By Lee Mack (continued from Pt 1)
The Pedestrian vs The Automobile
Already, traffic in Shanghai is a major hair-pulling trial of will, unless you happen only to travel around at 3 AM. China hands from years back scoff and say, "This? This is nothing compared to what it was five years ago." But if the marketing seers are correct, and the Big Three Shanghai automakers have their way, in the future almost every household will have a private automobile. Egads!
According to E. C. Liu, a chief architect working on the Xintiandi Project, the future of Shanghais urban space may well come down to the battle between the pedestrian and the automobile. "Shanghai is a walking city," Liu says, "very much like New York. In that it is different from Beijing which is more formal, more well-ordered, built on a grid, like most world capitals. Shanghai has grown more organically." Liu recollects fondly his old apartment on Yan'an Lu in the days before the overpass was built. "I had a wonderful view out my window, it was very quiet and peaceful." Then the cranes and crews moved in, the old houses came tumbling down, and now the area is not exactly beckoning for a leisurely walk.
But such an overpass was absolutely necessary, most people will argue, because it cut travel time from Hongqiao to the Bund in half and alleviated the perpetual gridlock that bedeviled residents five years ago. In the process, however, the city is being chopped up and its organic continuity disrupted.
Liu's property development, Xintiandi (New Universe), is located on a prime patch of real estate in the French Concession just south of Huaihai Rd near the First Party Congress historical site, and, with its narrow brick alleys and low buildings, small shops and corner cafes, it aims to preserve that spirit of pedestrianism so characteristic of Shanghai life. "No vehicles allowed," Liu says, "we are trying to preserve the spirit of Shanghai as a walking city." Liu hopes to see many more "architecturally-sensitive" preservation projects like this initiated, keeping true to both the historical authenticity of the original structures and the orginal genius loci as well. "Of course," he says, "the reality will come down to market considerations, whether or not preservation is economocally feasible, whether people will have the necessary awareness, whether the money will be there.
Preservation as an ethic may be a sitting duck as Shanghai's car industry kicks into high gear. The authorities have recently relaxed restrictions on acquiring license plates, a used car market is developing, and Buick is set to unveil a new model, called the SAIL, which is priced toward private car owners (at a cool RMB 100,000). And then a recent survey declared one-in-three urban households plan to buy a car in the next few years. You can imagine Volkswagon and Ford are paying close attention to this. The auto industry is traditionally a backbone industry in Western capitalist countries and these companies have not invested billions in Shanghai for nothing. The pedestrian may truly become an endangered species in Shanghai. A recent decision to widen Fuxing Rd provides a clue of what to expect over the next couple of decades. A lot of old mini-mansions will go under the knife. Granted, the traffic will be smoother, but what will we really gain in the long run?
Blade Runner II
What seems likely to happen is that everything currently a short walk away will become a simple click away. The internet, for all its faults and false promises, is not going to disappear and will only infiltrate more and more spheres of daily life. The authorities are pushing to make Shanghai a major hub in the cyber universe and, in the process, wire us up to the gills, put a mobile communication device in every hand and a credit card in every pocket. Shanghai, more than any other city, will determine whether the cyberlife will be the future life in China.
A few years back, Pacific Century Cyberworks, a conglomerate owned by Hong Kong real estate tycoon Li Kai-Shing and his scion son Richard Li, proclaimed they were going to build Asia's grandest cyberhub in Hong Kong. They set up portals and signed contracts and branded themselves as "the official dispensery of Chinese culture." And then they started losing money. Their flagship Tom.com lost some HKD 80 million last year.
"Pacific Century Cyberworks? Forget it," says Wolf von der Hagen, chief consultant for SBC, a German business consulting firm in Shanghai. "Hong Kong is dead." It turns out that PCC was not much more than a clever scheme to boost sagging real estate prices in Hong Kong.
No, von der Hagen goes on to say, Shanghai is the future for internet in China. Lots of high-power multinationals agree and are laying out top dollar bets. Siemens and Intel are in the process of establishing multi-million dollar facilities to produce the nuts and bolts of the tech revolution, and AT&T has just finalized a landmark deal to be the first foreign investor in China's fledgling T-com industry. Where did that happen? Right here in Shanghai. The authorities are laying some 14 million miles of copper wire and 12 million miles of optic cable annually. And they hope every home will have broadband internet access in 20 years. Probably much sooner. "Beijing may have its Silicon Valley," von der Hagen says, "but Shanghai will be the large-scale testing ground for the ideas they produce," WebTV, wireless 24-hour mobile access, B2B, online banking and online schooling are all being brought to Shanghai on the conveyor belt of technology.
Read On to Part III
