By Lee Mack

Shanghai is a city of two minds. On the one hand, Shanghai is a city obsessed with its past. The legends of Old Shanghai are regularly dragged out of the closet, dusted off, and paraded around like the heroes of the Silver Screen. A Shanghainese friend of mine says she feels these ghosts of the past lingering here. The ghosts of the pre-liberation times when foreigners ruled what was once called the Paris of the East. Ghosts of notorious figures such as the gangster Du Yuesheng and his cohort Generalissimo Chiang Kai-Shek. Ghosts that perhaps do not realize their time is past.

But Shanghai is also touted as a city of the future, a city on the upswing with vast, untapped potential and fortunes to be made. One look across the Huangpu at Pudong and you get the picture. Iridescent skyscrapers loom in post-industrial geometries. Clean, wide boulevards sweep traffic around the feet of these avatars of a new age. Ten years ago, this was all farmland. And a hundred years from now? What will Shanghai be like in the future? From Puxi and the ghosts of the past to Pudong and the stainless steel reflection of the present to...where? A lot of people have placed big bets on the answer to that question. Let us peer into the crystal ball and see what there


The 20-Year Face-lift Plan

The best place to start in the search for the Shanghai's future is at Government Headquarters. The official 20-year plan for Shanghai's future, unveiled earlier this year by the municipal authorities, promises a logarithmic extrapolation upon the present. From the vantage of downtown Shanghai we will see small mini-cities grow up around us, such as we have already seen with the Gubei area in recent years and Lujiazui across the river. Each area will function as a coherent whole, much like a cell to a body, complete with its own industries, infrastructures, residential areas, entertainments, character, and, most importantly for us, fast transportation links.

To make this feasible, the authorities plan to link these nodes together with an extensive network of roads and rails, tubes and tunnels: eleven new subway lines with a combined length of 330 kilometers and seven new light rails of 130 kilometers, not to mention the odd ultrafast Transrapid mixed in.

The blighted site of rusted cargo ships plying the fetid Huangpu river is also scheduled to be mercifully killed off and relocated to proposed deep-water ports off the coast of Pudong connected to the mainland by 20 miles of suspension bridges. The authorities sensibly say they want the Huangpu River to be an aesthetic as well as a commercial asset. Already, according to informed sources, riverfront property is some of the most expensive in Shanghai. It will only become more attractive when the 60-140 square-meter wide greenbelts are planted between the Nanpu Bridge and Yangpu Bridge.

Restaurateurs take note: Suzhou Creek could likewise benefit and become the nexus of cultural life in Puxi in the coming decades, as the creek is slowly rehabbed back to its quaint original form. When the smell goes away, expect the loft-style flats rumored to be had up there to quickly become not-so-rumored. Already, the Eastlink Gallery has made the move to a larger studio space along the Creek. Do they know something we do not? You'd have to be blind not to see a New York-style renaissance lurking in the works.

All that sounds pretty good, but if you really imagine a city criss-crossed by elevated highways and light rails which dwarf the elevated highway, one problem becomes painfully obvious: traffic.

Read Pt II!