Fantasy Islands by Sze Julie

Author:Sze, Julie
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520262485
Publisher: University of California Press

MAXIMUM SKYLINE, MINIMALIZED NATURE

Green and clean socialist living city

Technologically hygienic city

the healthy future garden-salad city.

An ordered oasis of high-tech corporations, Siliconed Valleys, and global investment zones.

A massive forestation and green infrastructure planning strategy,

corporate parks, urban forests, flowering roadside urban therapy.

A private Eden of commodified residential real estate and lush greenery,

intelligent homes, luxury, and class-differentiated scenery.

Pudong—one of China’s first garden cities—planted in Shanghai’s Tenth Five Year Plan33

One way to think about the meaning of Thames Town is that it is a totally normal example of shoddy construction in China. Although a building may look good, it falls apart or, in one particularly dramatic case, down. In June 2009, a thirteen-story new development in Shanghai fell down, killing one worker. Investigations pointed to the low-quality pilings used, and the poor placement of the dirt from the garage excavation next to a riverbank, which led to water seeping onto the site.34

For me, Thames Town’s decaying buildings and the sideways Shanghai skyscraper remind me of Albert Speer Sr., not least because his son, Albert Speer Jr., is the architect of An Ting (German Town). In 1934, Speer Sr. proposed “A Theory of Ruin Value,” which suggested that even in an empire’s decline (as in imperial Rome), decayed architectural relics remain monumental and awe-inspiring. The practical purpose of this theory is to avoid modern materials in favor of natural materials. In practice, this meant for Speer Sr. that for grand Nazi buildings and sites he designed (such as the Zeppelin Field or party rally grounds, or the New Berlin, which was never built) “we planned to avoid, as far as possible, all such elements of modern construction as steel girders and reinforced concrete, which are subject to weathering. Despite their height, the walls were intended to withstand the impact of the wind even if the roofs and ceilings were so neglected that they no longer braced the walls. The static factors were calculated with this in mind.”35

In other words, Speer’s ruins were a symbol of the Nazi regime’s grandeur. The theory was also, some argue, a product (or justification) of the reality of the lack of iron in wartime Germany.36 The ruins of Thames Town and the sideways skyscraper are also a symbol of the brutal efficiency of capitalism and its search for cost-cutting at the expense of quality, a symbol, in other words, of a con. That confidence game is also a reflection of the superhot, irrationally exuberant Shanghai building boom, where prices have gone up beyond all economists’ expectations: a bubble waiting to burst, which keeps stubbornly defying expectations that it will do so.37

Thames Town’s decay and the sideways skyscraper are contemporary examples of Shanghaiing, a term that originally referred to the nineteenth-century practice of kidnapping men to work as sailors on American merchant ships for the China trade. Sailors were pressed into unfree labor by “crimps” with colorful names like Jim “Shanghai” Kelly, and Johnny “Shanghai Chicken” Devine, both of San Francisco. The term’s meaning gradually expanded to generally denote kidnapping or engaging in fraud.

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