This was a very challenging but interesting day. Accompanied by Prof. Lü Xinyu’s PhD student Zhao Yeming (the person with the Fudan ID Card) and armed with a letter of introduction from Fudan, Wu Dan and I set off to the Wujiaochang Street Office (五角场街道办事处). This is the lowest rung of government. We were in search of the government vision for Wujiaochang and also some information about the regulation of screens (if there are any). Chinese government officials are often loathe to talk on the record. This is called “passing the ball” in Chinese. They prefer to send you off to see someone else, especially if you are foreigner, which always makes people nervous. After all, you never know when it’s going to turn out that you’ve accidentally given away a state secret. On the other hand, it would be rude to simply turn us away, so the best way is to refer us up the food chain, and that’s pretty much what happened. To cut a long story short, we did not get too far with the government officials, but we did a bit better at the department stores.
The gatekeeper at the street office sent us to the Residents’ Service Centre (居民服务中心). This is where you apply for various minor business licenses etc. The woman running the place by herself told us to go to the Propaganda Section (宣传处), which turned out to be on the 5th floor. The people there sent us off to “Teacher Wang” in an office on the 22nd Floor of the Orient Shopping Plaza, where they took our details and called us back to say they could not be interviewed by us without permission from the Yangpu District level.
However, the woman in the Residents’ Service Centre did immediately confirm that it was impossible to simply hang up a moving image screen in a public place, and that one did have to get permission. But she wasn’t the person to process that application, it was somewhere else. (We’ll try to visit later.)
On our way up to the 22nd Floor of the Orient, we also visited the Marketing Department (市场部) of the department store, on the 17th floor. Wu Dan will give a more detailed account of this discussion, held in the foyer of the office, but what I gleaned was already very useful. She told us that the screen was not there when the store itself was built around 2000, but was added in 2005 and went into operation in 2006. It was now run by a media company, and they leave everything to them. They don’t even bother to check the ads to see if they are appropriate to the store’s image or not. They just take the money from the company. When I asked her, she said she did not know how much they were paid. She indicated as well that the government requires them to put a certain amount of PSAs in with the commercial advertising. She was fully aware that the screen was poor compared to that on the Bailian Youyi, but pointed out that although business was better than it used to be, Wujiaochang is not Xujiahui, and there are few customers except on the weekends and during the holidays. Meanwhile, they are still waiting for the subway, and so there is not much motivation to invest in upgrading the screen right now. She also said their screen was on from 8 in the morning to 11 at night, and turned off to save electricity and money. Besides, there are not many people around during the night, she claimed.
Wu Dan had already had a brief conversation with Bailian Youyi on the phone the day before. Again, she’ll give a more detailed account and we hope to have a chance to talk to them later. But they told her already that although SMG handles it for them, they do work together to make sure the ad images match their store image.
Next, we went over to the Paris Printemps. (I think I need to see if I can just stand in the doorway and photograph what is on the screens I’ve designated as of interest. Hopefully no one will give a damn.) We were directed up to the Marketing Department again, on the 7th floor this time. A man came out and chatted with us. He told us that Pico Media supplied the pairs of large flatscreens that run throughout the store and outside the elevators, as well as the pairs of screens on boxes that had caught my interest. Pico pays the store for this. The only screens that are the store’s own are the ones in the elevators. The content on the screens is a mix of what Pico wants to put on and the store’s ads. The store and Pico collaborate and make sure the content is OK for both. When asked about the position of the boxes in the entryway, where no one pays them any attention, he seemed to think the logic was that there should be something on the way in to represent the store to the customers. Hmmm… not very convincing to me. As for having the same stuff on both screens, I forget what he said, but it seemed quite speculative.
He explained that the charity boxes had been put there by the government. (This was very ironic, since this morning a researcher from Xi’an in the Fudan Centre had been explaining to me that he thought a major reason why comparatively few Chinese give to charity is that they don’t trust the government not to steal it.) The box was put there and other places throughout the mall by the government, although he was not sure what government office put it there.
Most of today was spent pimping myself for Goldsmiths with Rachel Bilson, who is on a recruitment trip.
In the evening, however, I had an interesting dinner with Prof. Chris Connery, from UC Santa Cruz. He is heading up the University of California’s Education Abroad Program here for a couple of years. Although most of his students are Business majors, he himself is from the Literature Department, but is really a historian of modern and contemporary China. Among other things, when we got into a cab on the way back, we noticed it was one with a screen on the back of the front passenger seat. Chris hates them, and so we turned them right off. However, he also told me that these screens have now been banned. Apparently, they’ve only ever been in one or two companies’ cabs, and the passengers don’t like them. But then, the real turning point was an incident in which an actor or some sort of celeb was cut by the screen in a traffic accident. Of course, the best way to prevent that would be put seatbelts in the back seats of taxis! But I guess taking the screens out is another way to address the issue! Wu Dan and I will have to follow up on this.
