The Remaking of Shanghai Local Spaces
Edgar Snow, the American journalist who may be one of the most famous pro-Communist China figures from the West, wrote about Shanghai in 1964 in a subtly nostalgic tone laden with his own memory of the city:
Gone the glitter and the glamour; gone the pompous wealth beside naked starvation. Goodbye to all that: the well-dressed Chinese in their chauffeured cars behind bullet-proof glass; the gangsters, the shakedowns, the kidnappers, the exclusive foreign clubs, the opium dens and gambling halls; the flashing lights of the great restaurants, the clatter of mah-jong pieces, the yells of Chinese feasting and playing the finger game for bottoms-up drinking, the innumerable shops spilling over with silks, jades, embroideries… the peddlers and their plaintive cries; the armored white ships on the Whangpoo… the Japanese conquerors and American and Kuomintang successors; gone the wickedest and most colorful city of the old Orient; good-bye to all that.[1]
While probably no one else, either Chinese or foreigner, could have made such a statement in 1960s’ China, Snow was expressing his almost instinctive nostalgia, intrigued simply by the disjunction of his own memories. Maybe today this melancholy can be soothed, after forty years, by a newly kindled hope for the rebirth of Shanghai with its glittering urban modernity – and more to the point, Shanghai is on its way back to being one of the trendiest cities in the world.
However, after encountering too many reports and images of a Shanghai developing at a break-neck pace and consequently its seemingly ever-expanding desire for self-exaltation under both national and global strategic macro-planning, I, as a Shanghai native, am beginning to wonder to what extent this extreme focus on masculine aspirations has possibly overlooked the variety of local spaces of Shanghai urbanity in ways that have raised the power of global capital to the status of becoming the exclusive tool for understanding the formation of both local and global imaginaries. My observation is that some of these local spaces can be or are indeed ostensibly trivial (as is shown in Snow’s account) in the myth of globalization; some appear to be deeply embedded in the local soil despite its global outreach; and some traverse both global and local forms of awareness.
Snow’s Shanghai is gone and will never return in a temporal sense, but the experience of Shanghai as a city that is as divided and multilayered as it was in Snow’s eyes has always been valid, albeit in a different sense: what overlaps and intermingles now are the imaginary layers of space that overlap and intermingle in the form of a palimpsest that blurs the identities of space in spaces of identity.
Local Cultural Spaces: What is their local-ness?
In contrast to a constant academic interest in the analysis of political and economic spaces in Shanghai, predominantly Pudong, very limited attention has been paid to the local cultural spaces in this city. What is somehow underexposed academically is the role these spaces have played in the making of an emerging identity of Chinese urban consciousness and a local culture of consumption and, from another perspective, how local people have influenced the making of these spaces. It is through the making and remaking of local cultural spaces that Shanghai has involved itself deeply in the re-visioning of local value systems vis-à-vis those of the global. Moreover, the complexity of the production of Shanghai’s cultural spaces does not only lie in whether those spaces exist in the previously unequivocal centre of Chinese urban culture but also in the ways local spaces are to be re-cognized and reintegrated into the present.
Being a former intellectual gathering place in the Republican years (1912-1949), Duolun Road has accommodated some of the best-known masters of Chinese modern literature, entrepreneurs and politicians of that time. Renovated in 1998 from a street market into a picturesque pedestrian street, the 550-meter long road is proudly displayed as a place where the golden time of Shanghai, namely the 1920s and 1930s, is epitomized in a dense atmosphere of “culture,” as its new name “Duolun Road Cultural Celebrities Street” tries to suggest. More pertinent to its value as cultural heritage is the astonishing range of architectural varieties: houses in Islamic style, neoclassical French style, Portuguese style, or the mixed style of “Hongde Tang,” a local Christian Church with a Chinese pavilion structure can all be found along this street. Newly opened museums, art galleries and quite a few antique shops selling Mao badges or other souvenirs (mostly related to the Revolutionary Era) attempt to keep the street an up-to-date, market-conscious tourist attraction. In the Old Film Café (Figure 1), where films from 1930s’ Shanghai are screened, nobody can escape the deliberately nostalgic air evoked by old posters as well as a Charlie Chaplin statue on the café’s terrace (Figure 2).
