wyliepoon
Senior Member
Star article about "urban renewal" in Shanghai. It certainly reveals a darker side of the city that most foreign coverage of Shanghai seem to ignore.
Link to article
An urban fabric reduced to tatters
May 27, 2007 04:30 AM
They loom, desolately incandescent, over the city that was. Glowing spikes claw at the sky, reaching ever upward, wilfully ignorant of what lies beneath.
This is modern Shanghai, the most hyperbolic evidence of China's frenzied growth in a nation rife with such extremes. Radiant towers, monuments to the new – so important here – root themselves deeply in the city's urban fabric, which, simply by their prodigious sprouting, they have reduced to tatters.
Greg Girard eschews their glow for the shadows below. Since 2001, Girard, a Canadian photographer, has been documenting the rush to modernity in a city pursuing it at all costs.
Phantom Shanghai, his just-released book, reveals his priority, as he casts his gaze downward: entire neighbourhoods razed, hundreds of thousands of residents displaced, centuries erased, the slate wiped clean in moments.
In his pictures, a row of abandoned two-storey homes, remnants of another era, squat in a rubble field as a science-fiction skyline – "arc-lit mesas," as William Gibson has described them – spike up behind them.
A drab, narrow street, one of a warren-like network in the city's Bund district, is cast in the chilly fuchsia glow of the 468-metre-tall Oriental Pearl TV tower, a spindly finger fitted with bulbous pink knuckles near the base and top.
A still-lived-in old brick house , liberated from its once-attached neighbours, now adrift in a sea of kempt rubble, is surrounded by condo towers as their owners contemplate their new surroundings from beaten armchairs: holdouts, refusing to go.
Girard's images have a beguiling – and deceptive – stillness. They can seem mannered, with a put-on veneer of intentional artifice. Surreally, though – and owing, no doubt, to the extreme circumstances of the subject matter – the pictures are straight documentary, neither staged nor retouched.
Long exposures, most of them taken at dusk, capture the dying city – the city below – and its still-beating heart: washes of warm light spilling from doorways; bright rainbows of plastic drying on the concrete ground; bright fuchsia branches reaching up over a dreary wall.
But it is an unsettling stillness. The sense is of the condemned awaiting the gallows.
Shanghai boasts more than 4,000 skyscrapers – double the number in New York, and close to 10 million square feet of commercial space. It's not just the volume that's heart-stopping, but the pace. In 2000, there was only 400,000.
Since 1999, hundreds of thousands of people have been relocated, hundreds of acres of cityscape demolished, history and memory buried in tonne after tonne of rubble.
As with so much in the new China – industrialization, freeway-building, the explosion of car culture and mass-consumerism – its model is mid-century North America. After decades of communism, there was that much catching up to do.
But as is also true in China, the applied model is amplified hundred-fold. In the middle of the last century, most cities in North America embraced the Modernist notion of urban renewal: bulldoze old tracts of cityscape and make way for a new reality, based not on foot, but in cars, not on eclectic neighbourhoods, but master-planned cities with sectors divided by function: working, living, shopping, playing.
In the years that followed, the awakening – that urbanity, community, history, authenticity and sense of place were desirable human features – was a rude one indeed.
For a city like Shanghai, it is a curious fate. Since at least the 19th century, it has been as much a metaphor as a city, synonymous with the Eastern exotic, and the very real centre of international culture and commerce. The British owned it, briefly, and stayed; the French adopted a portion. The United States, wary of the Brits gaining an advantage in international trade, established extraterritoriality there in 1844.
Others, like thousands of Russians, Indians and many more, just went in pursuit of fortune; Shanghai, after New York and London, was for a time the third-largest commercial centre on Earth.
The collision of cultures helped build the myth of Shanghai as an idealized early dream of international cross-fertilization, a proto-cosmopolitan realm that would be a harbinger of things to come in our increasingly global culture.
Building types were a curious mix of traditional Chinese and imported European styles, as was the sometimes loose morality that pervaded the city, both in myth and reality – a proto-Sin City brimming with sophisticated vice that cartoon-version Vegas could hardly hope to match.
