shanghai imports european cities, finds them lacking
web feature / article by Sarah Wesseler
July 7, 2010
On a gray spring day in the open-air outlet mall that serves as the central shopping district of Luodian New Town, a grumpy-looking employee and I were the only ones around to hear the Muzak piped throughout the heavily landscaped streets. The residential section a few blocks away was equally desolate, its padlocked storefronts and abandoned restaurants capped by rows of curtainless apartment windows. Up close, the buildings’ brightly colored facades and steep-pitched roofs looked grimy and dilapidated. Long cracks in the facades were poorly masked by not-quite-matching paint, while the glass in many windows seemed moldy and discolored. The only signs of life: an old man peeing behind a bush; a mother and her children riding a small merry-go-round situated in the corner of a large, empty plaza; and, like something out of a Fellini film, scattered groups of young couples in wedding clothes posing for teams of photographers.
I decided to visit Luodian, a new development on the outskirts of Shanghai, on a recent trip to China after reading about Shanghai’s One City, Nine Towns program, an ambitious (and, at least to American sensibilities, rather bizarre) effort to facilitate sustainable urban growth through the creation of international-themed satellite cities. Luodian, an ancient village slowly being absorbed into Shanghai’s sprawl, was chosen as the site of a Scandinavia-themed town. Other developments are modeled on Spain, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and North America, with architects from those countries leading the designs. (Foreign designers were also awarded the commissions for the only two towns based on traditional Chinese architecture.)
Despite the plan’s Disneyesque quality, its underlying goal—steering Shanghai safely through a massive long-term growth spurt—is extremely serious. With its population ballooning to around twenty million in recent years due to a massive influx of migrants from rural areas, Shanghai is now one of the largest and most densely packed cities in the world. The city must add new housing for around 400,000 people each year to keep up with demand. As a result, the city has been gobbling up surrounding farmland over the past two decades, encrusting its core with layer upon layer of anonymous high-rise apartment complexes.
In 2000, mayor Ju Huang, inspired by the celebrated Western-style neighborhoods built in Shanghai’s city center throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by French, British and American colonizers, decided to export this international model to the suburbs. By providing unique architectural identities for some of the new satellite communities, the government hoped to lure wealthier residents to expensive, exotic new homes, and, for the less well-off, to provide recreational centers that would serve as community anchors and tourist attractions.
It didn’t quite work out this way. “It’s a big failure,” says Harry den Hartog, urban planner and author of the forthcoming book Shanghai New Towns: Searching for Community and Identity in a Sprawling Metropolis. “They found out that this thematic architecture didn’t bring the success that they wanted.” Because many of the new developments were far from the city’s business centers and inadequately linked to public transportation, the successful businesspeople they were meant to house have largely stayed away. Shanghai’s highly inflated housing market (in which property can double in value in just one year) has also played a role—although houses in the new towns sold out quickly, the vast majority of buyers were speculators who simply let the houses sit empty while waiting to sell them off. Consequently, many of the new developments remain virtual ghost towns.
In addition, the new towns have all been plagued by severe quality control issues. Because the Chinese developers hired to build the foreign architects’ designs were unfamiliar with the forms and materials called for in the plans, and as most of the architects themselves pulled out of the project halfway through because the government’s fees didn’t cover their expenses, the construction quality is consistently poor, making the brand-new towns seem shabby and depressing. In Anting New Town, a contemporary German-style development designed by the son of infamous Nazi architect Albert Speer, I saw metal handrails completely rusted through; in Thames Town, a replica of a traditional British village, chunks of plaster were missing from shop walls in the deserted commercial district.
Due to these problems, and in the wake of bad publicity from corruption scandals involving program creator Huang, the Shanghai government cancelled the One City, Nine Towns plan in 2006, fourteen years before its scheduled completion. Although the city continues to move ahead with ambitious plans for growth, it is now following a less whimsical path.