Yet there is a rupture between historical value, market value, and the everyday dynamics of the surrounding neighborhood. Being too much concerned with exhibiting every inch of cultural relics possible, Duolun Road loses in some way its charm by musealizing itself instead of enlivening its history as a part of its ongoing life. Huge investment in and gentrification of a once glamorous cultural space have hardly ensured its path to both commercial and reputational success. A perceptible economic depression has not left Duolun Road since its reopening. Somehow, by failing to retrieve its former cultural capital, Duolun Road has been reduced to an unsuccessful simulacrum of an old Shanghai that is simply no longer to be found.
Situated in a relatively marginal area in the former Japanese Concession, Duolun Road simply can’t write as successful a story as the renovated streets in the former French Concession, which quickly returned to being a magnetic centre of intellectual life and bourgeois tastes in the 1990s. Just slightly outside the central business district, in the prestigious Huaihai Road Middle (former Avenue Joffre in the early 1900s), Shaoxing Road (Figure 3) is undoubtedly a most low-key yet most significant cultural landmark in Shanghai without the need to proclaim itself, as Duolun Road does, as a “cultural celebrities street.” Anyone who has only known the hustle and bustle of Shanghai crowdedness would be shocked by the incredible tranquility and low density of this street. Home to the Shanghai News and Press Bureau, the Shanghai Kunqu Opera Troupe (Figure 4), two major presses in Shanghai (Shanghai People’s Press and Shanghai Literature & Art Press), three cafés, two restaurants featuring local cuisine, one modern art gallery, a tea house, two of the most well-preserved Shikumen[2] housing blocks, numerous bookstores (with generous discounts – they are directly affiliated with the adjacent presses), a park and a small leather product shop, Shaoxing Road owes its appeal to its location, locality, and localness. Contrary to the case of Duolun Road, older layers of history are hardly visually perceivable here, but still point to a crucial source of its aura: No. 7 was once the site of the Chinese Study Society, an important modern Chinese academic organization founded in 1916 in Tokyo; a former mayor of Shanghai in the Republican regime lived in No. 74; No. 27 and No. 54 were owned by Du Yusheng (1887-1951), the legendary leader of most powerful secret “Green Gang” society in Shanghai during the 1920s and 1930s. Last but not least, the French oriental plane trees, symbols of old Shanghai streets, contribute to Shaoxing Road’s authentic aura of Shanghai-ness. With their canopies stretching along both sides of the street, the presence of the trees is an indispensible element of defining the Shanghai local urban scene.
In the same house where Du and his fourth concubine lived, Deke Erh, the famous Chinese photographer, opened his “Old Shanghai Hand Reading Room” (Figure 5) around ten years ago (http://www.han-yuan.com/shudian/hanyuankongjian/shudianpic/pic-index.htm). Catering to both the aesthetic and consumption needs of local and global customers, the Old Shanghai Hand Reading Room is divided into two sections with two decorative styles: European classical and Chinese traditional. The books on the shelves are selected strictly according to high cultural tastes, with an especially wide choice of books and magazines about Shanghai traffic, history, folklore and local culture. Having rightly latched onto the late 1990s fad for old Shanghai nostalgia among Shanghai locals in their thirties with bourgeois tastes, this bookshop-café-teahouse has made a name for itself in local intellectual circles as an ideal meeting-place.
Even if the old Shanghai nostalgia spell has gradually faded, new spaces also can be found on Shaoxing Road for the ever-growing needs of urban cultural life. Le Petite Café is run by a Japanese fashion designer from Tokyo. Like a private living room, the café displays books of the owner’s private preferences in Chinese, Japanese and French as well as handmade photo albums. Concealed behind an unremarkable façade in a second-floor room, this café is nevertheless very much beloved by local white-collar workers. (Recently it moved to Fuxing Road Middle, just two blocks away from Shaoxing Road.) Two other cafés also have distinctive features: the Vienna Café, run by an Austrian, is said to serve the most authentic Austrian cuisine ever found in Shanghai, while the Adbay Café, which contains a small-scale library with books on advertising and design, was created by an advertising professional who has been working in Shanghai for more than ten years.
