The Shanghai Urban Planning Museum
Last Saturday Richard and I went to the Shanghai Urban Planning Museum. It’s in a five storey building devoted to, well, planning. It seems a strange thing to go and see, but Shanghai is home to over 24 million people and this being China everything is centrally planned. So the museums looks back at the history of Shanghai and some of the historical buildings that have been saved and goes onto to show the plans for the development of the city up to 2020.
Map of Shanghai
In the entrance hall, on the floor, is a big satellite map of Shanghai. I got Richard to stand where our apartment block is. We live just outside the main centre of Shanghai, between the inner ring road and the middle ring road. As you can see it’s huge. The metro line from the eastern International Pudong airport (about where the little girl is kneeling) to the internal airport of Hongqiao more or less by Richard’s right foot is 63km long.
The next floor took a look at the history of Shanghai with a series of old photographs showing how things used to be.
The Jing’an Temple built in 1216
The Longhua Pagoda built 220-280
Line Drawing of the Yang King Pang Creek
The Bleachers in the Stands of the Racecourse
The Main Grandstand of Shanghai Hippodrome
Nanjing Road in 1911
Rue de la Port de l’Est of the Native City in the 1920s
The Temple of the Town God
The old photographs were fascinating and show a very different, very eastern life operating in Shanghai around 100 years ago. The modern Shanghai has not only moved with the times, it has also moved west and has lost much of its original distinctive architecture. The urban planners were originally in favour of knocking down all the old buildings, but as they have gone on they have come to realise that there is benefit in preserving and renovating (in some cases, unfortunately, over-renovating) patches of the old lontangs or alleyways, in places such as Tianzifang and Xintiandi and other heritage buildings.
So the next floor of the exhibition shows the buildings they are preserving with the equivalent of Preservation Orders, a number of which I have already visited. Places such as the Yu Yuan Gardens and The Longhua Buddhist Temple and Tower are included and a number of other areas or buildings that are on my list that I have yet to see, such as the ancient water town of Zhujiajiao and the Xijiao Hotel and others which I hadn’t heard of but I’d liked to see if they are open to the public.
Scale Model of Xintiandi
Shanghai Concert Hall
They had a few models of the buildings which they are preserving such as the area known as Xintiandi and the Shanghai Concert Hall. It is encouraging that they have decided not to sweep away all the old buildings. Sometimes their attempts at renovation go far beyond what we in the UK would deem acceptable, but I applaud the sentiment.
Model of Central Shanghai
And then we went upstairs again to the best part of this exhibition, to the scale model of the central district of Shanghai. This is a view taken from another floor up again, looking down on the model. Our apartment block lies just to the west of this area, beyond the left hand side of this picture and is not included in the model. At ground level the model is magnificent to look at:
It cycles through a series of different lighting scenarios pinpointing say the inner ring road and the financial district, taking you through nighttime and then onto daylight. There is a
The viewing runway
viewing runway about 1 metre high all the way round which allows you to get close enough to this model that takes up an area about the size of two tennis courts. There are also a couple of higher up runways which allowed you to look down on the model, the lower of which is reserved for important cadres (who seem to have to wear dark suits). We spent quite a bit of time here and then moved on up to the top floor where we went to learn about what the planners of Shanghai had sorted for the future. Their aim is:
Building Shanghai into one of the best developed and most beautiful cities in the world in terms of manufacturing, culture, science and art.
But it was here that we were disappointed. Whilst there were some good exhibits:
Map of bridge to Dawugui Island
such as the model and description of the development of the Donghai Bridge which goes out into the East China Sea, joining the south east corner of the Pudong district of the Shanghai mainland with the island of Dawugui where they are building a deep-sea container port, the Yangshan Deepwater Port (in the bottom right hand corner of the map). The bridge is 32km long. The scale and audacity of this project is phenomenal.
Model of the Donghai Bridge and Yangshan Deep Water Port.
Plan of Suzhou Creek
There were also models of the Pudong International Airport out on the east of the city on the coast and a plan of the banks of the Suzhou Creek which cuts across the northern part of central Shanghai where they are “establishing a multilevel landscape belt and a rich flora alongside both sides of the Suzhou River, preserving historical building, so as to cultivate a vigorous water-front as well as a riverine environment that is open, elegant, comfortable, safe and human-oriented.”
But in the main we were presented with platitudes. I don’t know if this was ubiquitous urban planners-speak or communist party central planning-speak. Either way, the effect would probably have been the same.
There was a mechanism guarantee:
the future Shanghai should further enhance regional cooperation platforms, improve downtown labor-division systems, optimise policy operating mechanism, make innovation in policy concepts and thinking patterns, strengthen the construction of legal system, and perfect the guarantee mechanism for planning implementation
Whatever that meant.
Up until this floor there had been no problem with the English translation, so I can only presume that it is the content that is at fault.
In terms of comprehensive transport system, Shanghai should further enhance the guiding and supporting role of comprehensive transport in urban development, establish urban space development mode featuring transit-oriented development (TOD), make overall plans for urban and rural space layout, function zoning, land use deployment and transport development, and build up a transport development system that matches the functions of a global city, concords with the space pattern of a megalopolis, and adapts to the integrated development of a Yangtze River Delta Cluster.
And at that, and similar gobbledegook that they must have paid to have had translated, we left the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall in search of a good cuppa.
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