The Language of Cities by Deyan Sudjic

Author:Deyan Sudjic
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241188057
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2016-08-28T04:00:00+00:00

Skylines are the markers in a high-stakes competitive game in which Hong Kong

Dubai

Shanghai

London fight it out for global supremacy. There is always a new young gunslinger, ready to take on all comers to establish itself as more conspicuous, and more dynamic than the rest. It’s a constant battle in which there is nothing more humiliating than being the city with a tower on its skyline that was formerly the world’s tallest.

It was an arrangement that allowed a hybrid culture to flourish in the cracks between regimes. In some parts of the city, it was never entirely clear exactly who was responsible for enforcing any kind of legal system. What is now the city’s Zhonghua Road was once called the Boulevard de Deuxieme République and took you to Edward VII Avenue and Broadway. In those days you could have worshipped in your choice of onion-domed Russian Orthodox churches, the product of the army of White Russian refugees who sailed out of Vladivostok with the Bolsheviks at their heels. Shanghai in the 1930s was an island of floodlit art deco cinemas, neoclassical banks and electric trams, marooned in the midst of a China that had hardly changed in a thousand years. As the city petered out on the road to Nanjing, the neon signs and the street lights disappeared into the darkness of a medieval night.

The long freeze on Shanghai’s development lifted only at the end of the 1980s, with the introduction of the market economy to China. With a population of around 20 million people, Shanghai is effectively a city state now, with the powers of the central government at its disposal to annex satellite towns and villages and to take open territory into its direct control. Those powers have been used to shape a vast new city. Shanghai created an elaborate idea of what it was going to be before it started on realizing its transformation. The first step in the process was the opening of the City Planning Museum. At its heart was a massive model of the colourful new Shanghai of the near future. The size of two tennis courts, it is ringed by multilevel walkways that allow visitors a view of the emerging new city from every angle. In the 1990s, it was the place that all new visitors to Shanghai came to see after the birthplace of the Chinese Communist Party not far away. At first the city it depicted seemed like the remotest of possibilities, a fantasy of steel-and-glass towers in the midst of a city in which open sewers still ran in the streets. In fact, the present-day skyline is even more frenzied in its wild architectural imaginings than the model in the museum promised.

The Oriental Pearl Tower, a cluster of spheres impaled on a concrete tube, like some fantastically naive idea of an interstellar spaceship standing upright, ready for blast-off, has been overwhelmed by a ring of ever taller high-rises. The first of them to take shape was the Jin Mao Tower, with

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