TIME WARPS |

Finding Houston in Shanghai, Beijing, and Shenzhen

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WORDS & PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHRISTOF SPIELER

The most startling aspect of China is the feeling that everything is moving in fast forward. But not everything is moving at the same rate or direction. From the windows of
the Beijing airport express train, speeding on its way from the Norman-Foster designed
terminal of the second busiest airport in the world, I could see farmers working small
plots by hand. From their small houses they can see the five-star hotels and modern office buildings of the airport business park. The farmers, it seems, exist in 1911 and the
airport in 2011.
they connect, walled compounds that segregate rich
and poor, and a disregard for local history and culture. I can also see the same spirit and the same forces
that drove our cities growth. China has a different
culture, a different history, and a different political
system, but it can feel very familiar.

POST OAK ON THE HUANGPU

Above the Lujiazui subway station in Shanghai,
where Century Avenue shoots out from a tunnel
under the Huangpu River, streets converge onto a
massive traffic circle. Five boulevards combine into
three lanes of traffic speeding around ornamental
landscaping. A circular walkway above, 400 feet
in diameter, carries pedestrians over the chaos. All
around, buildings compete for attention. The pink
spheres of the Pearl Tower perch on a concrete tripod. The International Convention Center combines
a neoclassical faade with a pair of huge glass globes
depicting the world, China shaded in red. Nearby, an
office building is clad with tiers of ionic columns, like
a Roman temple-turned-shelving system. Next to it, a
glass cylinder perches on a pair of stone shards.
At ground level, I found the place vast and forbidding. The buildings are cut off from the sidewalks
by broad lawns and granite driveways. Traffic speeds
by on six-lane streets. The pedestriansand there
are many in a city where only the wealthy few own
carslook lost. On a map, Lujiazui Green appears
to be an inviting oasis in the midst of Shanghais
bustle; in reality, its an empty park, a decorative
foreground for the buildings around it rather than
a gathering space.
Instead the life takes place inside the buildings. At
one side of the circular walkway is the Super Brand
Mall. At 13 levels, its so tall that there are two Starbucks, one almost directly above the other. Nearly
every building in the area includes a mall of some
kind, and theyre all busy on a Monday afternoon.
This is Pudong, Shanghais new central business
district. Designated as a development zone in 1990,

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n the West, we look back at the history of

urbanization as an orderly sequence: technology advanced, demographics shifted over time,
planning ideas were tried, and those ideas gave
rise to new ideas. But nothing about China
seems so orderly. Its no stretch to say that a century
of American urbanismthe civic beautification of
the 1920s, the migration to the cities of the 1930s, the
industrial decentralization of the 1940s, the freewaydriven suburbanization of the 1950s, the urban
clearances of the 1960s, the megablock redevelopments of the 1970s, the instant skylines of the 1980s,
the historic preservation movement of the 1990s,
the green building movement of the 2000s, and the
place-making of the 2010sis playing out all at once
in China. All our mistakes and all our successes, plus
all the chaos of a century of figuring out what a city
should be, are here alongside each other with older
Chinese urbanisms.
In the past 30 years, the population of Chinese
cities has grown by 300 million; secondary cities like
Chongqing, Wuhan, and Chengdu are now bigger
than Houston, and Shanghais metropolitan area
has 3 million more people than New Yorks. These
cities are a preview of the future. Just as Chinese
planners once toured American and European cities
for inspiration, planners and architects from all over
the world are touring Chinese cities now. Just as
American developers helped create Chinas skylines,
Chinese developers are starting to invest around the
world, and the burgeoning ranks of young, talented
Chinese architects will soon be working across the
globe. Chinas cities are the cities of the future.
I spent two weeks in China last summer to see
what these cities are like on the ground. I came away
simultaneously impressed, depressed, startled, and
awed. I was also left with an odd feeling of familiarity. We can see China as a way of looking at ourselves,
a mirror reflecting our own cities back to us. In
looking at Beijing or Shanghai, we see how another
culture sees us. Often its an unsettling view. In the
extremes of Chinese city building, I can see the basic
flaws in our own cities: buildings that dont quite add
up to places, traffic projects that divide as much as

At ground level, I found

the place vast and forbidding. The buildings
are cut off from the sidewalks by broad lawns
and granite driveways.
LEFT THE PUDONG SKYLINE RISES ABOVE A MASSIVE TRAFFIC
CIRCLE SPANNED BY A CIRCULAR FOOTBRIDGE LEADING TO A
13-LEVEL MALL.