Girard is in Toronto this week for a reception for the book of his images. The title Phantom Shanghai is apt. Shiny new Shanghai, with its dull, blinding glow, is bound to be haunted by the city it has so efficiently destroyed. Save for a few glossy preservation projects, the city – for what makes a city, but the humanity it contains? – is destined to be the city that was.
It's almost unimaginable to refer to an entire city in the past tense. Cities are born. They grow. They change, sometimes radically. They rarely die.
Exceptions exist – Pompeii, for example, consumed by Vesuvius. Except in China, of course, where cities – not portions or pieces, entire cities – have been executed, sacrificed to the great god of progress that screams through the country, from urban to rural, mountaintop to river valley, with increasing speed and intensity.
In the Yangtze Valley, 14 entire cities now lie under 175 metres of water. Fully populated cities, most of them ancient, some of them brimming with historical significance, a built history of an ancient culture. Residents of these 14 cities were ordered to dismantle their homes, brick by brick, and start making for higher ground, where new cities – better cities, they were told – would be waiting.
In June 2003, the Three Gorges Dam was completed, and the rising water engulfed all 14, ancient urbanities drowned in the floodwaters of modern ambition.
Underwater now, they are easier to forget. Shanghai is less so. But by the end, which is coming sooner than most in the West can imagine, it will be no less engulfed. Earlier this year, 18,000 families were forcibly relocated to make way for Expo in 2010. The theme, according to its website, is "Better City, Better Life."
Girard includes at least one picture of that "Better Life," seen here below at left: A man washing himself at a public sink next to a man-made pond. Just across, a small cluster of generic suburban houses sit anchored in a tidy expanse of bright green lawn.
It is oddly Calgarian-seeming or Atlantan. It is certainly not Shanghainese, certainly not of myth, reputation, or history. But none of these things seem to matter anymore.
Girard's pictures are indeed of ghosts – homes, neighbourhoods, and a city that was, cast adrift in memory, but no longer with any basis in mortar, prone to occasional hauntings, but soon, never more to be seen.
Link to article
An urban fabric reduced to tatters
May 27, 2007 04:30 AM
They loom, desolately incandescent, over the city that was. Glowing spikes claw at the sky, reaching ever upward, wilfully ignorant of what lies beneath.
This is modern Shanghai, the most hyperbolic evidence of China's frenzied growth in a nation rife with such extremes. Radiant towers, monuments to the new – so important here – root themselves deeply in the city's urban fabric, which, simply by their prodigious sprouting, they have reduced to tatters.
Greg Girard eschews their glow for the shadows below. Since 2001, Girard, a Canadian photographer, has been documenting the rush to modernity in a city pursuing it at all costs.
Phantom Shanghai, his just-released book, reveals his priority, as he casts his gaze downward: entire neighbourhoods razed, hundreds of thousands of residents displaced, centuries erased, the slate wiped clean in moments.
In his pictures, a row of abandoned two-storey homes, remnants of another era, squat in a rubble field as a science-fiction skyline – "arc-lit mesas," as William Gibson has described them – spike up behind them.
A drab, narrow street, one of a warren-like network in the city's Bund district, is cast in the chilly fuchsia glow of the 468-metre-tall Oriental Pearl TV tower, a spindly finger fitted with bulbous pink knuckles near the base and top.
A still-lived-in old brick house , liberated from its once-attached neighbours, now adrift in a sea of kempt rubble, is surrounded by condo towers as their owners contemplate their new surroundings from beaten armchairs: holdouts, refusing to go.
Girard's images have a beguiling – and deceptive – stillness. They can seem mannered, with a put-on veneer of intentional artifice. Surreally, though – and owing, no doubt, to the extreme circumstances of the subject matter – the pictures are straight documentary, neither staged nor retouched.
Long exposures, most of them taken at dusk, capture the dying city – the city below – and its still-beating heart: washes of warm light spilling from doorways; bright rainbows of plastic drying on the concrete ground; bright fuchsia branches reaching up over a dreary wall.