In the proximity of Shaoxing Road, the combination of both real and virtual cultural spaces has earned the Dukou Book Store (Dukou means ferry station) recognition as one of Shanghai’s extremely fashionable cultural landmarks (Figure 6). Owned by an architectural designer from northern China, the bookstore + café + reading room concept resembles that of the Old Shanghai Hand Reading Room, but with no trace of nostalgia or extravagant decor. With white as the basic color tone of the small shop, the simplistic interior design corresponds well with its positioning for a young market. This is not only a place where one can drop by spontaneously for the silent enjoyment of reading or a cup of coffee; monthly reading gatherings, a library on the move (currently, books by Haruki Murakami), and discussions on books recommended and selected by clients are held there on a regular basis. The organization of regular and special events is accomplished via a virtual space that cannot be ignored in today’s Chinese urban cultural scene: http://www.douban.com. An internet community in which mostly students, young scholars and intellectuals share their interests and opinions by reviewing and recommending books, music, films and travel destinations, by forming hobby groups, by publishing blogs, and by initiating real events, douban, together with indie-bookshops like Dukou, carve out new identity spaces for an urban generation: middle-class, culturally aware, and trendy.
By mentioning just a few well-known examples, it is my intention here to show how it is possible for localness to be defined and redefined outside immediate global aspiration. The localness produced by Duolun Road was impoverished by its own imaginary of locality. Neither growing necessarily out of the authenticity of localness nor being entangled in the depth of time, the cultural spaces in the former French Concession have, by comparison, redefined localness through non-localness: despite their specific characteristics, one thing all the above-mentioned cafes and bookshops have in common is that none of the owners is a local Shanghainese. Being sojourners or new immigrants, they all successfully found their niche in Shanghai local spaces by accommodating the local imaginary of the old local milieu and remaking it into its new life. Cultural spaces in Shanghai have been reborn not only in the sense that old traditions have returned but also in the sense that the formation of local objects has again, despite its still very local surface, gone beyond narrow localness to be based upon hybridity and cosmopolitanism.
Local
Creative spaces … without the Local
The development of the creative industries in Shanghai is undoubtedly the hottest urban fashion in recent years. The institutionalization of promising creative industries has been a vital part of the official plan for Shanghai’s urban development. In 2004, the creative industries were listed in “The Outline for the Cultural Development Planning for Shanghai 2004-2010” in the general planning of Shanghai’s Municipal Government, which signals the official determination and effort in advocating the development of creative industries in Shanghai.
Of all the zealous endeavors in developing the creative industries, the rehabilitation of abandoned old factories and bankrupt work units into a new SoHo with loft areas for artistic creation and trade has been the most influential and most successful. Given the name 798 Factory has made for itself in Beijing, Shanghai doesn’t want to lag behind in the exhilarating new Chinese art market and art scene. As if repeating the old path of New York City in its urbanization in the 1960s and 1970s, when secondary industry or an industrial manufacturing landscape no longer represented the pride and power of a city and the nation, Shanghai, as the birthplace of Chinese modern industry, has also been experiencing a change in cityscape caused by the change in its capital flow-scape. Moreover, Chinese factories have undergone a more drastic shift in economic reform; not only was industry left behind as an inescapable stage in the history of the development of social civilization, but the fundamental change in the ownership of vast factory buildings was sudden and overwhelming. The shift towards the right to individually own urban space, a right relinquished by the traditional industries, altered the fabric of very basic social structures. Factories-turned-into-studios are no longer the publicly shared space of a centralized community. The state-owned work unit, where one was supposed to work and spend one’s lifetime, is gone; instead, on the same land, a place was reborn that is dedicated to and intended for commercial consumption, and thus became an object of consumption itself.
Early in 1998, Taiwanese designer Deng Kunyan landed in a desolate warehouse on the banks of Suzhou River, and energetically began to set up a fashionable art studio with global appeal. In a very short time, he and other avant-garde artists who wanted to work in Shanghai have successfully revived the previously bleak wasteland on the North Bund, actually an important harbor front and center of industry in Shanghai, and turned it once again into a huge creative center, now mainly known as ddm Warehouse, where numerous artists have gathered, opened studios, and gone into business. In the wake of its success, other creative centers are booming in Shanghai, mobilizing a similar pattern of opening art studios and galleries in old factory premises.