Today was the day Wu Dan and I set aside to explore the subway system a bit more and also to walk in some areas we had never been to before (along the lines of Bromley-by-Bow and the district I went to in Cairo). Overall, I would say that the walks in areas we had never been before were a bit like the walks in London and Cairo, in that we only discovered very little evidence of screen usage. Once again, this reminds us that these particular new media are not ubiquitous, but associated with certain kinds of culture.
Still, I would say that there were definite differences to London and Cairo. First, where residential neighbourhoods in London and Cairo are carpeted in satellite screens, the satellite dish remains illegal in China, where the government still aims to control people’s access to media, especially foreign media. Second, where the coffee shop screen was the main screen I saw in the Cairo neighbourhood, in China it seems that red LED and often tickertape-style LED screens are the most common thing. My hypothesis is that this is an extension of the blackboard that used to be what you found in China — like the blackboard, it tends to be text-based, it is locally controlled, it is mostly used for announcements of various kinds, and it can be changed frequently. However, the difference is that, mostly, it is used now as part of shops promoting themselves and is therefore part of a commercial culture that did not exist so much in the era of the blackboard.
[Wu Dan adds: There were small blackboards in the windows of small stores until the 1990s. Blackboards were used as promotion tools. I remember a small store (2 or 3 square meters) on the street of my granny’s apt had a small blackboard, on which was written some main items for sale. Only small stores used blackboards. Now usually big stores have LEDs.].
Public Transport
I got on the 910 bus at Guoquan Road and Siping Road, going to Dalian Road and Siping Road, at 09.30 a.m. There was a screen at the front and one in the middle. I couldn’t see either of them because the bus was so packed and I was down at the very front next to the driver. But I could see that images from the CCTV camera above the door in the middle of the bus (which is the exit) were visible on a small black-and-white TV screen on her dashboard. There was another CCTV camera pointed at the front door, but I did not spot any images coming up from that (probably because the driver can see for herself to make sure she is not closing the door on someone there).
Arriving at the Siping Road subway station at about 09.45 a.m, there was no security check. This is the only station so far where I have not encountered the Expo-anxiety-prompted security check. I’m not sure why they’re so confident that this station doesn’t need to do the bag x-rays. (On the other hand, given the current fashion for suicide bombing, I am also not sure why they think x-raying bags is the way to go, anyway.) On each platform, there are 3 back-to-back double sets of Samsung flat-screen TVs suspended from the ceiling. This was true in every other station I was able to observe today. On the left hand side of the screen, the number of minutes and seconds before the next 3 trains arrive is given, along with a representation of the route of the line (including where it meets other lines and so forth), and this moves up and down stop by stop. At the bottom of this left-hand column is the time. There is also the time of the first and last trains on the line. On the right hand side, the TV shows either the news or ads. While I was waiting for the train at Siping Road it was sports news, focusing on a football match. On the platform, the sound was at an audible level. This is all from www.mmtv.com.cn, whose web address is below the TV window on the screen.
The no.8 line train down to town was quite full. The screens in the carriages — there is one by each door — had either failed or simply were nut turned on. Many of the riders were middle-aged folks who seemed to be dozing or just staring into space. Younger people were looking at their mobile phone screens, and I saw one young man had a PSP. I understand that many people download internet novels and other texts onto their mobile phones. I’m not sure if they also do that with the PSPs, or if those are only for football, snooker etc. I could see one person down the carriage reading a magazine, and when I turned round there was a man in the distance in the other direction reading a newspaper. But it’s rare to see people reading paper-based materials on the subway here. I also noticed that although some people took calls occasionally, on the whole it was fairly quiet on the train.
At 10.05 a.m., I changed at Lujiabang Road to line no.9. I noticed the same 3 pairs of screens on each platform. I also noticed that in between the screens, there were pairs of Yaan brand CCTV cameras pointing at and past each other, up and down the platform. At some other stations, I noticed globe CCTVs as well. Unfortunately, on the no.9 line up to Xujiahui, where I was due to meet Wu Dan, the screens were off, too. The only screens on were the “zouzi” tickertape style screens at each end of the carriage, which repeat the message that is also announced about welcoming you on board, the final destination, and the next stop. This message is in both Chinese and English, both verbally and on the LEDs. On the short journey up to Xujiahui, the carriage was pretty empty when I got on. The middle-aged man opposite was reading a newspaper, the woman to my left was reading a long text on her mobile phone, and the woman to my right got bored and then starting calling numbers until someone answered and she could have a chat.
While I waited for Dan to arrive at Xujiahui station, at the far end of the platform, I found a touch-screen “Intelligent Enquiry System” (只能查询服务系统). It had a map of the area around the station. In theory there is supposed to be the option of touching various places in the neighbourhood and getting information about them (e.g. hospitals etc), but at the moment the screen says “no information available” for these. There is also a station plan, a map of the lines going through the station, timetables for trains, and a lot of information about the subway system itself. Although it was only in Chinese, I was quite impressed. Dan was less impressed. She pointed out that technological people have GPS on their mobiles with all that on it anyway, and older people who are less technological will not be interested in touch-screen devices.