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MEGABLOCKS

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it now has half of Shanghais class A office space, including the fourth and 13th tallest buildings in the world,
with the future second tallest under construction. The urban plan was developed in conjunction with the
French agency IAURIF, and the long axis of Century Avenue echoes La Defence in Paris. To a Houstonian,
Pudong with its broad streets and showy towers feels like Post Oak, only bigger.
Business districts like this one are the signs of urban success in the new capitalist China: every city must
have one, and many have several. Shanghai, like Houston, is marked by clusters of skyscrapers all over the urban core, each with its own activity center and each enthusiastically promoted by its own district government.
Like Pudong, most of Chinas new downtowns dont really resemble downtowns at all: their broad
streets, self-contained building complexes, and manicured greenery resemble nothing more than 1980s edge
cities in the United States. Weve figured out the shortcomings of those places since then: the traffic gridlock,
the monotony, the lack of a public life. Were now revitalizing our downtowns, adding residential space to
areas that previously had only offices, and trying to make places like Uptown more pedestrian-friendly. But
then, shiny glass buildings behind broad lawns always looked better in renderings than in practice, especially
since the renderings left out the traffic. That image is what China is after: modern, sleek, and tidy. It looks
good on a website. These new Chinese CBDs are diagrams that have transferred all too literally to real life.

Ultimately, the shape of Chinese cities is being defined by the linked needs of traffic engineering and real
estate development. Beijing gained 6 million more people (the entire population of metropolitan Houston)
over the past decade. This growth requires massive real estate development, accomplished by a partnership
of government planners and private developers. The government subdivides rural land into blocks, assign-

ing each block to a developer along with a zoning

requirement for how many housing units it must
accommodate. This is the modern Chinese version
of the 1811 New York City grid: a tool for the
conversion of land into developable property on a
massive scale.
This technique has dramatic implications for
urban form. The blocks are biga quarter mile
by a quarter mile is typicaland divided by a
network of wide streets. The size of the blocks and
the lanes of traffic surrounding them create selfcontained enclaves.
The monotony of these landscapes is apparent
from elevated subway lines in Beijing, Shenzhen,
and Shanghai alike. Block after block are full of
towers, sometimes five stories tall, sometimes ten,
sometimes taller, each model repeated ten or 20 or
30 times per block in an endless vertical sprawl.
I wandered into one of these megablocks just
north of the old core of Shanghai. The Chinese
version of a planned community, it had 30 highrise
residential towers, each 30 stories tall, all behind
gates and security guards. Enough people live
there to support an entire shopping complex, including a full-sized supermarket within the gates.
A whole private riverfront, too, on the banks of the
newly cleaned up Suzhou Creek, is for residents
only. We cant imagine housing at this density in
Houston, but we are building much the same kind
of place: a city designed as a series of self-contained
gated enclaves, marketed for their private amenities and perceived safety.
These compounds can be very pleasant places.
In Beijings CBD, I found Jianwai SOHO, completed in 2005, with 7.5 million square feet of retail
and residential on 42 acres. One level is reserved
for pedestrians and retail, with access roads, parking, and loading docks placed below, while the
2,110 residential units occupy a series of matching
towers above. The strategy of separating people
and cars worksthe pathways along the buildings
are quiet and comfortable, and theres no risk of
being plowed over by a taxicab or a delivery moped. The buildings are well detailed, and the shops
face outward to enliven the public spaces, which
include landscaping, benches, and trees for shade.
Where Jianwai SOHO fails is along streets where
it meets other superblocks. The CBDBeijings