This vogue of gentrifying obsolete industrial wastelands in Shanghai has been warmly embraced by the local government as an innovative and efficient way of reforming urban space without doing much damage to the original urban texture. It can be seen as a newly emerging form of nostalgia for the rapidly disappearing days of the planned economy – a mechanism of resistance against the speed of change. The Shanghai Sculpture Space (Shanghai Diao Su Zhong Xin) was remodeled on the site of the former Shanghai No. 10 Steel Works; Bridge 8 (Figure 7) was established in the 1950s and 1960s as the Shanghai Autobrake Factory; before 1998, Tian Zi Fang (Figure 8, 9), now declaring itself the Shanghai SoHo, was where the Shikumen street market and the Lilong Factory Shanghai Paper Cup Factory were situated; Weihai Road 696 was an opium house before it was transformed into the Shanghai Automotive Components Factory.
On the other hand, revitalization also seems to be an effort to preserve the memory of Shanghai as the cradle of modern Chinese national capitalism and industry. Among all the creative bases, Mo Gan Shan Road, also known as M50 (Figure 10, 11), is one of the earliest and most famous. The rows of derelict warehouses and factories were once the main property of China’s richest capitalists, the Rongs.[3] At its peak in the 1930s, this was the biggest and most modern flour factory in the Far East. Fu Xin was also developed quickly in the early twentieth century by the Rong Brothers and turned into a huge area of industrial infrastructure.
The pace of Shanghai’s modern capitalism and modernization, once synchronized with the world, came to a halt for nearly thirty years. Now the fast growth of the creative industries in Shanghai is emerging as a new page of possibility in the modernization of the Chinese city.
The commitment of Chinese social elites in the creative industries to restoring factory premises which seemingly do not match their social status is a typical phenomenon of post-socialist China, where the interchanges between central and marginal, past and present, historical and fashionable, orthodox and alternative, authentic and fake are brisk, unexpected, and almost always successful -- both at home and abroad. “The new aesthetic attraction of historical architectures has made their eccentricity and alternativeness orthodox,” argue Liu, Meng and Wang. “When old factory buildings become a proper form of urban architecture, the elites have gained greater affirmation of their power, moving their position from the peripheral to the core.”[4]
The “old factory” fad seems evidence of more nostalgic characteristics in restoring the materiality of historical residues, either meant to consume history or to absorb the shock of the suddenly altered ideologies and everyday lifestyles by creating even more shock and idiosyncrasy. Renewing Chinese cities in collage form (Jia and Huang 2006) and preserving the memories of the city by restoring industrial wasteland (Zhang and Zhang 2005) are assessed in many professional magazines and academic articles in the fields of Chinese urban development or architectural design as positive and updated approaches to a form of urban planning that is widely promoted.[5] With Colin Rowe's Collage City as their major inspiration, many Chinese architects and scholars are very passionate about the new methods of understanding the city in its complexity and dynamic adaptability.[6]
Nevertheless, the physical reparation of historical sites has done very little to compensate the local people who had occupied and subsequently lost those spaces for their psychological loss and the loss of their memories. These losses have not only been inflicted because the function of those spaces has completely changed, but also because they have been transformed in ways that make it impossible for them to invoke the memory of industrial civilization. Upon entering the old factory gate of M120, the former Shanghai Flour Mill, one sees an uncanny wasteland rampant with wild grass, ruins of factory buildings with a hundred years of history, motley socialist slogans on the wall, and, suddenly, a solitary old Baroque-style warehouse moderately gentrified with avant-garde works of art (Figure 12, 13). The contradictory layers of history impress in the really “cool” manner of postmodern pastiche, yet there do not seem to be any traces of respect paid to the memories of its lively past, traces which still haunt the place. The continuity of memory is understood simply in the continuity of the form of space, not the events of space. In the name of preserving the city’s memory, this total change of function actually eradicates the meaning of representing the memory of both pre-socialist urban industrial development and the socialist factory premises in Shanghai. Nor can these chic areas be effectively integrated into the everyday life of the majority of the city’s residents; rather, they have become a public space with very limited public participation in artistic practice, which is still limited to a small professional circle of inaccessible high culture. The national and municipal ways of imagining a modern Chinese city leave most of its city dwellers behind -- even the artists, who can no longer afford to live in the midst of this luxurious “nostalgia.” Old factory studios turn into another arena for real estate agents and commercial art-market merchants. Again, it is form rather than content that defines the architectural modernity of cities for national and local levels of government.
