I carried out the audit below on the 10th, as noted. Then I was in Nanjing for the Chinese Independent Film Festival for a couple of days, returning on the afternoon of the 14th. In the evening, at about the same time as I did the initial audit, I went back to the square and found a few faults which I corrected. This confirmed to me that even when I’m trying to pay attention and do things in detail, I still make mistakes! Therefore, these audits always need a double-check. In this case, the mistakes were made towards the end, when I was tired.
Shanghai Audit no.1 Wujiaochang (五角场)
Area covered: The streetscape at Wujiaochang (lit. “Five Corner Square”), i.e. screens and screen technologies visible by walking along the side of each building on each corner, and by going down to the sunken circular plaza in the middle. (One road, enclosed in a latticework “egg”, as the locals call it, soars above the sunken plaza, which is formed by the roundabout where the other roads meet.) I decided to stay out of any individual mall, and out of the grid of alleys forming the Wanda Plaza （万达广场）on the northwest corner. I wanted to focus on the street centred on the public space of the sunken plaza.
Time and Date: 10 October 2009, 6-8 p.m on a pleasant Saturday night. It was already dark when I arrived. If there were traffic CCTVs suspended somewhere that might be visible in daytime (although I don’t remember spotting them before) I couldn’t see any in the dark. Furthermore, the screens, which stand out during the day, become part of a larger lightscape at night, including numerous lightboxes of all sizes, and neon. If you wanted to audit the lights, you’d need a team of helpers! At night, I couldn’t see anything on the side of the frames. By 8 p.m. there were a lot more people around than at 6 and the place was clearly the local gathering point.
SW and SE corners are currently building sites with no screens, lightboxes or anything. The south corner where Siping Road (四平路) and Huangxing Road (黄兴路) meet has the Orient Shopping Centre (东方商场), a large single-building shopping mall.
1.
Type of Screen: LCD
Size: 20 x 30 feet?
Location: High above entrance to Orient Shopping Centre
Function: Advertising. (As well as consumer-oriented items, there seem to be public announcements for the Expo, celebrations of National Day earlier this month, and quite a few corporate ads for companies not making consumer products, e.g. a steel manufacturer).
Notes: Some of the pixel squares on this LCD are not working. I wonder why they are not repaired or if it is difficult to repair them? This screen is visible from the street and also from down inside the sunken plaza.
The sunken plaza was originally supposed to have shops all around its inside, I’m told. But that hasn’t happened. I guess no one wanted to rent the space? There were lightboxes in all the passageways leading into the plaza, but quite a lot were just advertising that these could be rented by advertisers. So, although lots and lots of people traverse the plaza (it’s the only way to cross the road here), it seems it has not been a huge commercial success yet.
There were red lanterns suspended all the way round the edge of the plaza for National Day holidays. In the centre of the plaza was a statue of the Expo mascot (a sort of Sponge Bob figure that is all over Shanghai these days, not lit up and so more or less invisible) and also an internally-lit pillar with a countdown on it.
2, 3, 4, 5.
Types of Screens: LED
Size: One strip all round the top of the pillar, perhaps 30 cm wide, and 3 screens on the pillar, each about 0.5 x 1 m. The strip was like a tickertape of red characters, and the rectangular screens also had red writing on them.
Location: middle of the sunken plaza
Function: The rectangular screens are a countdown, like the countdown clock originally developed for the return of Hong Kong in 1997, and installed in Tiananmen Square in Beijing. This they proliferated all over town as the countdown clock for the Beijing Olympics in 2008, and now it’s all over Shanghai as the countdown for the Expo next year (203 days to go as of October 10). The strip carried information such as the dates of the Expo (May 1 to October 31), the slogan “Better City, Better Life” (in Chinese, less elegant than in English, interestingly: 城市，让生活更美好), and also telling the citizens what the expo is and that it’s important (which I get the impression a lot of Shanghai residents are unconvinced of so far).
