floor plans were systematically

compromised: at the entrance was a courtyard, then the living room, and finally a

kitchen and a bath room in the back of the house (back-to-back in order to share wet-

walls), all the private areas such as bed rooms were on the second floor. Similarly, the

stylistic representation of the house diminished due to the increased emphasis on

efficiency: a plainer and cleaner façade became typical in the later generations of

lilong.7 Nevertheless, with a certain cultural resistance, abstraction never moved to the

truly modern, such as that of the famous Weissenhofsiedlung.8 The modernity of lilong

was also compromised by the users who were able to adjust the newly built

environment to fit their own long-held traditions of cherishing their living space.

However, situating lilong in the Shanghai context, the important factor of its

success was also the unique “Chinese dwelling culture,” which, from within, re-

defined the meaning of the modern elements borrowed from the west by the

understanding of space and its possible usage. It had not only vitalized the dullness of

the repetitiveness, but had also actively expanded the possibility of activating space

within the given constraints. For instance, common activities that were taking place in

the lanes – initially designed for people and vehicular circulation – transformed this

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internal road to a dynamic communal space for dwellers, recalling the internal space in

the traditional Chinese courtyard. Furthermore, lanes also provide for the sense of

“open space,” as Chinese prefer a small space with shading for activities. Lanes

perfectly serve that purpose and soon became imbedded in the dwellers’ way of life.

That is to say, the emergence of lilong and its success lie in two factors: Its

programmatic flexibility, and the plasticity of local culture. The morphological

structure of lilong varies little from site to site, but rather transforms over time. The

structure validates a physical agency that processes the transition from traditional

towards modernity resulting in the diverse urban social life. Each neighborhood is able

to utilize and incorporate own cultural norms.

To give a précis, several recent studies on lilong demonstrate that scholars now

pay more attention to its preservation and present possible strategies to revitalize and

re-use lilong in order to counteract the one-sided growth of high-rise urban housing

and commercial complexes that are gradually and monotonously engulfing Shanghai.

Nevertheless, there are also other issues that concern both Chinese and international

scholars, the nostalgia for an emotional beauty of the lilong – the beauty that lies in the

memory and reminiscences of people who have lived in lilong. It is the economy that

celebrates the sustainable and communal life of the working class. What was once seen

as truly modern has become a traditional heritage. Today, due to the profusion of the

population in Shanghai resulting from industrialization and urbanization, the demand

for housing has become one of the city’s great planning issues. The plan focuses on

maximizing density and financial return because of the potential for increasing land

value. The decision that has been made by the local government is basically no less

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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.

LILONG: A CRITICAL HISTORY

The history of urban housing in Shanghai is not complicated. Urban housing is

the most significant component of Shanghai’s modernization, industrialization, and

urbanization which had not begun until the late nineteenth century with the opening

of the Treaty Port and the various foreign settlements.9 The consequence of the

process of becoming a port was the proliferation of commercial activity, leading to

dramatic population growth – exponential increase of the workforce (and also

refugees).10 Urban housing was initially built to house foreign industry workers and

their families frugally and economically. Shanghai’s “modern urban housing,” lilong,

was the solution the foreign factories and enterprises used for economical real-estate

development.11 Thus, the initial idea was no more than the economy of construction:

“buildings that can be constructed with wooden boards, built in row like army camps,

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accessed by some internal paths joined with one general path that connected to the

public street.”12 Although lilong was initially meant to be built with wood, the

municipal government’s larger concern about the safety issues in the late nineteenth

century led to new housing regulations, including the prohibition of wood frame

structure. The major materials were those that could be supplied locally: brick bearing

walls and wood beams. Lilong was modeled after Western row houses with the

Chinese characteristic “lanes and courtyards.” According to Zhang Shouyi and Tan

Ying, houses are clustered to resemble the basic traditional Chinese houses, allowing

many families to live together in the same compound.13 Although I was not

completely convinced that these characteristics were seriously taken into account by

the developers – since the distinctive notion of internal semi-private space in lilong

can be just ad-hoc – it is compelling to see how the Chinese users naturally adapted

their life-style to the constraint of space and the structure of the neighborhood. It was

around 1870s that the first lilong was introduced and it was also the first time the

“facilities” such as shared bathroom and kitchen were added to Chinese dwelling

culture. Xing Ruan says that lilong is more a “middle ground” between the English

terrace house, and the southern Chinese courtyard house.14 I agree with Ruan

architecturally and stylistically but not as concerns planning – lilong is tightly

structured to service the needs of people in Shanghai. 15

The authentic Shikumen Lilong,16 named after the “eye-catching” decorated

gateway to the neighborhood, was built during this period and became the most

popular lilong for the first decade of the twentieth century. Built to host members of a

working-class family, the size and organization of a Shikumen lilong house was

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Appendix

adequate. A courtyard was the highlight of this lilong, providing not only good

ventilation, southern exposure to sunlight, and communal space, but also a distinctive

solid-v oid fabric that systematically constructed a viable form of urban neighborhood.