The journey out to Songjiang New Town at the end of line 9 takes 50 minutes. We were standing all the way, and so we could not take detailed notes about what was on the screens. What we did notice, however, was that the signal failed a couple of stops before the end of the line. When we checked our mobiles, we noticed that they also had “no signal”! So, this really is the middle of nowhere!
Coming back up from Songjiang New Town at 13.20 p.m., the screens were simply blue all the way. I’ve never seen this before. Before I’ve always seen them either on or off, but not on but blue. It’s a long journey to and from Songjiang New Town. At 14.15, we changed onto the No.7 line to Yaohua Road, another place neither of us had been before. It took 15 minutes to get there, and on the way, we took notes on what was playing on the screens (which were on at last and in a situation where we could sit down and take notes!). This is what we got:
• News report about 114 Australian waterskiers breaking some kind of record
• News report about a Chinese flying display team winning a competition
• Ad for a drink (Wahaha brand)
• Ad for Alice in Wonderland, to be released on 31 March
• “O.C.T. Mami” maternity clothes brand ad, mostly animation-based.
• Ad featuring young children, about the Shanghai Expo (Slogan: 用快乐温馨实现难忘, Happiness Will Create Everlasting Memories)
• Ad featuring changing times and progress, about the Shanghai Expo (Slogan: 时代在变，节奏在变，城市精神不变, The Times Change, the Seasons Change, but the Spirit of the City is Eternal)
• New Shanghai Expo ad (I hadn’t seen it before this visit) featuring pavilions with their names in titles in English and Chinese. (The signal broke up a bit during this, I think maybe because we were going under the Huangpu River at that point?)
• Long domestic news report about the drought in the Southwest, including weather reports about welcome rain in Yunnan, digging wells somewhere else and so on.
• Domestic news report about a spring snowstorm in Yili in Xinjiang
• Domestic news report about (I think) emergency services exercises in a new road tunnel being completed somewhere in Inner Mongolia
• Local news report on the New Bund (happy public reacting happily to the good news)
• Local news report about a new higher minimum wage in Shanghai
• Local news report about a new law with a new lower limit on blood alcohol for drivers.
I confess I did not try to take more notes on the subway and the bus on the way home because I was too tired…
Songjiang New Town (松江新城)
It took at least 50 minutes west on the train from Xujiahui to get to the end of the No.9 line, Songjiang. The train was above ground for a good part of the way, and we kept passing tracts of new developments. Nearly all of them were large Western-style houses in gated communities for the new rich, varying in style from standard McMansion to Italian Renaissance-style houses. There were also apartment complexes. Clearly, the urbanization of the Yangtze River Delta is proceeding apace, and the countryside is being swallowed up very quickly. The gated community aspect of the development may sound like it something that comes out of the wealth gap, and of course it is related to that. But the old danwei socialist work unit, with housing, workplace, school, and everything all combined, also always had a wall round it and limited entrance points.
We arrived at Songjiang New Town Station at 11.25 a.m. The route of our walk:
Take Northeast exit of Songjiang New Town Subway Station onto Tongyue Road. Turn left and head north 150 metres or so up to the intersection with Lücheng Road. Across the intersection to the Northeast is a mall. Walk through mall to Nanqing Road, and turn right and head East to intersection with Guyang North Road. Head north 1 km to the next major intersection, which is Xin Songjiang Road. Cross to the north side, turn left and head west along street. When we got to the intersection with Tongyue Road again, we doubled back along the south side of the street to check out an interesting LED sign, then went down Tongyue Road until we were almost back at the station. We ended the walk at about 12.30 and had lunch at a UBC coffee shop.
My first thought upon seeing Songjiang was to think of images I have seen of Pyongyang, or maybe of a new town on the flat lands of Inner Mongolia. In other words, I saw huge, wide, straight streets, lots of apartment blocks, not much traffic, and not a lot of life. Somehow, Shanghai seemed very far away indeed. It’s a new town, so what did I expect? It’s certainly in the same lineage as Milton Keynes or downtown Croydon. In contrast to all the other places just mentioned, I’m sure it’s hotter than hell here in the summer. It would be a great place to set a Madame Bovary-in-China movie, with her never able to get on the subway…
Walking out of the station, you see that the outside of the station is all little shops and restaurants. Not a single screen, however. There are large numbers of motorbikes parked around the station, and it has an underground car park. There are motorbike taxis and regular taxis ready for you, along with a lot of busses. This is presumably a dormitory suburb, and it’s evidently very spread out, with a big empty area of land just north of the station. So, people need all these various forms of transport to get to and from their homes. The informal motorbike taxis are something you don’t find in Shanghai these days, but you still find in smaller towns all over China. I noticed that there are no screens inside the buses (apart from LED destination screens at the front of the compartment).
