19 days before the Expo starts (as numerous screens tell me) and I am getting packed up to go home tomorrow. This morning, I went around the neighborhood getting a few more shots of blackboards I had spotted in the entrances to communities. Some of them are highly wrought and very artistic chalk drawings. Still, I guess fewer and fewer communities still have these. I imagine one reason is that the artists themselves are dying off and not being replaced.
Then, at lunchtime, I got a dramatic call from Wu Dan saying that the people at the Jiangwan-Wujiaochang Municipal Sub-Centre Construction and Administration Office (江湾—五角场市级副中心建设和管理委员会办公室) on the 22nd floor of the Orient Shopping Centre had finally relented. After maintaining again and again that they were too busy to see us, they had consented to an interview at 3.30 this afternoon. I rushed over to Wujiaochang to find that the big “Haibao” Expo figurine in the sunken plaza appeared to have given birth to twelve offspring. It was an eerie sight. Maybe I’m just getting out of Shanghai in time before the whole city is taken over by little blue aliens!
In the office, we met not with the promised “Teacher Wang”, but with a Vice-Director called Rong Zhaoda (戎兆达). I’m afraid that another heavy Shanghai accent made it hard for me to follow. But with Dan’s help and a recording we will be able to make sure we have not missed anything out. Sadly, however, the first thing that needs to be acknowledged is that the Yangpu District government folks who sent us to Mr. Rong did not really get what we needed, as he seemed not have the details and the big picture about Wujiaochang that we were hoping for. It turns out this office is below Yangpu District Office, and according to Mr. Rong the main job is mediating between different stakeholders at the Wujiaochang site itself. When we first arrived there a week or so back and said we wanted the big picture and had been told to find Teacher Wang, we were told he was the right person for that. Well, maybe he is. But Mr. Rong did his best in his place.
He gave us quite a lot of basic information that is in all the material we already picked up from the office earlier. When we asked him about the 3rd Northern stage of Wujiaochang, the “Knowledge Business Centre,” it seemed clear from his lack of concrete answers that this is planned for the future if they can get the other bits finished and up and running. I didn’t really get any answers to my questions about what the difference might between this and the central Knowledge and Innovation Community part of the site. They are both supposed to be live-work-play centres. He emphasized greening and low carbon in the 3rd stage, but that’s about as much as we got.
In a comparison with the more developed sub-centre at Xujiahui, he said they had the advantage of having been in operation for a long time, whereas Wujiaochang had only really been up and going in the new century. But Wujiaochang has the advantage of the universities nearby and is a much larger site.
We asked him about what it meant that the promotion materials often proclaim it a “public activity centre” (公共活动中心). The answer was shopping, promenading, and tourism. Yangpu has 1.2 million residents, and in addition the coloured egg and so on attract people from the neighboring areas of Hongkou, Zhabei, and Baoshan.
We tried to engage him about the screens and city beautification. He had plenty to say about the dominant colour scheme designated for Wujiaochang (blue and grey), but not so much about the screens. I got the impression they have not given much thought to how tatty that Orient Shopping Centre screen looks, not least because so many others have direct jurisdiction over it in various aspects.
Overall, I had a sense that this office is too low on the pecking order to set directions or policy. They are simple there to mediate, and screens have not come into that yet.