In its rush to catch up with other global cities and modernize the Chinese city through a flourish of creative industry, Shanghai has embraced some of the most up-to-date ideals and patterns of urban development in the world, which also in reverse has had a great impact on the way the city itself, its past and its future, are constituted and imagined. The challenge to change the criteria of “ugly” and “beautiful” in renewing industrial ruins is not only met by an effort to break down the established system of aesthetic values but also by questioning, and de facto changing, social values. However, in this process the memories of the spaces and places interfere by projecting themselves in a trial and error manner onto the mappings of both desires and uncertainties in the pursuit of the modern. The erasure of both pre-revolutionary and work-unit memory is blatantly obvious: historical sites are reduced to add-ons of buildings, rendering them empty signs with empty signifieds. The gap between idealizing a space for the preservation of memory and the actual blind spots still leaves the façade much prettier than what is hidden behind.
Spaces of Consumption: bridging the ruptures of Time and Space
Spaces of consumption can by no means be omitted in the mapping of Shanghai cultural space: they encourage both cultural imagination and economic profits. There can be no doubt that Shanghai Xintiandi, which declares itself Shanghai’s living room, should be counted as the foremost example of this kind. Saved by Hong Kong real-estate developer Vincent H.S. Lo from being razed, this new urban tourist attraction has been making the best use of the city’s historical, architectural and cultural legacy: Shikumen (Figure 14, 15). Again located in the heart of the former French Concession, which is only one block south of Huaihai Road Middle, this chic area has a site area of 30,000 square meters and a total floor area of 60,000 square meters. Xintiandi features a multitude of retail, entertainment, cultural, recreational, commercial and residential facilities in restored “Shikumen” houses catering to both locals and tourists. Concisely articulated as a place where “yesterday-meets-tomorrow,” the prize-winning project has generated controversy because of its approach to commercializing historical urban spaces. This popular fashion and tourist attraction has often been criticized by critics at home and abroad as fake, a mere simulacrum of Shanghai culture, and fundamentally a display window of globalization. Taiwanese cultural scholar Michelle Huang comments that: “Xintiandi Plaza is evidence of the capitalization of cultural heritage in Shanghai’s globalization, namely a representation of the glocalization effect.”[7] Huang asserts in “The Production of Urban Spaces: Shanghai as a Global City in the Making” that the preservation of historical and cultural values in this unique form of Shanghai folk values is as important as, if not more important than, creating opportunities in globalizing Shanghai.[8] Huang attributes the fact that the destruction of Shikumen hadn’t encountered much resistance from the local populace to the strong national power in the course of globalization.[9]
To make globalization responsible for the kitsch history effect of Xintiandi is understandable, yet not totally reasonable, if one seriously considers the historical changes in the local living situations. The apartment buildings and Shikumen houses, which were erected en masse during the rapid urbanization of Shanghai in the 1930s, created new social boundaries and privatized spaces in the city (Figure 16, 17). However, the living conditions of Shanghai’s local citizens were also seriously affected by nearly fifty years of de-urbanization, which caused both discontinuity and conflict between urban form and function. The negative influence on daily life was obvious especially in the case of the Shikumen houses, most of which were seriously lacking in regular renovation and repairs. Overpopulation and inhumane unsanitary hygienic conditions were a serious social problem in Shanghai Shikumen until less than ten years ago. Taking into account the actual living conditions and the simple wish of local people to live in larger spaces and a cleaner environment, in my opinion their lack of resistance to change can be attributed to less sophisticated forces than the joint forces of the global and the national. Moreover, the economic system in China, in which, for example, most of the old public housing, such as Shikumen, is not privately owned, is more complicated than a simple attribution of lack of resistance to the weakness of the local and the hegemony of national control makes allowance for. In other words: if the living standard and surroundings of Shikumen houses had been satisfactory and people had actually owned their own premises, the question of whether or for whom the houses were to be torn down would not have arisen in the first place.