OLD DOWNTOWN, NEW DOWNTOWN

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Pudong was not the first of Chinas new downtowns. After all, the
economic boom in China did not begin in Shanghai or Beijing,
but in the south, where four coastal cities and an island province
were designated special economic zones. The most famous of
these is Shenzhen, a onetime fishing village just across the Hong
Kong border in 1980 and now a city the size of Houston. In 1985,
when Chinese economic reform was only seven years old, the
50-story International Foreign Trade Center, with its rotating restaurant, was the tallest building in China. Thomas J. Campanella
notes in The Concrete Dragon that its construction at a floor every
three days became known as Shenzhen Speed. Today, the trade
center is not even among the ten tallest buildings in Shenzhen.
But its not only the building that seems outdated; its the
whole neighborhood.
Shenzhens old downtownthe area developed in the 1980s
and 1990sis a thriving, cluttered place. Office buildings, malls,
and highrise apartments press in on each other across narrow
streets (top). The main shopping area feels almost like an old city
in Europe, with curving pedestrianized streets, retail buildings
leaning out over the sidewalk, and narrow mid-block alleys lined
with stalls selling fast food, cheap clothes, and cellphone cases.
On the corner, diners at a three-story McDonaldsthe first in
mainland Chinalook out on the crowd of shoppers below.
Shenzhen is no longer a new boomtown. Appearances matter,
and a city concerned with appearances needs an impressive downtown, so Shenzhen has built one five miles down the road from
the old one. Called the CBD, it connects the convention center,
the city hall, the concert hall, and the library along a one-mile axis
lined on both sides with office buildings showcasing every possible
architectural variation of smoked glass. On a satellite image,
the clarity of its plan contrasts with the chaotic road network
of old Shenzhen. This new center must have looked great as a
1:1000 scale model. But on the ground, its even more alienating
than Pudong.
The convention center (center), a third of a mile wide, faces the
street with a stepped plaza so long and high that a dozen escalators have been installed to speed the trip from the sidewalk to the
front door. In the renderings by Von Gerkan, Marg, and Partners,
these steps are full of stylishly dressed people; on a day with no
convention they are simply desolate.
Across the street from the convention center is the central park,
built on the roof of a partially buried shopping center, surrounded
by shiny office towers, including OMA's new stock exchange
(bottom). This park, the centerpiece of the new Shenzhen, may
be the least people-friendly park Ive ever seen. It has what you
expect from a parktrees, lawns, benches, pathsbut nothing
is quite right. The benches are uncomfortable. The paths dont
really connect anything to anything. And when they get to the real
centerpiece of the city, a highway interchange, you find yourself
separated from the city hall by 17 lanes of traffic and multiple
landscaped traffic islands with no way to cross (bottom). Actually getting to the building you see directly in front of you takes a
half-mile detour. Theres no direct connection to the shopping mall
below. Nor is there a good way to get from the office buildings to
the park. In Shenzhen, a crowded city where people love gathering
outdoors, the park is nearly vacant.
This park is not a park at all. Its a design move. Its a grand
axis that looks good on a postcard. Its a beautiful view from an
office tower. Some of this is inevitable in a place that is growing so
fast, since it is much easier to sketch a grand axis on a map than
it is to get all the details of a public space right. Some of it may
be expected in a country where the idea of central business districts is relatively new. But in fact many of the ideas behind places
like this non-park are imported, brought directly to China by
Western architects or simply inspired by US and European precedents. This new downtown could be seen as the worst of Chinese
boomtownsbut its also the worst of Western urban planning.

biggest business districtis centered on the gradeseparated interchange of a 12-lane arterial and an
elevated highway with ten lanes of frontage road. In
the shadow of two massive overpasses, pedestrians
make their way across the street on a 300-foot long
crosswalk with a concrete traffic island in the middle.
Nearby, the main entrances to the local subway
station come at the end of a 200-foot long sidewalk
flanked by high-speed traffic on one side and a loading dock on the other.
This scene is typical of Beijing. My first impression
of central Beijing as I emerged from the subway at
Chongwenmen station was one of overscaled roads.
Here, even the arterial streets have frontage roads.
At Tiananmen Square, the mausoleum of Chairman Mao looks out over 18 lanes of traffic at grade,
and pedestrians must go down the stairs to cross
underneath. Westheimer in Houston looks like a
side street by comparison. At this size, streets become
major obstacles. Crossing on foot takes some courage,
especially since pedestrians are expected to yield to
cars, bikes, mopeds, and buses. At major intersections, orange-vested traffic wardens try (with varying
degrees of success) to keep order.
These large-scale streets are the result of a massive
effort to reshape Chinese cities for cars. Numerous
streets in Beijing have been widened, displacing tens
of thousands of residents and businesses. Still, traffic
is a mess, and the vast majority of residents dont
even drive: where the United States has 828 vehicles

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per 1,000 people, China has only 37. Its impossible to

imagine how Beijing will ever be able to accommodate the traffic that will result from even half its residents commuting by car, but traffic engineers seem to
be doing their best to discourage pedestrians.
The new avenues are lined with sparkling new
office buildings, but no matter how spectacular the
buildings are, or how nicely landscaped their entry
drives, the experience on the ground remains one of
incoherence. Places like Jianwai SOHOor even
Super Brand Mallare an attempt to overcome this
by turning inward: developers and architects cant
change the overall structure of the city and overcome
its fundamental problems, so they try to create good
places within it. Even transport links take this approach: the new Beijing South high speed rail station
has a beautiful concourse, but, surrounded by tracks,
ramps, and parking lots, it has no relationship to the
surrounding neighborhoods. That seems familiar to
me: American cities tried it in the 1970s and 1980s,
and it failed. Embarcadero Center in San Francisco,
Peachtree Center in Atlanta, and Houston Center
all tried to solve the problem of American downtowns by creating self-contained, vertically separated,
mixed-use complexes. But not only did the projects
themselves fail to generate enough activity to sustain
much more than food courts, they further weakened
the city around them.
View from above, the Beijing South station reveals
itself as a perfect oval, a pristine object in the city.