When we reached Lücheng Road, we found our first screen. This was a tickertape red LED screen above the entrance to a building supplies and decoration company, advertising its products. (There are a lot of such company shops here, because the place is still being settled, I guess.) This set the tone for everything that was to come for the whole of the day (including at Yaohua Road). We did not see any of those side-of-a-building screens, or any LCDs in Songjiang. What we did see were red tickertape LEDs, mostly at stores at intersections.
Crossing the road into the mall area, we discovered it consisted of a series of buildings with roads in between. It was a bit like Wanda Plaza at Wujiaochang in that way. However, it was older and less well maintained. Even though it was presumably built quite recently, bits of façade had peeled and fallen off. Also, where Wanda is pedestrianized, this was drive through. Throughout the walk, we noticed that not all roads had sidewalks, and in general the distances and the layout seemed designed with the car in mind. There were parking places in front of every shop, and so on. I’m sure a lot of people do have cars out here, and it makes it clear that it’s a neighbourhood for those who cannot afford the expensive in-town neighbourhoods, but who can afford a car — or at least a motorbike.
Among the places we noticed with LED red tickertapes was a bank, a spa, and a restaurant. But they were few and far between. The most exciting moment was when we discovered a large (perhaps 1 metre tall x 1.5 metres wide) LED screen at the north entrance to the Jin Gui Yuan housing complex. (Here as elsewhere, each housing complex seems to take up a whole block, to have walls, and to be gated.) The screens used red, yellow and green coloured letters. The quality of the green letters was very poor, perhaps demonstrating what Dan had read on the internet about the technology for green being, for some reason, more difficult.
Here is the slide cycle as we photographed it:
1.
03/29, Monday, 12:06
Friendly Reminder
Recently, thieves have been coming into the community, and many residents have suffered financial loss. Please lock your doors and windows when you leave the community, and don’t…
2.
03/29, Monday, 12:06
…leave your wallets and valuables in your cars. Please step up your vigilance.
Jin Gui Yuan Residents Committee
Ping’an Work Team
3.
03/29, Monday, 12:06
Fangsong Street is currently being established as a city-rank civilized community
4.
03/29, Monday, 12:06
The community is my home
[something about being civilized in broken green characters]
5.
03/29, Monday, 12:06
Being civilized begins with me
6.
03/29, Monday 12:06
Splendid World Expo
Civilized Community
7.
03/29, Monday, 12:06
Eliminate ? (broken green characters)
Promote Civilization
8.
03/29, Monday, 12:06
Fire prevention depends on everyone
Keeping us all safe and sounds
9.
03/29, Monday, 12:07
Being on guard is for safety
Safety is for happiness
Build a secure community
Benefit all citizens
10.
03/29, Monday 12:07
Weather Forecast
Today, starting sunny, clouding over
High of 16°C, low of 8°C
11.
03/29, Monday, 12:07
Secure Community
Everyone is responsible
Everyone takes part
Everyone benefits
12.
03/29, Monday, 12:07
Treasure Life
Refuse Drugs
13
03/29, Monday, 12:07
Friendly Reminder
If you’re driving, don’t drink
If you’ve been drinking, don’t drive
Drunk driving endangers others and yourself
–Songjiang Traffic Police
This screen helped me to see the lineage between these red tickertape LEDs and the blackboard mentioned above very clearly.
The complete absence of other kinds of screens cannot be put down to lack of aspiration in this neighbourhood. I don’t think anyone who lives here was born here. Presumably, they are all people who have moved to Shanghai and are trying to make it here. But it is clear that this is not a destination to visit for anyone who does not live here. Nobody comes here to watch the movies, or go eat a meal and have a walk around. The same is true for our other place-we’ve-never-got-off-the-subway neighbourhoods that we’ve walked around.
Yaohua Road (耀华路) Neighbourhood
Again, this was somewhere neither of us had been before. We arrived at 14.30 p.m. But once we looked at the screens in the station with information, we realized that it was just over the river in a neighbourhood where Shanghai Steel Plant had been, and where the Expo is now being built. I had been hoping for a typical inner-city neighbourhood, and I guess I got it. What we did was walk round a huge block that is full of 1980s-style housing blocks, divided into numerous “villages” (cun).
The route:
Come out of station exit no. 2, facing Chinese pavilion in the Expo grounds. Take a right and walk east along Pudong South Road past the entrance to the Shangnan Yicun housing estate (workers housing left from some huge manufacturing plant that was here once) to the intersection with Hongshan Road. Turn right on Hongshan Road. At the intersection of Chengshan Road, turn right, and walk West to Shangnan Road intersection. Turn right again, back to the train station. Walk finishes at 15.40 p.m.
