I put the Burtynsky vision of Shanghai to Edward Denison and Ren Guangyu. We are in a bar on the seventh floor of a 1920s building along the Bund, the historic downtown once considered the paradigm of Westernized Asian architecture. Denison and Ren are coauthors of Building Shanghai: The Story of China’s Gateway, a strident reading of the city’s past, present, and future. An English expatriot, Denison is a heritage consultant and photographer; Ren is an architect, born and raised in Shanghai but educated in China and Australia. A married couple, they are biracial and bicultural and their first child has just been born. ” The Buck Rogers scenario goes back to the early twentieth century,” Denison explains. “Shanghainese have always had to live in the shadows of their skyscrapers.” In the late 1920s alone, he adds, some 12,000 buildings were torn down and replaced by taller and more formidable structures. “There was talk then about how Shanghai was being destroyed.”
Though the authors are critical of the disappearance of public spaces, of the formidable and often alienating architecture, and of the sheer scale of the current transformation, change, massive and mostly callous, has forever been the fuel for Shanghai’s engine, and citizens have had no choice but to adapt. An acceptance of change, along with a capacity to thrive under it, may even define their notoriously vigorous character. “It’s the same now as it was a hundred years ago. Poor people are always coming in from the countryside to earn a living. They open small shops or sell their vegetables on street corners. That’s not going to change,” says Ren with a nod to the rough resiliency of the people. Westerners, Denison remarks, are nostalgic for those colonial buildings and dismayed at the “sci-fi” city of today. But Shanghai has never been the sum of its vaulting architectural ambitions. It is the sum of its streets and of the lives lived there. “Streets too crowded,” Ren Guangyu says, listing the century-old complaints, “can’t walk on the pavement — too many people, too little space!” She and Denison recently bought an apartment in a downtown neighbourhood.
Clearly, I am wrong to lay only globalized twenty-first-century Western anxieties at the foot of Shanghai. Viewed from on high, and likely in passing, this has always been a scary, upsetting city.
One enters Southern Beauty, a restaurant in the former French Concession, through a watery dream. Slanted walls of running water bracket an elevated path along a corridor. A mirror door at the end slides open when approached. Inside the dining room, I am shown to a table next to a floor-to-ceiling glass window looking onto the street. My lunch companion, a vivacious twenty-nine-year-old lawyer named Feng Zhen, is already seated. She is tiny and tidy and wears a cream-coloured business suit and a warm smile. After shaking hands we exchange business cards, Feng’s emerging from a slim leather case. A waiter pours tea, and we sit for a minute, admiring the surroundings.
My opening comment describes the serenity not so much of the restaurant, which weds Eastern service to Western prices, as the sidewalk beyond the window. Previous strolls through the narrow laneways involved negotiating — to paraphrase Ren Guangyu — too little space with too many locals in too great a hurry. Today, at least, the streets of Shanghai are easy, and even pleasing, to walk.
“Shanghai is more livable now than it was ten years ago,” Feng says. “It is also more likeable.” A native of Zhangzhou in Fujian province, she views the city with both the elasticity of Wang Gangfeng and the skepticism of a provincial raised on tales of the chaotic metropolis and its all-elbows citizenry. But she, too, remarks on the dwindling sidewalk scrums and pitched battles to board public buses: “No question, the quality of life has improved. It isn’t only on the material side either. Shanghai is cleaner. People are more polite.”
Like everyone else I speak with, Feng Zhen acknowledges the harshness of how the improvements have been achieved, especially the destruction of traditional dwellings and the relocation of their residents. But she also insists that “the government now has better skills at building a city.” A better-designed city, in turn, makes everyone calmer. “If the rules are reasonable, people will follow them,” she explains. Prosperity, too, is serving to improve Shanghai, and the incessant bulging of the municipal seams with newcomers is fine by her. “It is part of the dynamism,” she says.
When it comes to living in Shanghai, enormousness is simply not an issue. “It has always been too big,” Feng says, echoing Ren. Though her husband is currently in Xinshi, where he owns a business, she has no problem envisioning raising a family here. She hopes to buy an apartment on her salary as a lawyer for an international firm. A globalized person herself — she recently completed a law degree in the United States — Feng Zhen is considering sending her own children to a Shanghai school where both Mandarin and English are taught.
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