Notes: The pillar is well-lit and at night it’s the most visible thing in the plaza. The egg above us was not lit when I arrived although I noticed later that its light display system started flashing away at about 7 p.m. People clearly rendezvous in the centre of the plaza as “under the egg” is an easy meeting place for everyone. Lots of people nonetheless overheard on their mobile phones doing the usual “I’m here, where are you?” routine. Some people taking photos of their kids in front of the pillar.
6, 7
Type of Screens: LED
Size: Rectangular, about I x 1.5 m
Location: Outside entrance to Orient Shopping Centre, on one each side of an Expo display with clocks on it telling the time in different parts of the world. One on each side.
Function: Time plus countdown to Expo, in red characters
Notes: One screen is visible from the entrance/exit to the Orient, and the other from across the square or as you are driving past.
The most visible screen at Wudaochang can be seen from a good mile away down Handan Road. However, I think the egg obscures it once you are down in the plaza.
8.
Type of Screen: LCD
Size: Huge, perhaps 30 x 20 m?
Location: On the front of the Youyicheng mall (白联又一城购物中心) on the NE corner of the square.
Function: Same as the one on the front of the Orient, but I think the ads are for more prestigious brands or international brands.
Notes: This one is much brighter than the one on the Orient, and I don’t think any of the pixels have failed yet. It makes the one on the front of the Orient seem a bit sad and second-rate. Nobody stands and stares at this or any other individual screen. Yet, the whole light show, combined the shops and other things you can do here seem to make this place a magnet for people in the evening.
On the Youyicheng mall side of Songhu Road (淞沪路) leading north out of the square, there are 4 tombstone-shaped pillars, with screens on each side. Each screen seems to be a combo-screen, with an LCD rectangle on top and an LED with tickertape writing running along the bottom. So, I counted each one as a double, making 4 screens on each pillar, and 16 screens in all.
9-16.
Types of Screen: LED, LCD combo
Size: LCD perhaps 1.5 x 1 m, and LED perhaps 1.5 x 30 cm
Location: Youyicheng mall side of Songhu Road, outside mall. The other side of the “pillars” on which these screens are mounted, facing Songhu Road, has simple lightboxes. (First time round, I assumed they must be the same on both sides. But the road side was invisible to me and — foolishly! — I did not double-check.)
Function: Intended for advertising, and currently running lots of celebrate-the-expo stuff, but also exhorting people to contact them if they want to put ads on these.
Notes: There is clearly a tension between Wujiaochang’s ambition to be an Oxford Circus and its location, which is more like Brent Cross. When I first visited this part of town a few years ago, Wujiaochang was just a traffic intersection and there were no major retail developments here. This is an ordinary residential neigborhood with a university adjacent. Youyicheng mall is very upmarket, with a Starbucks and so on. But it seems to be largely empty. There is no tube station here yet (although there will be one later). So, there’s a tension between what the place wants to be and what it is so far, manifested in the unrented advertising spaces. I wonder whether this is part of a city planning drive? Is the vision that, with 2 major universities nearby, this part of town will move significantly upmarket in the next few years?
17-21.
Types of Screen: 5 TV sets in a row
Size 30-inch max each.
Location: inside a café bar in the Youyicheng mall, on the Songhu Road side.
Function: Hard to tell. The screens are not visible from inside the café, but only from the street. They seemed to just have regular TV running, but I couldn’t tell what was on.
Notes: Need to pay more attention!
The NW corner has the Wanda Plaza (万达广场). As I noted on my previous visit, this is by far the busiest part of the whole area. It is not a single-building mall, but rather divided by little alleyways. This grid is accessible 24 hours. There are various shops from department stores to individual restaurants etc. From the Youyicheng side of Songhu Road, it’s noticeable that while the Wanda is covered with lightboxes and neon, there are no screens, I guess because they would be swamped by the other stuff. The one exception is the large screen on the front of the Wanda International Cinema Complex. Although this is set inside the grid of streets, it is visible from Songhu Road, and so I decided to count it in.