In a way, this repeated the theme of the Songjiang walk, in that what we were seeing was LEDs, and the occasional in-shop flat-screen TV. The main difference is that there were more of them, which goes along with the density of the neighbourhood. But the logic of using them on shop fronts and mostly at intersections seemed to still hold. We saw them outside a restaurant and a bank just past the subway station; the Expo products shop (all overpriced junk, of course), which was a bit further along Pudong South Road, the post office, an AllDays convenience store, another expo store (perhaps), and a bank at the intersection of Pudong South Road and Hongshan Road; a KeDi convenience store on Hongshan Road before the Changli Road intersection; a confectioners (Laiyinfen) just past the Changli Road intersection; another AllDays convenience store just before the intersection with Chengshan Road; a store across the road from the intersection; a pharmacy a bit further down Chengshan Road; a Tino coffee shop across Shangnan Road; and a restaurant.
Closer to the Expo site itself, we discovered a very new and swish public toilet that used tickertape LED screens to tell you if the stall was occupied or vacant, and also to let you that one room was the men’s urinal. Outside a school and outside the entrance to a gated neighbourhood the post of the rolling gate had a little LED on it with a pattern round the edge and a red tickertape welcoming you. (Unfortunately, it has not come out well in the photos.)
At Hongshan and Changli Road, there was also one of the Expo countdown pillars (33 days to go!), using an LED screen.
Met a friend who works at Shanghai Academic of Social Sciences today. I think he can be quite helpful. He has sent me a copy of a report they did not only ago on “mobile TV” in Shanghai, i.e. TVs in cabs and on the subway etc. Plus one of his colleagues used to work in the Wujiaochang Street Office. Maybe they can make an introduction for us, which would help us a lot!
We also spoke about why screen devices might be so much more popular on the Shanghai subway than the London Tube. One reason I had thought of before was that the physically compact nature of Chinese characters means you can get a lot more content on a screen than you can on a Western equivalent. You don’t really need anything as big as a Kindle or an I-Pad in China. I had thought the devices must be cheap. But according to my friend, the PSPs that they use here are all imported and cost about 2000 RMB — not cheap at all! Another important difference is the absence of free newspapers like Metro or the Evening Standard.
I’ve just come back from photographing the big screen on the Youyi department store. I’ve ended up with 500 or 600 photos and got quite confused about whether or not I’ve got everything. However, the contrast to the Orient is very clear. They only have two things in common. First, they have a lot of ads for themselves. And second, they have a lot of ads for Expo.
Other than that, they are very different. The big screen does have world brands. Last year, it was Pepsi. Right now, it’s L’Oreal. Everything looks much glossier and big budget, with a faster cutting rate (hence my confusion!), good lighting, special effects, and so on. However, I must admit there’s not a big range of material. There’s a lot of Expo and a lot of SMG (Shanghai Media Group), repetitively. Maybe that says something again about how Wujiaochang is still very much in the making. Maybe once the KIC (Knowledge Innovation Community, 创制天地) thing and the subway station are in place, it will all come together a lot more. (Oh, I noticed that there are now brown landmark road signs for KIC itself. Must photograph those. They use the old 1930s Yangpu Stadium as the icon for KIC.)
No clock on the screen, so hard to know exactly how quickly it cycles through. But I think it is approximately a 15 minute cycle.
Still, I think working through this stuff — although daunting — will really help to provide an interesting tale of two screens and a way to talk about how quickly new technologies can become old, meaning that then people feel obliged to replace them (or not, in the case of the Orient!).
This is one occasion when I really did wish I had brought that video camera we bought. Still, I can either try to do that next time or try to get someone else to video it, maybe.
On my way down into the underground plaza at the centre of Wujiaochang, I found some materials from a 2007 plan for the development of the area stuck to the wall. These I photographed especially carefully!
Met with Wenhao in the evening and went over to the Shanghai South Station to brief him on what we need. Interestingly, he felt it did not look so great in the evening, because not all the lights were on. Reflecting back, I guess I had liked the slightly more mysterious feel, or romantic lighting! But maybe it won’t photograph so well. I will leave that to him to decide.
After a discussion, I have also asked Wenhao to take a few more photos of the egg at Wujiaochang, plus video of the two screens. This will help me a lot to do an analysis of what’s on the screen. He gave me some photos of the repaired egg, taken in winter. As he explained, there was no dancing in front of it then, because it was too cold.
This afternoon I went to Wujiaochang again at about 4.30 p.m. I stood in front of the tatty screen on the Orient Shopping Plaza and just pressed the shutter over and over until I was convinced, after perhaps 15 minutes, that the circuit was repeating itself. When I got home I discovered I had taken 232 pictures. Given how much text is on many of the ads on this screen, it seemed to me this might be the only way to deal with it. However, it is going to take some time to analyze all this and see what I’ve actually got.
What are my immediate observations? First, in a strange kind of way it reminded me of the local ads you used to get at the cinema in the UK, i.e. cheaply produced slides for local restaurants, with photos and text. I can’t tell if it was because of the poor condition of the screen itself or the low production values involved, but the advertising seemed cheap. Second, it seemed impractical. Lots involved phone numbers and email addresses to chase up on. How many people in Wujiaochang (except maybe me!) are even paying attention, let alone ready to whip out a notebook and jot down numbers? Third, a lot of the ads were for the Orient Shopping Plaza itself, and there were no ads for international or (I believe) even national brands.