At this point, it’s not clear what will become of towns like Luodian that were completed before the One City, Nine Towns program’s dissolution. While several towns have become popular destinations for wedding photography, there’s no way to know if they will ever become living communities. To den Hartog, the exotic flavor of the towns seems unlikely to attract a critical mass of residents anytime soon. “Just for living I think most Chinese don’t care if it looks European or Asian. For speculation reasons maybe it is interesting if it looks special, but architecture seems not so important for most Chinese (homebuyers). They just care about building quality and improved living conditions.”
shanghai imports european cities, finds them lacking
On a gray spring day in the open-air outlet mall that serves as the central shopping district of Luodian New Town, a grumpy-looking employee and I were the only ones around to hear the Muzak piped throughout the heavily landscaped streets. The residential section a few blocks away was equally desolate, its padlocked storefronts and abandoned restaurants capped by rows of curtainless apartment windows. Up close, the buildings’ brightly colored facades and steep-pitched roofs looked grimy and dilapidated. Long cracks in the facades were poorly masked by not-quite-matching paint, while the glass in many windows seemed moldy and discolored. The only signs of life: an old man peeing behind a bush; a mother and her children riding a small merry-go-round situated in the corner of a large, empty plaza; and, like something out of a Fellini film, scattered groups of young couples in wedding clothes posing for teams of photographers.
I decided to visit Luodian, a new development on the outskirts of Shanghai, on a recent trip to China after reading about Shanghai’s One City, Nine Towns program, an ambitious (and, at least to American sensibilities, rather bizarre) effort to facilitate sustainable urban growth through the creation of international-themed satellite cities. Luodian, an ancient village slowly being absorbed into Shanghai’s sprawl, was chosen as the site of a Scandinavia-themed town. Other developments are modeled on Spain, England, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, and North America, with architects from those countries leading the designs. (Foreign designers were also awarded the commissions for the only two towns based on traditional Chinese architecture.)
Despite the plan’s Disneyesque quality, its underlying goal—steering Shanghai safely through a massive long-term growth spurt—is extremely serious. With its population ballooning to around twenty million in recent years due to a massive influx of migrants from rural areas, Shanghai is now one of the largest and most densely packed cities in the world. The city must add new housing for around 400,000 people each year to keep up with demand. As a result, the city has been gobbling up surrounding farmland over the past two decades, encrusting its core with layer upon layer of anonymous high-rise apartment complexes.
In 2000, mayor Ju Huang, inspired by the celebrated Western-style neighborhoods built in Shanghai’s city center throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by French, British and American colonizers, decided to export this international model to the suburbs. By providing unique architectural identities for some of the new satellite communities, the government hoped to lure wealthier residents to expensive, exotic new homes, and, for the less well-off, to provide recreational centers that would serve as community anchors and tourist attractions.
It didn’t quite work out this way. “It’s a big failure,” says Harry den Hartog, urban planner and author of the forthcoming book Shanghai New Towns: Searching for Community and Identity in a Sprawling Metropolis. “They found out that this thematic architecture didn’t bring the success that they wanted.” Because many of the new developments were far from the city’s business centers and inadequately linked to public transportation, the successful businesspeople they were meant to house have largely stayed away. Shanghai’s highly inflated housing market (in which property can double in value in just one year) has also played a role—although houses in the new towns sold out quickly, the vast majority of buyers were speculators who simply let the houses sit empty while waiting to sell them off. Consequently, many of the new developments remain virtual ghost towns.
In addition, the new towns have all been plagued by severe quality control issues. Because the Chinese developers hired to build the foreign architects’ designs were unfamiliar with the forms and materials called for in the plans, and as most of the architects themselves pulled out of the project halfway through because the government’s fees didn’t cover their expenses, the construction quality is consistently poor, making the brand-new towns seem shabby and depressing. In Anting New Town, a contemporary German-style development designed by the son of infamous Nazi architect Albert Speer, I saw metal handrails completely rusted through; in Thames Town, a replica of a traditional British village, chunks of plaster were missing from shop walls in the deserted commercial district.
Due to these problems, and in the wake of bad publicity from corruption scandals involving program creator Huang, the Shanghai government cancelled the One City, Nine Towns plan in 2006, fourteen years before its scheduled completion. Although the city continues to move ahead with ambitious plans for growth, it is now following a less whimsical path.
At this point, it’s not clear what will become of towns like Luodian that were completed before the One City, Nine Towns program’s dissolution. While several towns have become popular destinations for wedding photography, there’s no way to know if they will ever become living communities. To den Hartog, the exotic flavor of the towns seems unlikely to attract a critical mass of residents anytime soon. “Just for living I think most Chinese don’t care if it looks European or Asian. For speculation reasons maybe it is interesting if it looks special, but architecture seems not so important for most Chinese (homebuyers). They just care about building quality and improved living conditions.”