May you live in interesting times,” says the Chinese curse, but life in Shanghai does make time interesting! With its elevated flyways that appear infinite to the naked eye, and maglev trains travelling at breakneck speed, both running a parallel discourse to the local metro trains… all these snake above and below, making a convoluted and quite literally head-spinning experience. As if these did not offer enough contortions for the neck, there are at least 200 buildings over 300 metres high scraping the sky of this city. Largest, tallest, biggest, all lit up, converting the city centre into a massive neon billboard — one whose sole purpose seems to be to cause jaws to drop! A far cry from the tanks of Tiananmen, the image of this sensationalist architecture succeeds in instilling awe even in the most sceptical. The “bottle-opener” top of the Shanghai Financial Centre and the bizarre “balls” of the Oriental Pearl Tower have become symbols for the growing prowess of the Chinese mechanism.
Often one reads of comparisons between Mumbai and Shanghai, and yet we can be assured that the comparisons begin and end with the fact that both are commercial centres of their respective countries with Art Deco districts on the waterfront. The Bund is what Marine Drive could have been. Art Deco is a passage in the history books on Mumbai while in Shanghai it lives its erstwhile glory, sophisticatedly backlit in contrast to the neon of the opposite bank. While new and old have been visibly demarcated by the river, they have been invisibly juxtaposed in the fabric of the entire city.
Unlike Singapore, where the lines of the old were erased and new ones etched on the surface, displacing and replacing traditional relationships, Shanghai displays a unique intelligence. It has chosen selectively to retain its cultural threads and then woven them into new patterns. Districts in the city have retained their original essence, with flying gables, cobbled streets, cornices and columns, shaded alleys of Chinese maples that twist, turn and surprise into squares and courtyards challenging the sterility of modernity packaged in steel and glass boxes. The fragrance of petunias wrapped around lamp posts and the aroma of jasmine tea from the smattering of tea rooms mixes with the damp of the sea and rises from the densely packed corridors of the city. Shanghai remains loyal to the sense of its old and yet it has instilled in it the sensibility of the “new”. Cameras mounted on poles run on solar power, paved sidewalks are perhaps five times the width of the Indian standard and slope into a state-of-the-art drainage system, LEDs light not just façades but even act as art. The city is colour-coordinated from signage to flowerbeds, no edge is left unturned, unmanned or un-pruned. Areas have been levelled, housing removed to create parks and plazas, and industry shifted to reduce environmental damage.
What’s astounding is not how the feat of walking the tightrope has been performed but how the Chinese have chosen what to retain and what to replace so as to achieve this perfect balance. Here it is not left to the survival of the fittest but to the careful choice of a few to carry the values of cultural space. For any Asian, postcolonial, highly populated city, the past is often seen as a necessary burden that hampers future design. Shanghai is an example in which the past adds a distinctive flavour to the future in measures both discernible and planned. Ironically this is seen as devious and structured. On the flip side of the coin is the Indian metropolis, unable to prioritise what to keep and what to let go. Insecure about losing our uniqueness to modernity we have become hoarders, keeping everything good, bad and ugly, making our cities junkyards rather than museums. Not every building is a monument, not every street relevant in its current scale or form. Perhaps Shanghai’s sensationalism is what is needed here, to help us discard the useless and archive the noteworthy, to make our past future-ready, with the understanding that the future, too, shall be the past some day.
[Suparna Bhalla is a Delhi-based architect]
