everyday life in shanghai, part II

Photos: http://web.mit.edu/awol/www/beijing/june12/

Another day, another completely different facet of Shanghai. We got on the bus at 8:30am to get to the Shanghai Planning Institute right when it opened. Apparently, nobody actually works at “DUSP Headquarters East” (Dennis’ term for the place) – it’s just a monument to the wonders of Shanghai and its tomorrow. There are two 3-D models of the city in the exhibit – one on the first floor that’s really just Shanghai and the space along the river, and one on the third floor that’s the entire city. Photographs on the second floor show what the Bund looked like when it had docks and no seawall (it’s unclear why the seawall needed to be built). Given the choice, I would take the old Bund. The new Bund, with its wide promenade, lacks the energy of the old Bund.

The rest of the Planning Institute is pretty much just slick packaging of propaganda of how the city is expanding, with respect to new buildings, the environment, shipping ports, airports, etc. (Expo 2010 will be in Shanghai.) It’s all very shiny and multimedia-based: video screens, interactive exhibits, and the like. But it’s still propaganda. In the basement of the institute, there’s a reconstructed old street of Shanghai, which is actually functional with cafes and shops. Kind of a nice way to design that type of thing, although it’s not purely intellectual or academic.

We left the Planning Institute to go to the cultural museum, which is across the boulevard. The distance between the two is thus geographically small, but to get there, you have to walk all the way down the boulevard until you reach the pedestrian underpass, then cross to the other side of the street, then walk up the boulevard until you get to the museum. The underpasses are nice, but a little inconvenient. The buildings in the People's Square (where the planning institute and cultural museum are) are enormous - monumental buildings plus monumental plazas. As a result, everything is far apart. The cultural museum, happily, is very cheap for students - 5 yuan - although the girl at the desk almost didn't believe that my student ID was a student ID. The museum is all marble and gold, done very tastefully for a Chinese building (translation: constrained). I'm sure there are elevators somewhere, but what you see when you enter is a four-level criss-crossing set of marble staircases with gold-painted wrought-iron railings. The exhibits aren't really that spectacular, though - they're very traditional, boring exhibition spaces with very limited collections. Also, you can photograph everything - which really shouldn't be allowed for centuries-old pieces of furniture. Early Chinese furniture is quite beautiful, with simple curves and excellent craftsmanship.

We had only 45 minutes at the museum, after which we set out to meet the rest of the class at the Peace Hotel, which is at the end of Nanjing Road. Nanjing Road is basically a shopping strip - a really big one. It's less status-conscious than Newbury Street, and more along the lines of Atlantic City and Vegas, with all of its neon lights and ads plastered everywhere. During the day it's packed (don't people work?!) with people, huge signs for stores, and ads for Coke and Pepsi. It seems like a pedestrian mall at first glance, with pink granite square tiles paving the sidewalk from storefront to storefront. However, as you walk along the road - which has two sidewalks and a center aisle, all at the same elevation - horns honk insistently so you get out of the way of the pedestrian trolleys that take people up and down Nanjing Road.

Nanjing Road is a rather long avenue, and thus leaves you feeling overwhelmed at the end because your sense have been bombarded by colors, ads, people, and the sheer scale of the place. From the Peace Hotel, we moved on to lunch, which we had at a Chinese hotel restaurant (the Astor). It's pretty nice inside, but we had lunch at the buffet. I have to say that it was rather (quite) underwhelming - thus far I haven't experienced any food that was significantly different from Chinese restaurant food stateside. There was too much cornstarch, unappetizing-looking foor in an antiquated, gloomy banquet room. The place was pretty empty - aversion to the stained yellow chair slipcovers, perhaps.

Following lunch we embarked upon an exhausting but wonderful tour of the housing of Shanghai's French concession district. The French concession contained a mix of French and Chinese people, and really just meant that the French governed the area, rather than it being an expatriate community. The housing is all courtyard housing, which are very dense with households and which are cramped, and fast becoming decrepit. We discovered an American guy in one unit, who let us through his tiny one-room place. He was in China teaching English, and it seemed like he enjoyed seeing students who spoke his native language (one of our professors, Juan Du, later remarked that his Chinese accent was perfect). This particular housing (the old traditional hutong housing) is being demolished to make way for luxury apartments.

A quick note about highways and streets here - people are constantly cleaning the street and water street flowers and highway greenways. This sort of labor is very visible in China as opposed to the US, where the standard of living is higher and such jobs carry class stigmas. Here, it seems like people are happy to have any work, but in truth when these workers are around it feels like they're servants picking up after everyone else's mess.

Back to the French concession. We saw a succession of increasingly hybrid types of housing, where the general courtyard house was changed by different architectural materials. I was surprised by the trees, which are all French parasol trees - china doesn't seem to have native flora and fauna. When I see California, it looks totally different from Boston, but China seems like a very wealthy urban area. The most distinctive features of the traditional housing is the layout - with all kinds of enclosed alleys. People actually inhabit the alleys and interior streets, though - in China, they're community space since space is so scarce. The new housing, of which many are called "model squares" because they're exemplary housing, is more sterile and indeterminate regarding architectural style.

What the housing did show us, though, is some aspects of everyday life, which adds to the glitzy emptiness of the skyscraper district. WE saw churches and schools, and a lot of the first-floor-retail kind of development. People are out at all times of the day, regardless of age or weather. We saw parents with small children on Nanjing Road at night, which is glitzy but safe - no strip clubs, dance clubs, or anything like that, just restaurants and shopping. Actually, the only activities one can partake in are the free or cheap ones: walking, eating, and shopping.

In the late afternoon we stopped by mada s.p.a.m. (ma design associates, strategy/planning/architecture/media) to see the office. The average age is really young - around 26 - which makes me think that architecture is so new in China that it must be both really easy (more space in the market) and difficult (nobody's heard of architecture) to start a new firm. The firm seemed to be in an indeterminate area; it's located in a converted kindergarten building and is a combination of concrete, glass, and checkered bamboo panels.

We spent the evening on Nanjing Road, which is a sight to see in the nighttime. It's completely lit by neon lights and streetlights, to the point that it's bathed in surreal daylight. The evening is always a vast improvement on the morning weatherwise, though - cooler, drier, and more breezy. People clear out by 10 or 11PM, which is surprising, given that they're all out so much at every other hour of the day. The sheer numbers of people in the city are really staggering, so that you wonder how they all fit in indoor spaces at night.