Kitchen View

The view from my kitchen, Jing’an, Shanghai

Cité Bourgogne

I wasn’t entirely sure where I was. I had just left the rambling lanes of the Taikang Road arts district and was wandering aimlessly through the streets of Shanghai’s former French Concession, each one buzzing with scooters, each lined by perfectly gnarled plane trees and odd, eclectic buildings. The blocks were long but broken by lanes, most of them crowded with hanging laundry, parked bicycles and potted plants. Security guards marked the entrance to each lane, but they seemed nonetheless open to the public, and passersby ambled past me and into the lanes without so much as a glance from the guard.

That’s when I came across a lane marked by an arch with a surprising inscription: “Cité Bourgogne, 1930.” (It really shouldn’t have surprised me, given the colonial history of the surrounding area, but it did.) Two young women stood at the entrance, chatting amiably. I decided that this Burgundian enclave was worth exploring, so I passed through the arch and down a narrow alley. I found myself in a compound of sorts, a small grid of laneways lined by tidy brick rowhouses. At the centre of it was a small square, ringed by houses filled with laundry lines, mostly empty except for a few wet shirts and a worn-looking Winnie the Pooh. Two middle-aged men sat at a table near the edge of the square, eyeing me with benign curiosity.

The Cité Bourgogne, it turns out, is an example of a distinctly Shanghainese form of housing, the shikumen, which takes its name (”stone gate”) from the archways that mark the entrance to each house and laneway. (Shikumen are also known as lilong, which literally means “laneway neighbourhood.”) Shikumen first arose in the nineteenth century when, fleeing the poverty and instability wrought by the Taiping Rebellion, thousands of country-dwellers flooded colonial Shanghai. Property developers scrambled to provide them with housing, and what was built resembled a cross between the traditional Chinese courtyard house and European rowhouses or mews houses.

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Three Newsstands

Star Ferry terminal, Tsim Sha Tsui, Hong Kong

West 34th Street near 8th Avenue, New York

Sinan Road near Taikang Road, Luwan, Shanghai

Location, Location, Location

Building the new Shanghai.

Nanjing Road

Nanjing Road, from People’s Park east to the Bund, is a good place to take in the contradictions of Shanghai. Its ornate architecture and procession of grand department stores are a reminder of the city’s colonial past, when Nanjing Road was the heart of the International Settlement, jointly controlled by Britain and the United States and one of the several foreign concessions in the city. Today, the eastern part of Nanjing Road has been eschewed by many upwardly mobile Shanghainese in favour sleeker shopping districts elsewhere in the city, and it has a somewhat tacky atmosphere that is at odds with its grandiosity, especially at night. Touts and hustlers follow foreign and domestic tourists, trying to lure them into brothels and karaoke bars, while electric trolleys taking shoppers from one end of the street to the other push their way through the crowds.

Sinan Road Bicycles

Luwan in the former French Concession, Shanghai

Cold Night in Shanghai

“Give Them Bread and Circuses, and TV Ads on the Subway”

The usual assortment of passengers on the train:
cellphone fiddlers, ad-gazers and the lone reader

With typical New China audacity, even hubris, Shanghai authorities opened up more than 100km of subway tracks on a single day this past December, nearly doubling the metro system in a single stroke. This puts it well on its way of becoming the world’s largest–at least by the length of trackage–in two or three years of time.

Yet there doesn’t appear to be anything about the Shanghai Metro that marks its soon-to-be special status; nothing like the claustrophobic confusion of the Tokyo Metro, the steam-punk appeal of the NYC subway, or the hi-tech sheen of London’s Canary Wharf underground station. Superficially, what the Shanghai Metro does offer are the familiar standards: free daily newspapers, automatic vending machines, contactless smart cards, platform screen doors, annoying LCD screens, inoffensive-looking station interiors, neutral voices announcing the next stop, and respectable-looking riders mostly engaged with their cellphones.

I think I caught him red-handed

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Pillars

Gorgeous, albeit neglected, relics dot the Shanghai landscape. This one is an entrance to an old housing complex.

Shanghai Bicycles

Xujiahui After the Rain

Shanghai: Creative Destruction?

Linden trees in the old French concession

In 2010, when Shanghai hosts the World Expo, 35 percent of the city is supposed to be dedicated greenspace. The stated goal is provide 15 square meters of green space per resident, with a park or other green feature no farther away than a half-kilometer walk from anyone’s home. It is an amazing challenge for such a huge and overcrowded city. Nevertheless, Shanghai will probably succeed in meeting it, but at great cost to the fabric of this enormous metropolis.

When I picked Shanghai as the Chinese city to consider in my book Green City: People, Nature and Urban Places, I had no idea of the ambitious plan. As an example of what can be done when powerful government combines with capitalistic fervor, however, I quickly learned that Shanghai is unparalleled.

The fruit of this green effort was evident from the elevated highways when I first arrived in Shanghai on the airport bus. Steel mills and industrial plants line the edges of the nearby waterways, their red brick buildings smudged by smoke, gray and black piles of slag and other waste lining the surface roads. But the edges of several compounds are planted in bushes and trees, producing a green contrasting brightly with the dark industrial tailings.

The highway right-of-ways are also lined with green, with footpaths and benches that people use, at least in the center city, like any other park. Further out in the new towns, I later saw that district governments often make other choices, grouping the required green space together to produce big parks filled with sports facilities.

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Moving Through Shanghai

Runner south of Suzhou Creek

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Shanghai Talk