Therefore I read the success of Xintiandi, a very locally globalized restaurant and bar space, as nostalgia realized by commercial musealization. If this is true for tourists and non-locals, I would also interpret Xintiandi’s popularity among locals as a form of resistance evoked by the whitewashing of Shanghai’s urbanity, the motivation behind which was the huge commercial opportunity that didn’t escape Vincent Lo, who realized that to sell Xintiandi was to sell “the idea of Shanghai back to its own residents.”[10] The viability of this idea rests on the locals’ repressed love of Shikumen as a basic form of urban dwelling and community – at least Xintiandi restores an ideal and comfortable form of Shikumen, albeit in an over-gentrified way. It was the anti-urban discourse in China that had destroyed Shikumen – prior to globalization. In this case local desires appear to be in unison with the global in terms of coveted results; however, the two parties have very different starting points.
While the desire for consumption can be projected onto the temporal effect of refurbished urban space, time past is not necessarily the only magical spell underpinning the charisma of old architecture for locals. Today’s Shanghai largely epitomizes infinite moments of now-time, in which past and future neither need to be nor are meant to be traced. Even the Bund (Waitan), which may have been Shanghai’s most famous landmark for a long time, now has a tendency to be a space of now-time. The grand promenade of western-style buildings along the Huangpu River is widely known as “an exhibition of multinational architecture.” For more than thirty years it used to be famous for being the original financial hub of the Far East. Now, the banks, foreign consulates and multi-purpose business complexes are coming back. Bund 18 (Figure 18), formerly known as the Macquarie Bank Tower – the headquarters of the Chartered Bank of Australia, India and China, built in 1923 and designed by Palmer & Turner –, was one of the highest-profile commercial buildings on the glamorous Bund. Renovated in early 2003 and reopened in November 2004, this old Renaissance-style building has been gentrified into a modern commercial building with world-class, brand name shops, chic bars, expensive restaurants and art centers (Figure 19, 20). A UNESCO Award was given to Bund 18 for its successful renovation in 2005, for its well-balanced combination of historical value and present-day functionality. “Renovation”, as proposed here by Italian architects richly experienced in renovating Venice, is supposedly not meant to remake the past but rather to provide it with a new life of its own. In this most nostalgic example of architecture we find yet another expression of nostalgia: not as a form of yearning for the return of (or to) the past, but rather as a tool for making history (again).
One of the cultural activities held in Bund 18 in 2008 was an exhibition called “SHANGHYPE,” subtitled “A Portrait of the City from Dawn to Dusk.” The introductory text for the art exhibition expresses what today’s Shanghai appears to be for artists from home and abroad:
Shanghai is hype. We talk about it without seeing the multifaceted reality of this city. We do not respect the contradictions, the different angles and the shadowed zones. We cannot see the quotidian difficulties and the fake amiability of the post-hyper-commercialization… a democratic archive location with no hope for the future, is very fitting in the case of Shanghai and China today, with specific reference to Shanghai: this idea of the continuous move towards something else, with no past and possibly no idea of the future either – this impertinent, optimistic and flattering present that leaves no time other than for a cursory glance at reality. A glance like so many others: totally useless.[11]
In Bund 18 one senses a bit of the future of the memory of Shanghai’s urban space, a part that is not altogether fetishistic about the past. This imagination of the past is no longer nostalgic or differentiable from a parallel framework of imagining the present. It is a kind of ad hoc nostalgia, in that only spatial but not temporal experience is involved. Yet it is a game not only of global but also of local passion. Optimally suited for the most stylish socializing occasions such as cocktail parties, fashion launch shows, art exhibitions and luxurious recreation, Bund 18 provides new arenas for rising local elite communities to stage themselves, to establish their new identities and to redefine their global status. Here the global and the local are married happily to the advantage of both parties. It is no longer easy – or necessary – to tell whether this is a Shanghainesed world or a globalized Shanghai.