Likewise, seen from only a few stories up, the CBD

begins to resemble its architectural renderings: a series of towers floating above the ground plane. Those
towers themselves are spectacularOMAs China
Central Television (CCTV) headquarters is every bit
as vertiginous and shimmering in real life as it is in a
magazinebut they dont add up to a place.
That leaves me with an unsatisfying thought:
in the fast-growing cities of China, architecture
doesnt matter all that much. Once the urban form
is established, the buildings themselves can do only
so much to change it. The CCTV headquarters is
an extraordinary buildingbut in the context of the
CBDs oversized streets and noisy traffic, it feels little
different from the ordinary buildings that surround
it. The role architecture plays in China is not so much
city-shaping as symbolism. Western starchitects
are hired to lend prestige to a development, to brand
a corporation, or to mark a citys economic success.
They are not hired to make better places. If architects
wanted to do that, they would need to be involved
earlier, before the streets are laid out and the overpasses planned.

A HISTORY OF URBANISM
I walk down a busy street in Beijing, just north of
the Forbidden City. Its crowded with buses, cabs,

the tree-lined streets of mansions, and the blocks of

courtyard apartments. Much of this remains surprisingly intact. Standing on the riverfront in Shanghai,
I looked across the Huangpu at the highrises of
Pudong, then turned the other way to see one of the
best preserved 1920s business districts in the world.
I wandered northwards across the Garden Bridge
where I found much of the old city still intact: threeand four-story buildings with ground floor shops,
apartments above, and courtyards in mid-block that
could be in Paris. Despite the foreign architecture,
the street life felt much as it did in the hutongs of
Beijing. Chinese urbanism and Western urbanism
had melded here.
This traditional Chinese urbanism has persisted.
I found it just off Beijings CBD in the alleys behind
Jianwai SOHO. This part of the city developed in
the 1970s and 1980s, and theres certainly nothing
quaint about the mid-rise apartment buildings and
cinder block shops. But the roads are narrow. Gates
open onto walled courtyards. The stores are small.
The buildings feel lived in. Cars, bikes, mopeds,
and pedestrians mix freely. A remarkable urban life
flourishes here, sometimes directly across the street
from the granite drives and manicured lawns of office towers.
But the original Chinese cities are now being
steadily destroyed by a potent combination of capitalism, central planning, and Western architects. More
than half of the old hutongs of Beijing are gone, as
are most of Shanghais
courtyard apartments.
Their former residents
scattered, theyve been
replaced by government buildings, office
towers, and highrise
apartments. This has
attracted some disapproving attention in the
West, but of course we
did the same thing long
ago in our own cities,
and were still doing
it today.
For now, the demolitions seem to have
slowed down. The
government has put protections in place and is talking up a program to rehabilitate what remains. But I
have a sinking feeling that the hutongs as we know
them are doomed. Preservation, after all, usually
means preserving buildings; no development regulation can preserve a community of people. This land
is too optimally located in the heart of the huge city
to house poor families forever. The hutongs are in a
literal time warp, preserved for the moment as the
city changes around them. Like on those farms near
the airport, time may have moved more slowly here
than elsewhere in Beijing, but the clock will catch up.
I hope these buildings will be saved, so that people 30
years from now will be able to see what the old cities
of China looked like. But I also hope that their lessons will be learned so that new places can embrace
some of the same virtues.

This park, the centerpiece of the new

Shenzhen, may be the least peoplefriendly park Ive ever seen. It has
what you expect from a park: trees,
lawns, benches, paths. But nothing is
quite right.
OPPOSITE CARS SPEED BY THE NEW SHENZHEN CITY HALL.

is that it had no need to look to the United States or

France for a precedent for how to build a great urban
place; that precedent existed here already.
The hutongs were not perfect, of course: they were
often overcrowded, badly heated, and unsanitary. But
they offered things that the new office towers and
residential complexes lack: a relatively congenial mixing of cars, bikes, mopeds, and people, social public
outdoor space, individual identity, a human scale, and
a sense of community.
In Shanghai, this older urban tradition met the
19th-century European city. The International Settlement and French Concession, established in the 1840s
and ruled by foreign powers until World War II, became home to tens of thousands of Westerners. They
designed the Art Deco highrises lining the riverfront
of the Bund, the department stores of Nanjing Road,