There was also extensive use of foreign motifs: traditional European, Western classical,

Russian, or even Japanese styles of decoration was added to the façade of the house to

reflect the splendor of the community. In addition, integration of commercial and

residential components was the distinctive characteristic of the Shikumen style because

it did not only vitalize the neighborhood, but it also financially sustained the

community by feeding back the profit from the commercial component to the overall

system. The New Shikumen Lilong was later introduced as a result of the first stage of

Shanghai’s population growth – the first stage of an over-congested urban population.

The three-bay unit of the Shikumen was reduced to one with a smaller courtyard –

arguably just a small space to symbolize courtyard. Also, the spatial emphasis was

shifted from the interior (house) to the exterior (lane) – lanes were widened to

accommodate vehicles, resulting in a more spacious community space outside the

house.17

The New Style lilong came in the late 1910s due to the critical need for higher

density housing. Thus, the courtyard was defeated by the need for interior space; it

was significantly reduced, if not completely filled. The New Style was the compact

version of the Shikumen: the floor height and building width were decreased to the

minimum, the number of floors increased, and the interior space of each unit was

clearly partitioned for different activities.18 This New Style was preferred by the

developers as more economical than the Shikumen. Occasionally, during the same

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time, the Garden Lilong, a semi-detached house with a garden in the front, was built

for a purpose that was totally different from other types of lilong; it served the elegant

taste of the rich community.

Then, the development of lilong ended around the mid-twentieth century

when the economy took complete control with the Apartment Lilong, a five to seven-

story concrete frame structure, a Western-style apartment with shared-facilities. With

this birth of this soon become general high-rise apartment-type housing, the name

“lilong” no longer resonated with the celebration of Chinese communal life on the

ground. After the Apartment Lilong, developers shifted their interest to the notion of

an extremely efficient housing type, rather than the community-based housing type.

Thus, at the termination of lilong, there was the beginning of the development of the

slab block and modern high-rise tower.

To sum up, a series of lilong were constructed in the inner part of the city as

neighborhood units fitted into a city block. Changes include the use of material (from

wood to brick, and from brick to concrete), and the typology of the basic unit (smaller

and more defined over time). The success of the first series contributed to the demand

for the next, and thus, not so long after the first building stage, within less than a

hundred years, more than 200,000 lilong dwelling units (of approximately 60 – 150

square meters per unit19) became the dominating characteristic of Shanghai’s urban

fabric. The major change emerged from the inflexible control of the district housing

bureaus, as the central government guaranteed housing for every worker and limited

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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.

RE-DEFINING LILONG: THE CONCEPT OF NEIGHBORHOOD LIFE

[For lilong,] the physical condition of the house was secondary. It was the

uniformity in neighborhood structure that constitutes the embryo of lilong.21

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Literally, the meaning of lilong is “neighborhood lanes” as li is for

neighborhood and long is for lane – an abstract concept of space making use of public

realm to reinforce the sense of the community.22 Properly, lilong is not a noun, but an

adjective; thus, “lilong housing” is a form of dwelling in a lane-structured

neighborhood – to the extent that neighborhood means more than just an area, but a

community where members interact with each other on a regular basis.23 It is this

distinctive concept of formation of locality that is prominently imbedded in many

Asian cultures. One can recognize similarities to lilong in the cho of Toyko,24 the

hanok of Seoul, the hutong of Beijing, and the soi of Bangkok,25 to name a few. These

concepts of East Asian neighborhood influence the everyday life of inhabitants. These

concepts appeal to local government for the neighborhood and its culture as a

collective force, and serve individuals in providing for their safety and amenity as a

group.26

For lilong in particular, the distinctive style of spatial occupation comes out of

the constraints of space. Every living function is condensed in a small and compact

box-shaped row house for the Shikumen Style, and a narrow strip for the New Style.