The main thing Wu Dan and I did today was interview Professor Zheng Gang, the Vice General Manager and Chief Architect of ECADI (East China Architectural Design and Research Institute), who was one of the people in overall charge of the Shanghai South Railway Station project. The interview began at about 2.15 and ended at about 3.00 p.m. It was relatively brief and general but very interesting, partly because of the things he was able to clear up about the design of the station, and partly because of the things he said about screens in general.
First, he gave us a sort of overview on the design concept. From this, two things became clear. First, the round design of the station allows trains to pass through it, making it different from the C19 terminus design in European cities, where trains can only move in and back out of the station the way they came in. Second, taking the passengers up above the trains to an elevated open and spacious waiting area was an important part of the design. Although we did not talk about this with him, we have observed previously how the use of glass, including for walls, helps to achieve this. Within this context, the screens are essential for enabling people to find their way.
(Wu Dan adds: Visually, the round form also has symmetry. If the traditional square form had been used, then the building and the tracks could not have been made parallel to the subway system or the existing buildings. It would have created unaesthetic angles. This obstacle disappears with the round form. The round form also has the largest internal volume and the most efficient use of space, helping to solve the problem of the Chinese New Year, a.k.a. Spring Festival crush of passengers.)
Interestingly, he maintained that there has been no problem with people finding their way around the round design, and that the numbers were on the pillars from the start. This is not what the woman at the station told us last year. Who to believe? Dan said she probably believed him, and I agree. On the other hand, he’s not likely to want to say something was overlooked or there was a problem.
He also spoke about the distinction between the round station itself and two underground shopping areas to the side. These are under the jurisdiction of the Shanghai city government, whereas the station itself is under the jurisdiction of the Railways Bureau. We talked about the fact that this is not an integrated retail-hotel-transport hub but tends to separate retail off. He spoke about how there were huge pressures of numbers in the Chinese transport system, especially during the Chinese New Year season. Therefore, the main priority of the station is processing travellers. They have to check in quite early at the moment (although the high speed trains and the increasing number of daily services is changing this very quickly), meaning there are crowds of people moving into waiting rooms and then from there down onto the train. In other words, getting people to also wander around buying things or making the station an independent destination in the city in its own right is not part of their priorities now. Nevertheless, he did speak about how this might change as the boarding process speeds up and there is less need for spacious waiting areas. These might be given over to retail in the future.
The LED direction screens (矩形点阵显示) were therefore an integral part of the design from the word “go.” However, what colours are used and so on in the lettering was not something the designers oversaw. He suggested that the colours might be cheaper because those are the most common colours used in China (something we’ll have to check, as it’s clearly not his particular area of knowledge). As for what colours were used to signify what, that was purely a matter for the station.
(Wu Dan adds: I did some price checking on the internet. Red, Yellow and Blue colours are the cheapest with LEDs. White and Green are technologically more complex and a bit more expensive, with purple and brown as the most expensive. So, what he suggested holds. )
The LCD screens, which he referred to as advertising screens, were clearly of less interest to him, and added in as the space was built according to the demands and needs of the people responsible for advertising space in the station. This seemed interesting to me, because I feel that the LCD and LEDs work together to regulate flow, and that the former are not just an optional add-on. They tell people you can wait here, where as the others point you in a direction to go.
He also said that originally the touch-screen info stands were supposed to be used a lot more and there were supposed to be many more of them. But a) there wasn’t enough money (Wu Dan adds: He felt this was the government’s excuse, mostly in order to conceal control of information. They are not willing for too much government information to be revealed to the public. Without an information filtering mechanism, information can only be released to the public after the government offices have agreed) — and b) there isn’t enough information on them or linked to them to make them of much interest. He maintained there was no problem with the technology itself (although I found the one we played with on our last visit clunky, as these things usually are).
Finally, we had a general discussion that played into our interest in the old and the new and the way in which the new becomes the old very quickly. He said that he felt the quality of the technology was crucial to whether screens look good or not — it’s all about whether the pixels are functioning and whether the screens are bright enough to work, even in daylight. (Wu Dan adds: There is also the issue of the position of the screens. They cannot be facing the sun, or the results will not be good. And the contents are also important. They have to be beautiful, otherwise they will not complement the building.) Clearly, by this logic, which I think is largely correct, each new generation of screens will make the last lot look tatty and past it.
(Wu Dan adds: Regarding why the station does not have a shopping mall as an integral part of the design, the main problem is property rights. The station itself belongs to the Railway Bureau, but the surrounding shopping malls belong to the Shanghai government. With these separate sets of ownership, it was impossible to design a large shopping area into the station itself. But from Mr. Zheng’s point of view, future development of the existing design would not be too difficult.)