22.
Type of Screen: LCD
Size: 4 x 6 m?
Location: On front of building containing cinemas
Function: Advertising, including but not confined to trailers for cinema.
Notes: I noticed a “Life Channel” watermark logo in the top left hand side on one commercial. This refers to a Shanghai TV channel. In it a reporter was interviewing people in a restaurant, and the restaurant logo was on his microphone. Weird mix of report and ad?
23. (Not sure if this counts)
Type of Screen: LED?
Size: 3 x 2 m?
Location: There are 4 rectangular ads around the Wanda screen (no.30). The one on the top left has a sort of moving light show behind the main element, which advertises the KTV (karaoke) in the place.
24.
Type of Screen: LED
Size: 1 x 4 m
Location: above entrance to China Gold Coin (中国金币) store on Wanda Plaza, facing Songhu Road.
Function: red tickertape. Mostly advertising. But when I snapped it, the Expo slogan was running across it.
Notes: This was the only screen I could see in any of the stores facing the street
(Unless they have only just been installed, the following screens were missed on the first run-through. No one is paying them any attention whatsoever. They feel like orphans to me.)
25.
Type of Screen: LCD screen on a stand.
Size: 1 wide x 0.75 m high
Location: Songhu Road entrance to Paris Printemps (巴黎春天) Department Store.
Function: Some sort of variety show is playing on the screen (it is silent) but there is slit in which people can drop notes. The charity is 中国扶贫基金会.
Notes: I see no one put any money in.
26-31.
Type of Screen: 6 LCD screens, arranged on 3 pillars, one screen above the other.
Size: 0.5 wide x 0.3 high
Location: 2 pillars in the entrance to Paris Printemps at the corner of Handan Road and Songhu Road, and 4 at the entrance on Songhu Road.
Function: I think they are intended for advertising. At the moment, they have messages about the Expo, ways of contacting the owners (Pico Media, 盈迈笔克传媒, 021-63875363), and a singer. Again, totally ignored. I noticed that the same folks have screens hanging in the windows of the store on the alleys inside the mall.
The audit finished at about 8. As I passed the NW corner of Handan and Songhu Roads, in the pavement space in front of the Paris Printemps (巴黎春天) Department Store, the locals were beginning their public dancing. This is something you see in public spaces all over China, but less in Shanghai than elsewhere. People had brought their boomboxes, and they were playing Radio 2-style ballroom music or folk music. People were then dancing to it, either in couples (the ballroom) or as a sort of mass line dancing event or aerobics event.
It seems to me that there is no accident this is outside the Wanda Plaza. This plaza has a lot more affordable shops in it, and attracts many more shoppers. There are also food stalls of various sorts, which are well patronized. Here, the consumer ambitions of the developers and the desires of the local residents seem to mesh well. The use of the space for dancing is not really a challenge to the shops and so on, as I’m sure many of the dancers had eaten in the restaurants before they began to trip the light fantastic.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I dipped into the basement of the Wanda to eat at a Chinese fast food outlet. Here the light is really intense, there are lots of screens, and it was jammed with people. I couldn’t help thinking about whether people seek out the light at night to try and hide from some sort of fear of darkness. Of course, this is also where the toilets are, which draws people in, too, including me.
At the end of this audit, I feel like I will come back and spend a lot more time here now, trying to get a sense of how the traffic changes over the day, and how the screens are more prominent in the daylight than at night, when they become part of a general lightscape. I also want to try and make closer observations about what’s on the big screens. And I’m interested in the flows of people here and if I can observe more.
Lu Xinyu told me that the sunken plaza had also become a place where temporary workers sometimes gather to sit around and chat. These are the most marginal figures in the city, and there are certainly plenty of them around this part of town, because construction is ongoing here. But I did not see any of them last night.
Finally, thinking about Terry’s City Legend prototypes, I noticed how there is map on each corner of the square. But I never saw anyone using it at all.
