blues in the city
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I learned early in my Shanghai stay never to leave home without my camera. If you wait until tomorrow to photograph what you see today, you usually get screwed — because what you saw yesterday very well could have been bulldozed overnight. This city is under construction.
For example, today the neighborhood around Shanghai University’s Yan Chang Lu campus looks nothing like it did nine months ago. All of these things are new: about 100 trees, four sidewalks, a huge gated community of high-rise apartment buildings, an entire elevated highway with new street lights and crosswalks, and a couple dozen new shops and restaurants that inexplicably include four new 24-hour convenience stores literally just a few feet from one another and about one minute’s walk from the three 24-hour shops that came before them.
But as fast as all of these things came together, they are falling apart even faster. Everything was shiny and new for about five days. Now it’s dirty, rusty, chipped and cracked. And no one seems to care. And why should they? Five or 10 years from now it might all be gone, replaced by another poorly planned project with crappy construction.
There are, however, some buildings in Shanghai that appear to have been built with an understanding that what goes up doesn’t necessarily have to come down, that the future is more than just a series of 10-year plans. There are neighborhoods in this city that have weathered rain and revolutions, communities held together by bricks, mortar, blood and tears, buildings with personality, history and a style that screams “Shanghai.”
And they are all being torn down by the government. Torn down to make room for the new Shanghai — a redundant run of high-rises so boring they can’t be bothered to scream anything.
On the corner of Xinzha Lu and Chengdu Lu — like hundreds of other corners citywide — lie the ruins of Old Shanghai. It looks like a war zone, half bulldozed buildings stand defiantly amid the rubble. I pass this place often in taxi rides, and each time I think about telling the driver to pull over so I can take some photos. Each time I don’t, I ride off wondering if the scene will still be there tomorrow.
Thankfully, it was still there a little more than a week ago. That’s when I finally arrived with my camera. Visible from the street is a shikumen archway, the signature feature of Shanghai’s longtang, or li long neighborhoods — the signature style of Shanghai’s early 20th century architecture. But the wall surrounding this archway is gone. Walk through the gate or around it. It doesn’t matter. It’s beautiful and sad. Decoration gives way to destruction. A jagged edge of exposed brick. And Shanghai’s shiny space-age skyline in the background.
A small crowd grew as I stumbled over stone piles looking for the right angle. This is not uncommon. Tall white guys can draw crowds here even when they aren’t doing something stupid. But one man who had been staring for several minutes suddenly did something that surprised me. He walked through the archway and through a door behind it.
He was still living there.
Soon, several proud residents of this once-proud neighborhood surrounded me. They wanted to talk (even though they soon realized my companion and I could understand very little of what they said). They seemed happy that someone had shown up and shown an interest. Maybe they thought I could do something to help.
This is what we could understand. These people stayed not to send a message to the government, but because they had nowhere else to go. They had yet to receive any relocation money from the government. They had yet to be told which nondescript high-rise in which faraway district the government was moving them to. They had no idea when it would become their apartment’s turn to be torn down.
“What can you do?” said one young man with a sad smile. Added a middle-aged woman with him, “This building used to be beautiful and tall. Four stories high.” Then she made a sweeping gesture that covered the current state of the building and said in English, “Very poor.”
It was still beautiful in a way, the same way ancient ruins in Rome are. But mostly the building was just short and sad. Unfinished walls never meant to be seen now faced the street. Apartments stood alone, neighbors next door and upstairs knocked down one by one. Some residents didn’t have four walls, maybe three. Some had none. A shantytown stood in the middle of the ruins. Homeless families made homes out of odd boards of wood and plastic tarps. Kids played on piles of rubble, bricks that used to be a home. Women carried water buckets in search of a working faucet. Elderly couples slowly made their way, using each other for support as they hiked over mountains of memories.
The ground was hard to find in most places. Mounds of broken brick and rock were the new landscape. Mixed among the mess were signs of life: shoes, hats, stuffed animals, playing cards. It gave the impression that residents were forced to evacuate in haste.
There were a few facades that had yet to face the wrecking ball, and they gave hints to the building’s past glory. Residents pointed out architectural features that they were proud of. One man — the only person who showed anger instead of helplessness — took us inside his apartment so we could see some of the intricate stone work on his walls. Then he gestured through an open door to a temporary maintenance shed housing construction — or deconstruction - workers. “Those people are living 50 feet away from here,” the man said with hatred in his eyes. “They could tear all of this down tomorrow.”
As we left the neighborhood, a young boy was playing by himself on a hill of red brick. He had a plastic sword in his right hand. He raised it high above his head until it looked like one of the skyscrapers that stood behind him. It was as though he was proclaiming himself the ruler of the ruins.
Back out on the street, just a minute’s walk from the young boy, was a new modern-looking building with smooth walls, a sleek design and a pastel paint job. Inside, people were buying spots in the new high-rise apartment buildings scheduled to be constructed atop the ruins of a once-proud neighborhood. The name the designers chose for the new apartment complex was JAZZ. Their slogan: “Blues in the city.”
It seemed rather fitting.
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Related:
Shanghai nabs 150 protesting demolition of homes (HRIC) Site blocked in China
Shanghai detains 132 for protesting against forcible clearance (AFP)
05.28.2003, 2:17 PM · Observations, Politics