After this, we checked out the Shanghai City Archives for photos and material on the old Wujiaochang. Although we did not really get anything much, I was struck by the new culture of public access at work here. We just walked in and there was no hassle. Second, I was struck by the culture of putting a lot online and making as much as possible accessible through computers. Portals at work here, as Janet might say. But this is also a public institution, like the museum, and the computer screen interface is crucial in both sites. In contrast, at the station, it is the least important kind of screen.
Wu Dan and I agreed to meet up at a Costa Coffee in the Grand Gateway (港汇) mall at Xujiahui on our way to attempt the audit of the Shanghai South Railway Station. We did this mostly because we had heard that additional security in preparation for the Expo meant that there were armed police at the station now and that we might well not be able to get into the building at all without a ticket, never mind the central area that was already reserved for ticketholders only before. I deliberately did not bring a camera, because I didn’t want any hassle.
However, Shanghai is always changing, and when I got to the mall they told me that the Costa had closed down since I was last here a few months ago. I had also been warned to expect bags to have to go through X-ray machines on the subway as part of the new security drive. But, although that went on at all the major hubs we went through, it didn’t happen where I got on the subway at Siping Road.
And when we did get to the railway station at about 12.45, it seemed to be open for business as usual. On the way in at ground level, we noticed an LED destination screen with lots of malfunctioning/failing lights and colours. We wondered why they don’t fix it. The only change we found was that the Italian café overlooking the action has also closed. (Clearly, some businesses don’t last long here!) So, we went and ate at a Chinese dumpling place (DN Dumpling), also on the upper level, so that we could unobtrusively do a fair amount of the audit from there.
We decided to cover about a third of the outside ring of the station from pillar 2 at the Northeast entrance to pillar 7. The restaurant we were eating in was above pillar 6. We also decided to add the half of the middle circle beyond the ticket inspector’s entry points that was closest to us and visible from where we were. After observing and noting all we could from above, we went downstairs and added in the rest. No one seemed that bothered by what we were doing.
UPPER LEVEL
1. Samsung LCD 50 x 70 cm. On side of service console in dumpling shop. Not turned on.
CENTRAL RING (only directly accessible to those with tickets)
2-13. Central ring, down the middle, 6 pillars with 2 back-to-back flat screen LCDs at the top, all playing the same channel. All the LCD screens in the whole station were playing the same thing. Closer observation revealed this channel to be Mega Info Media (兆讯传媒公司), and that it belonged to the All-China Railway Bureau (全国火车站电视广告联播网). At the bottom of the screen was a blue tickertape with white lettering that carried news headlines and weather forecasts. The material above it on the channel appeared to be all ads or paid-for programming, e.g. from Disney. When we observed the central ring LCDs, the third from the left from where we were sitting in the dumpling store on the east side of the station and the seventh were not on/broken.
14-19, running down the middle avenue of the inner ring are 6 relatively small LED screens on the top of pillars, and sticking out into the avenue like flags, indicating the entrance to the various waiting areas off to the side by the train number. If you enter this central area, you go down a ramp, so you see these screens first. This then directs you to the correct waiting area.
20-27. As you enter each of the waiting areas to the side you will find one of 8 single-sided quite large (perhaps 1.5 x 1 m?) LED screens facing you, each one with details concerning the particular train the waiting area is currently serving. If you turn around and sit down, you will be facing one of the nos.2-13 LCD screens.
28-33. Beyond screens 20-27 are ramps leading down to the platform areas. At the top of each of these is a relatively small LED with the train number, like nos.14-19.
OUTER RING (from pillar 2 to 7).
At Pillar 2 is the SE Entrance to the station.
34. As you approach the entrance, there is a very large (3 m by 2 m) LED with all the details of the trains, the waiting areas etc. These LEDs are in 3 colours — red, orange and green. At first, we thought that red was for the things that did not change, words such “train” or “platform”, that orange was used for things like the specific train numbers or platform numbers that would change as the day went on, and that green was for high attention messages such as “now checking tickets” (i.e. go into the boarding area). The latter would also flash sometimes. But then, later on, we noticed that green could be used for the day of the week, so the logic of the colour deployment became less clear to us.
35-38. There are two security gates in at the SE Entrance, each with an X-ray machine for baggage. Each X-ray machine has two TV monitor screens, one in colour and one in black-and white. (We don’t know why!)
39. LED screen, perhaps 1 m by 70 cm. At first we thought the information on this was different from the information on 34, but then we realized it had the same information but in a different order all its own. (Who knows why?)
40-42. 3 CCTV globes, hanging low down on pillars 2, 4 and 6. In other words, there is one of these every two pillars.
43-50. Underneath the dumpling shop is the soft-seat waiting room. We couldn’t enter this, but as far as we could make out, there were 4 pairs of back-to-back LEDs hanging from the ceiling with train information.
51-58. Next to them were 4 back-to-back pairs of LCD flat screens with the railway TV channel playing.
