Future Tense (and tension)

Prior to my departure to China, my student gave me a brief talk about her impressions of growing up in a small city outside Beijing. "As a child I grew up in a city constantly under construction. When I came to the United States, I was shocked when I arrived to find a place without cranes--cities that seemed already fully developed..."

Growing up in the suburbs of post-Industrial Syracuse, this sentiment seemed a bit foreign to me. While there was the occasional refurbished strip mall, finished basement, or glamorous kitchen renovation (not to mention the colossal building of the Carousel Mall--I seem to have blocked this anti-climactic moment from my mind's subconscious history), the footprint and skyline remained a static 3-storey story of routine and reuse. Even when I ventured out of the suburban limits, most often to visit family in Brooklyn, Manhattan, or Vermont, I was confronted with pre-war and pastoral, never the sensation of a skyscape framed by cranes and a streetscape of punctured pavement and snaking pedestrian detours.

This past weekend I made my way to Pudong for one of many trips to document Lujiazui's planning, development, and realization. While there was more than enough material to satisfy my interests and speculations, I was also thrown off-guard by the sheer amount of on-going construction and development. With the Jinmao, Oriental Pearl, and other high-rises elegantly kissing the pregnant pink sky (it poured for the entire duration of my Saturday trip), ground level was not a clean silhouette of form and logic, but rather a chaotic maze of construction sites with deep dirt and stone channels beginning to form future foundations, roadways, and infrastructure.





In my effort to understand the planning of Lujiazui, Shanghai's designated finance and economic trade zone, China's superficial agenda seemed clear. In simplified terms: 1) To create an urban financial center that physically (and more importantly, economically) manifested itself as a major world market competitor and presence. 2) To use architecture and planning as a means of invoking Shanghai's "future."

With the rise of the Oriental Pearl's purple-and-burgundy bulbous form, complimented by an on-going arm's race of skyscrapers competing to be the most forward-thinking (whether it be in sustainable, structural, or sometimes, aesthetic terms, they're all there...), Lujiazui's iconic skyline continues to evolve, while already boasting enough big-buildings to serve as Shanghai's promotional baby. Gracing the prolific PR posters that plaster China's walls and billboards, or made into a fake-gold, rotating model at the Exhibition and Urban Planning Center, each 100+ floor skyscraper touches the sky with a new urgency for attention, publicity, and celebrity status.



With that said, I did not feel star-struck by my confounding navigational adventure through Lujiazui. Instead, I was just plain distressed. The planning that has gone into facilitating the development of "the other side" of the Huangpu River has been (and clearly continues to be) motivated by a desire for the immediate "wow" factor, rather than the intricate, organic evolution of a rich urbanity that stems from a multi-layered approach to street-level business and life, varied living and leisure conditions, not to mention the facilitation of sustainable transportation-- Shanghai's huge biking culture is completely erased from Pudong's main road, Century Avenue, a dangerous 4-lane boulevard that falls flat on its promise of being "just like Paris."

As I walked down down Century Avenue, almost tripping over construction workers in holes near the tip of Lujiazui, trying to save my camera from the monsoon that was upon us, I tried to reconcile my experience with how I might feel about Lujiazui in ten years. When the cranes are gone, the Western-type brick strip malls are built (Cold Stone Creamery is just a hop away from the Pearl Tower), and the small flower-beds between highway lanes grow to fruition, would Lujiazui become a place I would want to spend a Saturday?

Unless something is done quickly to counter gigantism and explicit commercialism, Lujiazui's future seems bleak for those seeking culture rather than science fiction, the human scale vs the scale of an already well-toned city being pumped up on curtain-wall inducing steroids.