In this sense, the rebirth of Shanghai cultural spaces is more than a matter of bridging the ruptures in time; it is also a matter of bridging the ruptures of spaces. On one hand, this remaking can be a calculated manipulation of its past in a narrative that is still boosting its cosmopolitan past in global competition while, on the other hand, the resurging enthusiasm in the recognition of the sustainable development of urban space in terms of the necessity of public space, cultural diversity and its consequent respect for history is not just about global capital flow, but about the global cultural ideal of the modern city and in turn, global modernity. Or, put in a more succinct way: a glocalized cultural modernity of Shanghai, which is above all characterized by a local imaginary, decentralized, or at least poly-centralized. Richard Sennett believes that this fragmentation of the city in its spatial form is not a recent phenomenon, nor should it be looked down upon:
In the modern era, the hope for democracy has become nearly universal throughout the world, but the nature of democracy people hope for has changed. National and even global visions of democracy are the old kind of urban democracy writ large, a unifying political force. But against those visions has been set another: decentralized democracy, which does not aim at such cohesion… in the sense of inviting participation, as it becomes more fragmented and partial in form… Decentralized democracy has a particular affinity to the modern city. Cities are very rarely coherent human settlements.[12]
Shanghai is decentralizing itself in both temporal and spatial terms although there are necessarily also those forces and powers at work that have been trying to re-centralize – just as history and memory re-centralize each other. The seemingly incoherent and confusing hybridized meanings of spaces may be motivated by the urgent need of post-socialist China (or any other place that has experienced memory crises) for consistency in its overlapping layers of both memory and history. Chinese modernity has always been imagining itself to be on the right track heading forward, and it also has been wishing it has infinite opportunities to start from zero again – this might be the most exciting chapter in the story of the production of Shanghai local spaces.
Notes
[1] Stella Dong, Shanghai: Gateway to the Celestial Empire, 1860-1949. Hong Kong: FormAsia Books, 2005, 32.
[2] Shikumen Lilong is a typical form of Shanghai urban dwelling community which was largely constructed in the early 1910s. The basic unit of lilong is Shikumen (石库门/石庫門), or literally “stone gate.” Shikumen fuses both Chinese (lower Yangtze) traditional and Anglo-American architectural styles.
[3] The Rongs have been the richest family in Asia since the early twentieth century. The Rongs’ industry consisted mainly of flour- and cotton-mills before the PRC was established. Rong Yiren, the most important national capitalist in China, was the Vice-President of the People's Republic of China from 1993 to 1998 and played a significant role in the early stage of the opening of the Chinese economy to western investment.
[4] Xiaodu Liu, Yan Meng and Hui Wang, “Fabricating History: Rehabilitation of Existing Industrial Buildings,” Time + Architecture, China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House, 48-53, 2.2006. <http://www.cnki.net> 51, all translations are mine.
[5] Xinfeng Jia and Jing Huang, “’Collage and Urban Renewal of Chinese Cities,’” Urban Design, China Academic Journal Electronic Publishing House, 12-14. 01. 2006, http://www.cnki.net.
[6] Colin Rowe's Collage City, published in 1978 by MIT Press. This book covers several important topics in modern city planning: architectural autonomy, criticism on modern architecture, collage as an urban planning skill and method of thought.
[7] See Michelle Tsung-yi Huang, “The Production of Urban Spaces: Shanghai as a Global City in the Making,” Taiwan: A Radical Quarterly in Social Studies 53 (March 2004): 61-83.
[8] Ibid, 61-83.
[9] Ibid, 76.
[10] Jeffrey W. Cody, “Making History (pay) in Shanghai: Architectural Dialogues About Space, Place, and Face,” Shanghai: Architecture & Urbanism for Modern China, Eds. Seng Kuan and Peter G. Rowe. Munich, New York: Prestel, 2004, 139.
[11] See http://www.bund18.com/english/news/news1.asp?page=3&id=277.
[12] Richard Sennett, The Spaces of Democracy, University of Michigan, College of Architecture + Urban Planning, 1998, 40-1.