But it is an unsettling stillness. The sense is of the condemned awaiting the gallows.
Shanghai boasts more than 4,000 skyscrapers – double the number in New York, and close to 10 million square feet of commercial space. It's not just the volume that's heart-stopping, but the pace. In 2000, there was only 400,000.
Since 1999, hundreds of thousands of people have been relocated, hundreds of acres of cityscape demolished, history and memory buried in tonne after tonne of rubble.
As with so much in the new China – industrialization, freeway-building, the explosion of car culture and mass-consumerism – its model is mid-century North America. After decades of communism, there was that much catching up to do.
But as is also true in China, the applied model is amplified hundred-fold. In the middle of the last century, most cities in North America embraced the Modernist notion of urban renewal: bulldoze old tracts of cityscape and make way for a new reality, based not on foot, but in cars, not on eclectic neighbourhoods, but master-planned cities with sectors divided by function: working, living, shopping, playing.
In the years that followed, the awakening – that urbanity, community, history, authenticity and sense of place were desirable human features – was a rude one indeed.
For a city like Shanghai, it is a curious fate. Since at least the 19th century, it has been as much a metaphor as a city, synonymous with the Eastern exotic, and the very real centre of international culture and commerce. The British owned it, briefly, and stayed; the French adopted a portion. The United States, wary of the Brits gaining an advantage in international trade, established extraterritoriality there in 1844.
Others, like thousands of Russians, Indians and many more, just went in pursuit of fortune; Shanghai, after New York and London, was for a time the third-largest commercial centre on Earth.
The collision of cultures helped build the myth of Shanghai as an idealized early dream of international cross-fertilization, a proto-cosmopolitan realm that would be a harbinger of things to come in our increasingly global culture.
Building types were a curious mix of traditional Chinese and imported European styles, as was the sometimes loose morality that pervaded the city, both in myth and reality – a proto-Sin City brimming with sophisticated vice that cartoon-version Vegas could hardly hope to match.
Girard is in Toronto this week for a reception for the book of his images. The title Phantom Shanghai is apt. Shiny new Shanghai, with its dull, blinding glow, is bound to be haunted by the city it has so efficiently destroyed. Save for a few glossy preservation projects, the city – for what makes a city, but the humanity it contains? – is destined to be the city that was.
It's almost unimaginable to refer to an entire city in the past tense. Cities are born. They grow. They change, sometimes radically. They rarely die.
Exceptions exist – Pompeii, for example, consumed by Vesuvius. Except in China, of course, where cities – not portions or pieces, entire cities – have been executed, sacrificed to the great god of progress that screams through the country, from urban to rural, mountaintop to river valley, with increasing speed and intensity.
In the Yangtze Valley, 14 entire cities now lie under 175 metres of water. Fully populated cities, most of them ancient, some of them brimming with historical significance, a built history of an ancient culture. Residents of these 14 cities were ordered to dismantle their homes, brick by brick, and start making for higher ground, where new cities – better cities, they were told – would be waiting.
In June 2003, the Three Gorges Dam was completed, and the rising water engulfed all 14, ancient urbanities drowned in the floodwaters of modern ambition.
Underwater now, they are easier to forget. Shanghai is less so. But by the end, which is coming sooner than most in the West can imagine, it will be no less engulfed. Earlier this year, 18,000 families were forcibly relocated to make way for Expo in 2010. The theme, according to its website, is "Better City, Better Life."
Girard includes at least one picture of that "Better Life," seen here below at left: A man washing himself at a public sink next to a man-made pond. Just across, a small cluster of generic suburban houses sit anchored in a tidy expanse of bright green lawn.
It is oddly Calgarian-seeming or Atlantan. It is certainly not Shanghainese, certainly not of myth, reputation, or history. But none of these things seem to matter anymore.
Girard's pictures are indeed of ghosts – homes, neighbourhoods, and a city that was, cast adrift in memory, but no longer with any basis in mortar, prone to occasional hauntings, but soon, never more to be seen.