Because each unit does not have much living space, and the lilong rows are laid out

parallel to each other in a close proximity, lanes are used by lilong inhabitants as a

living space, which is common to the Chinese who see outdoor activities as prominent

to communal life. These activities that take place in the lanes range from exercises –

particularly Tai-Chi – to commercial activities, hawker business, barbers; to

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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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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 mixed-

use programs and transparency of public and private realms. This proximity

encourages dwellers to communicate with each other dynamically, connecting them to

the outside and the urban environment. The notion of urban dwelling form lies in the

strength of the bonded community. It is not the physicality of building that is the

meaning of housing to the dwellers; instead, it is the intangible notion of “belonging,”

the public space is as important as one’s own house; to use an old Chinese saying – the

sense of belonging possesses inherent qualities of lilong.35 It is this “neighborhood life”

that makes lilong a physical mediating agency between the form of Western modern

housing and traditional Chinese dwelling culture. This social-support community is

what I think Kevin Lynch means by:

[A] legitimate feature of good settlements, within which one can organize

politically when the need for control arises…apart from that, the fact of being

in an identifiable settlement which has quiet, safe internal lanes, easily

accessible daily services and vital street-life in close proximity, has made the

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living so pleasurable. Every one is aware of the diversity around him or her, and is

in visual contact with other ways of life.36

For Lynch, this is visually the quality of a “good city form.”

CONCLUSION: THE NEW LILONG

As pointed out in the beginning, I seek to derive a way to rethink LMRHD

housing in Shanghai through the concept of neighborhood – the essence of lilong

housing. Although the concept is not being seriously taken into consideration by the

residential developers, it has been proven to have potential by the successful Xintaindi

(2001), a series of renovated original Shikumen lilong houses that is now a bustling

retail-shopping district. The architect Ben Wood took nostalgia for the traditional

Shanghainese lilong house as the selling point and re-designed it for a sole commercial

purpose.37 Xintiandi’s developer and the designer spurred us along with the example

of the creative approach to reuse the form of lilong neighborhood, showing us the way

to rethink the real estate economy of the low-rise.38 Greg Yager and Scott Kilbourn

attest to its success:

It works because it has a design that is geared to the appropriate human scale

and texture. The master plan responds to the context of Shanghai’s streets,

providing open space in additional streetscape. The district as a whole is

dynamic and well landscaped, and well managed – all elements of good

design.39

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Xintaindi’s take on the concept of lilong’s “neighborhood life” and the structure of

lilong that gives close proximity and coziness of the entire area, are what constitutes

the project’s astronomical success – they are the qualities, the “fine grain” of the old

lilong pedestrian neighborhood that fulfill the need of the people of Shanghai. There

have been some experimental projects to renovate old – particularly the Shikumen and

the New Shikumen types – lilong neighborhoods for residential purposes such as Lane

252 and Futian Terrace. The result of both projects does not demonstrate a

convincing potential for the renovation to be a strategy to revitalize lilong. In

particular, both projects fail to generate enough funding to subsidize the houses’ rent.

The unfortunate result is the inclination toward less-affordable housing. The

constraint of renovating lilong is that the structure and orientation of the existing

lilong houses in Shanghai are not supportive to either horizontal or vertical expansion,

thus the only renovation that can be made is the condition improvement, which gives

no profit to the current development since it will not increase the density.

Therefore, for the new LMRHD, we must return to the very basic concept of

neighborhood life and take it as a point of departure. I, nonetheless, argue for the

viability of the “spine and ribs” structure of lilong neighborhood since it gives strong

social control to the area and helps maintain the system of neighborhood organization.

It is defensible because this structure has proven to be conducive to the urban life of

the Shanghainese for more than one century. However, it needs to be adjusted in

order to accommodate higher density and better sanitary condition. I propose to re-

orient it by changing the row orientation from having the front of the rows facing the

back of the previous row, to having their backs facing each other so that dwellers can

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share their service areas. In this case, not only will this organization optimize the

service area of the entire site, but it will make the sanitary control less problematic.

This service corridor will still be a communal space for people, at the same time

providing an easier control of garbage, plumbing system, fire escape, as well as safety.

