URBAN ADAPTATION

ARCHITECTURE AND ADAPTATION

"It is architecture’s very impression of fixity that makes its manipulation such a persuasive tool."

                                                                                           Robert Bevan

In anticipation of the 2010 World Exposition Shanghai authorities have initiated citywide beautification programs including street median planting, topiary Haibao and Expo 2010 displays and even the illumination of the underside of elevated highways.  Perhaps less obvious is a pervasive crackdown on illegal, pirated and knock-off products that contradict the image of a city that has eschewed its grey market revenue.  DVD stores for example that previously displayed arrays of pirated foreign and local films, have now, seemingly under pressure from authorities, partitioned their store with secret rooms behind false panels that feature the covert merchandise.  

One of the more contentious urban planning initiatives has been the redevelopment of the popular food street Wujiang Lu (吴江路) which is situated in JingÁn district just off Nanjing Xi Lu (南京路) near the subway station on Line 2.    Motivated by the sanitized rhetoric Better City, Better Life and perhaps implicitly the public relations challenges of the Beijing Olympics, Shanghai’s urban planners and policy makers have moved purposively to address streets and vendor activity that may tarnish its progressive image. "Since the theme for Expo is ‘Better City, Better Life', we need to provide residents with a neat, clean environment," explained Chen Chang, a spokesman for the city's JingÁn district.  "We believe during the World Expo, foreign friends should see a clean environment."  To this end, the gritty food street has been systematically leveled and reconstructed as a modern, upscale street mall. Part of the initiative involves a legitimate need to have old, and poorly maintained structures meet building and health codes, but in this case it involve the removal rather than renovation of these buildings.  Plans for the northern section which comprises a lane of three-story buildings with stone balconies and red tile roofs, are less clear.  An advertisement stating merely "new business hub” screens the area currently being demolished.

Wujiang Lu (literally Wu’s river street) follows the footprint of the minor creek on which it was built in the 1860’.  Infamous in its heyday as a hotspot of vice and prostitution within the International Settlement, the street was euphemistically named Love Lane.  Half a century before that it was farmed for cotton.  Its most recent iteration is that of a food street, which until very recently was known for classic snacks like sheng jian bao (pork-stuffed fried bread dumplings), and various delicacies on skewers. Restaurateurs and vendors interviewed in the weeks before the eviction indicated they were relocating to less developed areas at the urban fringe or to back to other provinces.  Shanghai has had a striking record for illegal evictions in recent years demolishing 850,000 households and evicting 2.5 million people from 1993 to 2003. If there is a connection between displacement and the rise in illegal vending, the recent decision to create night markets may provide some insight.  Wujiang Lu has been targeted as a pilot site by the Shanghai Commission of Commerce for one of fifty future night markets to improve the quality of nightlife and solve traffic problems caused by illegal vendors.   According to Zhang Xinsheng, assistant director of the commission, 'night markets would prolong their business hours and enrich the city's nightlife by providing entertainment, leisure, shopping and food.  Tu Haiming, a member of the Shanghai Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference reinforced this sentiment with his observation that “most street vendors [would] move into regular night fairs if the costs were reasonable. They are tired of dodging urban management officers.”

The empirical re-characterization of Wujiang Lu is a perhaps familiar palimpsest that diminishes a rational and contextualized understanding of place-making history that has actions and consequences, and replaces it with a celebration of spontaneity and the relevant.  What is relevant is fleeting, often blatant and surreptitious at the same time.  Macro-culture, exemplified here by the non-descript mall strip on the south section of the road has transposed (if not erased) the intrinsic micro-culture of the food street.  The term macro used in a phenomenological sense describes less the scale of change and more the mnemonic effect on culture. At the heart of China’s endearing presentation is the public relations directive of the Exposition with its international focus.  Consequently disparate economic and cultural elements have been eye-washed in very much the same way.   Popular streets, historical buildings, utilitarian bridges and DVD stores with illegal content all represent the same type of problem, but their respective solutions bear very different consequences.   As covered in a previous related post, architecture is a form of adaptation both phenomenologically and pragmatically.  Given the chance, people will adjust space to meet their needs, and the concept of architectural space is always fundamentally subjective and grounded with memory.     One interesting example of memory mapping is the project, Growing Up With Shanghai, which features nine residents all born after 1978 recalling the Shanghai’s growth and change in their immediate neighborhood.  Another self-described grassroots preservationist effort dedicated to historic districts and buildings has gained momentum in the city of Tianjin, China’s fifth largest city.  Rapid and repeated reconstruction invariably erases the semiotic clues embedded in physical space which give way to a homogenized image of the urban environment.  The leveling of architecture has real-world consequences for the future well-being of communities, but in China, the rapid of cities from rice-paddy fields is an even more powerful indicator of changes in collective cultural memory.

"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."           

                                                                                                                                   Milan Kundera