NOSTALGIA
On the wall of the Beijing Planning Exhibition, a
bronze model depicts Beijing before the revolution.
Seen at a small scale, the city reads as texture. A city
wall five miles east to west and five and a half miles
north to south encloses a dense fabric of hutongs.
Much of this is gone now, as is the city wall itself.
But the defining center of old Beijing is still there:
the Forbidden City, its vast and orderly sequence of
courtyards, the symbols of imperial power, contrasting with the city around it.
After the emperor fell, the Japanese were driven
out, the nationalists were defeated, and the Peoples
Liberation Army marched into Beijing in 1948, the
communists appropriated the symbols of the imperial
dynasties. The palaces were kept intact, and Tiananmen Square was widened into a huge parade ground,
surrounded by the buildings of the new regime and
centered on a monument to the soldiers who fought
in the revolution. In 1976, Maos mausoleum was
placed directly in line with the old gates. This axis
remains one of the key organizing principles of Beijing; it was extended northwards in 2008 to form the
centerpiece of Olympic Park, an extension that was
envisioned, perhaps ironically or perhaps appropriately, by Albert Speer, the son of Hitlers architect.
The historic east-west axis, which intersects at Tiananmen Square, has also been strengthened: its now
anchored by the CBD on one end and another major
office district, Beijing Finance Street, on the other.
I walked across Olympic Park the day after I went
to the Forbidden City. It was a hot August afternoon
as the sun beat down on the crowds of Chinese tourists. The vast paved plaza that marks the axistwo
and a half miles long, up to 600 feet widehas no
benches, no trees, and no shade. There is not much to
do here on an ordinary day but be awed by the surrounding buildings. The Birds Nest and the Water
Cube look a little worn now; they do not quite have
the same sparkle they did on TV during the games.
But they remain jaw-droppingly impressive, huge
otherworldly objects at an inhuman scale standing in
magnificent isolation on the plaza. They look nothing like the Forbidden City, but they send the same
message of power and strength. Mao successfully appropriated the symbols of imperial China to reunite a
country torn by civil war under a strong central government, and todays regime is using similar symbols
to underline a message of common purpose.
The emotional power of history is also being
exploited to commercial ends. Just south of Tiananmen Square on the central axis, Qianmen has been
rebuilt as a pedestrian street. Its lined by 1920s buildingssome, according to the plaques, real, restored
to their earlier appearance, and others no doubt
imaginative re-creations. Antique lampposts, stone
benches, a replica streetcar plodding slowly down the
street, and thousands of red lanterns create a stage-set
atmosphere of an imagined 1920s Beijing. The buildings are occupied by shops for the brand-conscious:
Sephora, H&M, Hagen-Dazs, Zara. The place is
a hit: its the busiest outdoor public space I saw in

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mopeds, bikes, and people. But then I turn into an

alleya hutongmaybe 25-feet wide, between two
buildings. I pass a store selling groceries, a four-table
restaurant grilling meat over a charcoal burner, a
small workshop. Then the alley becomes residential.
The homes themselves are hidden behind lines of
walls; occasionally a portal opens into a courtyard
crammed with small buildings. There is life everywhere: laundry hanging out to dry, old men playing
mahjong, kids running around, men loading a truck.
The alley twists and turns until the busy city is lost
somewhere behind me. As it gets narrower, Im sure
Ive hit a dead end, but theres a narrow way through,
a path only six feet wide between buildings. After
a few more twists, I suddenly emerge onto a major
street again, back in modern Beijing.
In a commercial alley south of Tiananmen Square,
shops face each other across perhaps 30 feet of pavement, with no curbs to separate the pedestrians,
bikes, mopeds, cars, and delivery vans. Businesses
spill out onto the street with their tables, chairs, and
racks of merchandise. Electric signs hang overhead.
Its visually chaotic, but unlike in the modern streets
of Beijing, traffic is surprisingly polite. Cars slowly
make their way through the crowd, people step aside,
and nobody seems bothered.
The urbanism of Beijing is very old. Theres been
a city in this spot since before the 1200s, when Marco
Polo visited here. In the 16th century, Beijing was the
worlds biggest city. The supreme irony of Beijing

Beijing. Nostalgia clearly sells.