Moreover, this corridor will serve as a light well that provides southern exposure to the

internal units. Density can be increased by a greater number of floors. Since,

structurally we can reduce the depth of beams with modern construction technique

and material, the building then can accommodate more floors with the same or

slightly greater height. It may be possible to increase the height to four or five stories.

Also, the front of each row house – living area – will then face each other, making the

entire lanes a living area for the neighborhood. Since a small courtyard in the front of

the house (for instance, that of the Shikumen) is not used for individual purposes but

is utilized as another semi-public space, this will then minimize unnecessary individual

open space, and maximize space for public activity, encouraging a community sense.

This structure also allows areas along the main internal spines, along the main external

road, and the lower floor of the mixed-use building to be used for commercial

activities like the traditional lilong. This will provide adequate employment

opportunities to the members of the community, balance incomes/revenues, initiate

long-term investment plan, encourage entrepreneurship, and strategically plan a

community-based – domestic— tourism.

For the unit type, it is a top-priority need for a self-contained – studio type –

unit due to the change of life-style during the last quarter of the twentieth century.

Therefore, lilong’s single-family housing unit then has to be modified to a smaller unit

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with individual facilities, which must also be modularly flexible for prospective

modifications. However, it is reasonable to acknowledge some needs of the single-

family housing, so types of housing should still be mixed. A single-family house might

occupy the unit on the ground level and other self-contained unit can stack on top of

it. I suggest “elevated corridors” on each floor providing an access to each unit, to

which open spaces – small garden, common area – can be attached, serving not only as

a community area, but also a transition space from public (corridor) to private (room)

so that moving from public to private area will not be too sudden. Also, to efficiently

make use of the space on the upper levels, each unit can still share an exterior wall in a

row-house style. As long as there is open space attached to at least one side of the

shared wall, natural lighting and ventilation are accessible. In addition, to reinforce

residents’ community sense and liveliness, building blocks must be de-solidified; in

other words, made porous. Porosity of the rows allows natural lighting and ventilation

into the dense block. This will give residences a semi-enclosed sense allowing them to

visually interact with activities and services conducted at the other side of the lanes, as

well as give them a sense of security by the neighborhood watch.

To sum up, I am convinced there are physical aspects of lilong that are still

valid for today’s housing situation in Shanghai derived from the understanding of the

most basic concept of this form of settlements, “neighborhood sense.” More than a

hundred years of lilong history has made it a culture of “modern Shanghai.” My

proposal to rethink this modern urban housing lies in the neighborhood concept as

well as the functionality based on requirements of the modern life-style. Lilong houses

have to be rethought in order to cope with the demand of an individual life, at the

114


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.

115

Appendix

116

NOTES

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCING SHANGHAI

1. The term “hybridity” emerged in academic discourse at the turn of the

twentieth-first century regarding the issues and major challenges traditional

settlements were facing, i.e. massive urbanization and suburbanization, the

spread of consumerism, the internationalization of labor, and the growth of

expatriate migrant populations and ethnic minorities. According to Nezar

AlSayyad, “hybrid environment” simply accommodates or encourages

pluralistic tendencies or multicultural practices, which should be turned on

its head.” Accordingly, to say that urbanism of Shanghai is hybrid might be

problematic since what it represents are two separate environments, rather

than a fusion of different elements that creates a new entity. For details, see

Nezar AlSayyad. “Hybrid Culture/ Hybrid Urbanis Pandora’s Box of the

Notes

“Third Space,” in Nezar AlSayyad, ed., Hybrid Urbanism (Westport,

Connecticut; London: Praeger, 2001), 1-20, and “Identity, Tradition and

Built form: The Role of Culture in Planning and Development,” A

Description of 1996 International Association for the Study of Traditional

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:

118


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.

119

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 Global-

Local 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): 1-

18. 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


(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

CHAPTER TWO

HISTORY, POWER, AND MODERN SHANGHAI

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


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


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


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


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 nation-

state 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


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


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 so-

called “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.

132


CHAPTER THREE

POLITICIZATION AND THE RHETORIC OF SHANGHAI URBANISM

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 re-

published 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


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

CHAPTER FOUR



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 Post-

Reform 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 socio-

economic, 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


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

APPENDIX

TOWARDS SHANGHAI’S URBAN HOUSING:

RE-DEFINING SHANGHAI’S LILONG

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. “High-

Density 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 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


(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 “li-

long” – 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


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 high-

rise housing with the innovative low- and medium-rise strategy.

143

Notes

144

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.

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