59 At the end of the waiting room nearest pillar 7 was one more flat screen LCD playing the railway channel.
60. From the soft seat waiting area is a special entrance (东软席动车组专用检票口), with its own ramp leading down to an LED screen which directs soft-seat passengers to the left (for platforms 6-11) or the right (platforms 1-5), and lists the relevant train numbers underneath. Underneath there was a message playing with advice about minding the gap and not getting lost:
严禁携带危险品上车。(It is strictly forbidden to carry dangerous items onto the train.)
开车前五分钟停止检票。(The gate closes 5 minutes before the train leaves.)
确认站台，避免走错。(Check your platform number and avoid going the wrong way.)
站台与车厢有间隙，小心踏空受伤 (Mind the gap between the platform and the train.)
A1候车室在 北面下一层 (The A1 waiting room is one floor below in the north.)
FAR OUTER RING
Before you go through the SE Entrance is Ticket Office No.1, facing the street level, but still inside the station.
61-2. Above the ticket windows are 2 large LED screens with information about trains and how many tickets are still available in each category.
63-71. Above each window is a smaller rectangular LED with information about what you can do at that window (or if it is closed temporarily).
OUTSIDE THE AUDIT AREA
72. We noticed that in the central avenue, at one end, on the side from the area we were auditing, there was one stand-alone LED with red letter slogan-like messages to encourage people to behave in a civilized way and so on. It’s odd that there’s just one of these. The rest of the equivalent spaces down the central avenue are taken up with lightboxes (also often with public service style information), but there’s only one screen like this. So, we included it even though it was just outside the audit territory. Here is what was on it:
笑迎四方宾客，送上一片真情 (A sincere welcome to all passengers.)
共建和谐铁路，共享美好旅途 (Let’s all build a harmonious railway, to create a beautiful journey.)
城市，让生活更美好 (Better City , Better Life
创建和谐之旅，服务精彩世博 (Create a harmonious journey, serve a brilliant World Expo).
Finally, we did not see any of the touch-screen stands with information about the station in our audit area. We did notice one elsewhere in the station, abandoned, and turned off. Perhaps they have given up on these?
I just walked over to Wujiaochang, a.k.a. “Pentagon Plaza”. The egg is alive again! Thank goodness for that. The whole place feels much better with pulsing light shows in the middle of it, rather than a dead black hole. But it’s pouring with rain and freezing cold (I could see my own breath). So there weren’t many people about, and no sidewalk dancers tonight.
Tomorrow I’m going to meet up with Wu Dan and we’re going to try and audit a section of Shanghai South Railway Station. I don’t know how easy it is going to be. I’ve heard that security has been stepped up a lot in advance of the Expo, and so we may face restrictions about even getting into the station itself without a ticket. We’ll see…
Last day for me. Amal leaves very early to go to Rehab and from there on a charity mission out to an “informal housing” area. (60% of Cairo’s population lives in informal housing, according to a book I am reading, City of Sand by Maria Golia). I really wanted to go, but we were worried about me missing my plane, stuck out in the middle of nowhere.
So, I also decided to find ordinary Cairo (as opposed to City Stars and Rehab). I decided to copy our walk strategy by going on the subway to a stop I’d never been to before. Taking the subway from Attaba Square towards Shubra, I got out after 5 stops or so at El Khalafawi, and exited at Mohammed El Khalafawi Boulevard. This seems to be an ordinary middle class neighbourhood, or maybe lower middle. I walked straight north, then turned right at a cinema or nightclub called Romio, went past a school, and kept turning right. In the end, after an hour of walking along a street full of shops and cafes in a residential neighbourhood, I recognized I was lost and took a taxi back to Attaba.
Along the way, a pattern established itself very quickly in terms of screens. First, there were satellite dishes on the top of every single residential building. Second, there were TV sets in cafes and also in quite a lot of shops. Every time I took a photo of a TV set in a sheesha place, the guys beckoned me to come and join them. I got a lot of “welcome to Egypt” cries from younger men. I don’t think foreigners are often seen in this neighbourhood. There are no roman lettering road name signs, so I have no idea really where I was.
That’s it, basically. The sets are a mix of new flat screen and what I think of as “regular” TVs, but should probably start calling “old-fashioned” TVs. Quite a few of them were not turned on. (I guess it was early in the day in Egyptian terms.) In addition, there was often the sound of what to my ear sounded like sermons or readings from the Koran (think Charles Hirschkind’s book). The TV sets seemed to be playing that sometimes, but also soaps and sport. But I was walking, and did not spend long enough to gather what was on the screens in the cafes where only the men hang out, and whether it is different from the shops where there are both genders, etc. etc. I would also be interested to notice when (if ever) people in the cafes actually look at the screens.
Tonight there is an England v. Egypt soccer game on at 10 p.m. We have heard that sometimes there are screens put out in public places on these special occasions. I think Amal is going to go out and take a look and then report back. I am very curious.
More non-functioning screens in the brand-new airport terminal on the way out. Only one or two, but once again, evidence of no budget/no people who can fix them?