In Shanghai, too, the past is being celebrated again. The Bund has been restored. The French Concession is
prestigious. In the underground concourse that connects the Urban Planning Exhibition Center to the subway,
a re-created Shanghai Traditional Street in the 1930s features stores selling iPod cases, fast food, and bottled
water behind fake European storefronts, with yet another replica streetcar at the end.
Theres a contradiction built into all of this. After all, the Concessionsterritory outside of Chinese jurisdiction seized by foreign powers at gunboat-pointwere a central part of the foreign humiliation of China
that led to the communist revolution. In Shanghai, this history is blunted by memories of a common enemy:
in 1937, when the Japanese invaded, the foreign territories became a refuge, then after Pearl Harbor, when the
Japanese invaded the Concessions, too, the Westerners suffered as the Chinese did. But the images of Westerners riding in rickshaws pulled by Chinese that are displayed in the Traditional Street still give pause.
The ironies in these revivals of Shanghai history are most obvious at Xintiandi, perhaps the most famous
commercial historic preservation project in China. In 2003, two blocks of old buildings in Shanghai were rebuilt or restored as high-end retail. They now house a Starbucks, a Hagen-Dazs, a BMW Lifestyle Boutique,
and a Lawrys Steakhouse. Western restaurants in rehabilitated buildings recall an era when the West ruled
most of Shanghai, yet theres one more building in the complex: the place where the Chinese Communist
Party held its first meeting in July 1921.
Nostalgia, however, is not the same as preservation. Nostalgia for the past has grown alongside widespread
destruction, with replicas of history being built even as real historic buildings have been demolished. As in
the hutongs, the government may respond to rising public concern by trying to protect old buildings, but
theres no assurance the old neighborhoods will keep their character. Perhaps the buildings will remainthe
government can assure thatbut it may be different people who live there. I saw a Mercedes in a hutong,
which could be a sign of the future. Once the fad for Western ideas has passed, the new rich and upper middle
class may rediscover these old places, fix them up, and enjoy a more comfortable, less crowded version of
hutong life.

NEW ATTITUDES

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In the Shanghai office of the landscape architecture firm SWA Group, transplanted Houstonian Scott Slaney
is hopeful about the prospects of urban planning in China. He laments the obvious problems: he says that a
decade ago, new developments still included bike lanes and narrower streets but now hes seeing wider and
wider boulevards. He also agrees that most parks are planned as greenspaces and not gathering places, and he
remembers the Shanghai neighborhoods that have been demolished. But, he says, attitudes are changing, and
urban planning in China is getting more sophisticated.
I spent two days in Shanghai seeing some of what Slaney was talking about, starting at the building that
houses SWAs offices. Highstreet Lofts is an old factory converted into offices and stores by Italian expats
Kokai Studios, who were also responsible for the renovation of one of the landmark buildings on the Bund. A
central light court, opened up within a framework of existing beams and columns, floods the high-ceilinged
offices with light, and the old loading docks have become a quiet courtyard. The outside skin is a mix of existing walls and windows, and inserted screens and signage, with no attempt made to disguise the alterations as

historic fabric. At the front entrance, a coffee shop

faces a narrow Shanghai street across a small plaza.
In a city where many new buildings face the street
with walls and security cameras, the shop and plaza
are a welcome public gesture.
The Highstreet Lofts is an example of something
thats happening both in Shanghai and in the United
States. Industrial uses are moving further from the
urban core, leaving old factory complexes, now
replaced by larger and more efficient facilities, empty.
And here, as in the United States, the old industries
are being converted. Near the river, the former
Shanghai Oil Plant has been converted into bars,
restaurants, and a boutique hotel. Its called, rather
transparently, Cool Docks. As at the Highstreet
Lofts, the modern alterations are unapologetic, and
while there is some of Xintiandis nostalgic architecture, many of the rough edges of the old buildings
have been allowed to remain. Cool Docks may be
historic, but its not quaint.
To the north, on the banks of once polluted
Suzhou Creek, the M50 arts complex occupies an
old textile mill. Much of the old fabric here has been
torn down, and a long graffiti-covered wall hides an
empty field that awaits cleanup and redevelopment.

The supreme irony of Beijing is that there was no need

to look to the United States or France for a precedent
of how to build a great urban place; that precedent was
there already.

But at M50 the old buildings were converted into a

series of galleries. The former factory gates, set in a
tall wall that surrounds the compound, open into a
series of irregular courtyards lying between the old
brick buildings. Again, there was no attempt at pastiche; the existing finishes mingle with modern steel,
glass, and concrete, and planes of primary color mark
the gallery entrances.
These reinvented places have a human scale thats
entirely lacking in much of modern China. But I
did see something of the same scale in a few new
places as well. The most dramatic was actually an
SWA project. Beijing Financial Street is the counterpart to the CBD on the opposite side of the city. It
too is home to branded corporate headquarters and
luxury boutiques. But unlike the CBD, the district
is centered not on a highway interchange but on a
park. The roads are at an urban scale, with two to
four lanes and wide, tree-shaded sidewalks. Opposite
the park, the street is lined with restaurants, which
occupy the ground floor of an office building. It was
the only business district I saw in China where I
actually enjoyed walking around. And so did others,
it seemed: on one Saturday afternoon, with the office
workers at home, the adjacent mall was empty, but

families lingered on the sidewalk in front of the restaurants.

Do projects like this reflect a new, more sophisticated version of urban design? In Shanghais urban planning museum, the exhibitions about historic preservation, sustainability, and new urban villages inevitably
present an idealized view, reflecting aspirations more than reality. But they are an indication, at least, of government planners awareness of public concerns, and those planners can steer Chinas cities into more livable
directions. I imagine that the same planners who first noticed the gleaming highrises on their trips to the West
have since returned to note a shift toward more context-sensitive design, and now theyre responding. But
the Beijing Finance Street and the CBD were built at the same time, and even as Cool Docks and M50 draw
crowds, other warehouses are being torn down for new office parks.

AMBITION
The centerpiece of Beijings planning exhibition is a huge scale model of the urban core. Families can stand
around and see what their city will look likethe activity centers, the neighborhoods, the expressways, the
transport hubs, the monuments, the parks.
In China, planning is overt. Thats in contrast to Houston, where agencies justify new highway projects by
saying things like this capacity is required for future traffic needs. In China, they tell you that they want to
convert farmland to neighborhoods housing hundreds of thousands of people, and that they want to create
clusters of corporate headquarters around the edges of the city, and so theyre building a highway to enable
that plan. Its ironic that Chinaa regime where the public has no input on any of these projectsis having a
more honest discussion about planning than we are.
The infrastructure that the Chinese are building for their new cities is truly impressive. Shanghai opened its
first subway line in 1995, and today it has 270 miles of subway lines, more than New York, London, or Paris.
All were built in two decades, and plans are on the books to double that system. Shanghai isnt alone: Beijing,
Guangzhou, and Shenzhen all have subway systems of over 100 miles, surpassing Washington, D.C., and Chicago, and another eight cities have smaller systems. The subways I rode were all up-to-date, with sliding doors
at the platform edge for safety, excellent signage, easy-to-use vending machines, and smart card fares.
China is building all kinds of infrastructure at this same scale. Across the countryside, I saw miles of new
six-lane highways (albeit nearly empty). Chinas ports, full of new wharves and state-of-the-art container
cranes, include seven of the worlds ten busiest. The airports are big, shiny, comfortable, and passenger-friendly. China has the longest overwater bridge in the world, the longest cable-stayed bridge span, and five of the

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OPPOSITE THE WIDE STREETS OF BEIJING REPLACED OLD HUTONGS

LIKE THIS ONE.
ABOVE IN SHANGHAI, THE OLD CITY IS BEING REPLICATED IN AN
UNDERGOUND ARCADE AND REPURPOSED AS GALLERIES AT M50.

ten longest suspension bridge spans.

Perhaps the most prominent symbol of Chinese
infrastructure is the countrys high-speed rail
network. The Beijing to Shanghai high-speed rail
line opened on June 30; I rode it four days later.
Cruising along smoothly at 190 mph, I could not
help but be impressed by the ambition of this
project. Of its 800 miles of new, double-track,
grade-separated electrified railway, 86 percent is
elevated, including two major river crossings, and
22 tunnels go right through any hills that got in
the way. Twenty brand new stations serve cities
along the way, and the Beijing and Shanghai
stations were completely rebuilt to serve the new
demands of high-speed rail. Imagine traveling
from Houston to Atlanta by train in five hours
and you get the idea.
Now 90 trains a day travel between Shanghai
and Beijing carrying 165,000 riders.
Its nothing short of remarkable that China
has reached this point. In 1999, China was the last
country on earth still building new steam locomotives for regular service. Then in 2003, the first
new, dedicated high-speed rail line opened. China
began importing high-speed rail trains from Europe and Japan in 2006; by 2008 the Chinese were
building foreign-designed trains under license;
and today, a Chinese-designed and Chinese-built
train is the fastest mass-produced train in the
world. By comparison, the United States built its
last steam locomotive in 1953 and still has neither
a dedicated high-speed rail line nor the capability
to design or build high-speed trains domestically.
Spurring all this expansion is Chinas sense
of optimism. Developers are building because
they have every reason to think theyll make a
profit. The people support (or at least tolerate) the
government because they think that their futureor their childrens futureis getting better.
In the same way, the governments infrastructure
spending is a statement of positive expectation:
new highways, railroads, and ports will create
economic growth, and that growth will justify the
spending. Thats the same motivation that created
the highways of Houston and the subways of New
York, and its what felt most familiar to me about
China, even as weve lost some of that optimism
back in the United States.

A PEOPLES HISTORY OF
ARCHITECTURE

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In Beijing, Maos portrait overlooks the city. In

Shenzhen, that place is held by a billboard of
Deng Xiaoping, who led China from 1978 to
1992. It was Deng who designated Shenzhen as
a special economic zone in 1980, and his triumphant 1992 tour of Shenzhen cemented the
economic reforms after the Tiananmen Square
massacre. Shenzhen was the prototype for the new
Chinese city, with monuments to economic success, not military victories.
A small park in a residential area of Shenzhen
tells an alternate history of China. The park rests

on the site of the fishing village the city started from, and was built when the village residents were rehoused
in modern apartment towers. A series of bronze plaques tells the history of the fishing village, starting with a
summary [reproduced here as written]:
The beautiful Fisherman village borders Hong Kong. It is by the side of Shenzhen River. Great
Changes have taken place in the last decades. In the early 1940s the Dongguan fisherman used to live
and set up thatched cottages on the semi waste peninsula and float on the river to fish. When the Peoples
Republic of China was founded, the fisherman began to move onto the bank gradually and live in one-story
tiled houses. The village was formed and the name of Litoujian was later replaced by Fisherman Village.
The extreme Left trend of Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) was as violent as typhoon and it made the
peoples life poorer and poorer with each passing day and people began escaping to Hong Kong one after
another. At the beginning of the reform an opening up of the country, Shenzhen Special Economic Zone
was set up. Great changes took place in the fisherman village. The people there worked hand in hand to
develop multiple trades and they reached the goal of being the first village of 10-thousand RMB households
in China. Thirty-five two-story buildings appeared by the side of the Shenzhen River for the first time. It
began the first phase of the Chinese peasants exploring the ways of better life.
On January 25, 1984, Comrade Deng Xiaoping visited Fisherman Village. He chatted with the villagers and was solicitous for their welfare. Knowing that the peoples livelihood was improving, Xiaoping was
very gratified.
This display is extraordinary and telling. Its take on the past is blunt: there is actually a bas-relief of meanlooking Chinese border guards in front of a barbed-wire fence, blocking the peasants escape to Hong Kong
during the Cultural Revolution. But like every historical marker, it provides an edited view of history.
This notion of communal progress is at odds with what I saw in China. On average, society has taken huge
strides forward; there is no doubt average Chinese citizens are better off than they were before Deng. But that
progress has not been evenly shared. The farmers outside the airport can see China changing around them,
but are their lives any better? Today, one of the biggest sources of political unrest in Chinaand instigators of
some of the rare instances of public protestare peasants who are losing their land to new development.
What really rings true in the Shenzhen park memorial, however, is the adamant belief in the virtue of development. The measure of progress has become economic, not political: the failure of the Cultural Revolution
was that it kept people in poverty, and todays success is measured in household income.
And the manifestation of this economic progress is built form: people moving from boats to thatched cottages to tiled houses to two-story houses to apartment buildings of high standards, strict requirements,
and good quality. I saw this extolling of development everywhere. On a construction site, a red banner read,
Like surging waves, never stop developing. In Beijing, a sign urged us to develop and enjoy together. The
Shanghai paper reported an incident of panic on a subway train when a man ran through yelling that there
was a bomb on board. There wasnt, and when police tracked down the passenger, his excuse was that he was
trying to get away from an overzealous real estate broker.
Halfway around the world, I came to a conclusion that was hardly new: cities are shaped by money more
than by design. Economic imperatives transcend political systems, and this is as true in centrally planned
China as it is in supposedly laissez-faire Houston. Architecture works, as it always has, in the service of the
economy. Theories of urban planning and the social impact of architectural styles are insignificant in comparison. Cool Docks, Beijing Finance Street, Jianwai SOHO, and Qianmen have little in common on the surface,
but they are all tools for making money.
The view from the airport train proved telling: in making up for decades of lost time, China is completely
jumbling the usually orderly timeline of how cities have traditionally evolved. Instead of a succession of styles
and ideas, the history of urban planning has become a grab bag of ideas to mash up, try out, and celebrate. The
neat progression implied in the Shenzhen park is misleading: a two-story house is obviously an advancement
from a thatched cottagebut its not clear that the new downtown Shenzhen is a beneficial evolution from the
old one. I could assemble what I saw in China into a story, echoing the story of Western development: an old,
pedestrian-oriented urbanism gives way to car-oriented cities, and then planners realize the shortcomings of
that approach and rediscover a more sophisticated solution. But its hard to maintain a linear narrative when
everything is all happening at once. If Chinese cities are the cities of the future, then the future is certain to
be disorienting.

Its ironic that Chinaa regime where

the public has no input on any of these
projectsis having a more honest discussion
about planning than we are.
OPPOSITE FARMS OUTSIDE BEIJING GIVE WAY TO THE
NEW CITY DEPICTED IN A MASSIVE SCALE MODEL.

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