Visited the Museum of Urban Planning at The People’s Square. This is a municipal building at the centre of the city and imparts a strong sense of civic pride presented in the newest designs. It reminded me somewhat of Foster’s gerkin building on the south bank, with its displays of planning and overview of the city, but on a more ambitious scale, of course! On the exterior and over the sliding doors is a huge screen showing public information films and notices.

Inside, the entrance hall a huge screen in front of a fountain dominated the lobby, screening a show-reel of city life (to be seen in various parts of the city all week, for example on screens in the subway, it featured alongside public information films and news). Like a modern day city symphony film edited together with a corporate gloss, the various aspects of life were triumphantly shown: leisure in public spaces (a middle age couple dancing together in a park/street), workers in a new ‘clean’ technologically-driven workplace, an assembly line of robots making cars, painted faces and traditional dance performance leading into upbeat ‘disco’ performance to represent art and culture, and various types of sport, all shot with increasing emphasis on activity, fast paced cuing and a rousing soundtrack. I was gripped. The concept: a monumental city where everything working together (harmony), where everything is vibrant but also clean and new.

The theme was repeated upstairs in exhibits about the economy, industry, transport, all in stages of construction and development. This was one of the overwhelming sensations of the city, that it is under rapid construction and is already working efficiently, that massive investment in transport, education, information and service industries, ‘clean’ manufacturing, is taking place. There is definitely a sense of before and after (before is old industrial labour and production suggestive of dirty factories and pollution coupled with remnants of imperialism, after is the new cleansed workspace of robots labouring and IT workers and engineers in primary-coloured workstations, and a new post-imperialist, post-communist China). In addition to before and after, the ability to imagine the future is paramount, and the urban planning museum makes this clear in its ability to persuade the visitor (me at least) that this huge development is indeed planned, controlled and centrally managed. It is a vision that is rapidly becoming materialized (the transport system for example, and the building of Pudong).

The central space upstairs was filled dramatically with a model of the city (a model city in both senses), a microcosm of the rows and clusters of apartment blocks, iconic high-rise buildings at the centre and along the river opposite the old imperial banking district, the raised highway running through the middle, the display being lit variously (and to some unknowable remit) as we watched.

And as we watched this display, with Chris and Rachel discussing displays and panoramas, ‘as if by magic’ there was a circular raised ‘box’ behind us, to one side of the model city. This was a 3D ten-minute film of the city as an animation, a fly-over and through starting with the old airport and ending with the new. We stood in the middle next to a railing whilst the film started, its captivating principles being its shift of direction (suddenly you go this way and then it reverses and you instinctively turn around to be in the wake of the movement), and its ability to change levels of perspective, to swoop down and beneath underpasses, low over trees, high around the sky-scrapers.

In the afternoon we visited shopping malls, eating in a food hall with a perplexing payment system and multiple food options. Escalators dominated the central pillar of the mall as though people ascending and descending were part of the spectacle. Many global brands of shop (Starbucks, Addidas, Mango) as well as brands that were as expensive as these but not familiar. Stopped for tea with Lu Xinyu and a discussion of documentary film. By the end of the day and as the light faded, we had taken the metro out to the Wujiaochang (five corner square) in the Wanda area, the site of the egg, and the place where local people ballroom dance outside the mall, itself a lower grade mall than the others we had been into. The egg itself was larger than I had imagined from photographs and more of spectacle in terms of its light displays. I also hadn’t realized that there was a quite large road between the egg and the mall where the dancing happens, so that the space is even more incongruous for a social gathering of dancers. We walked up the road to look at the new IT area being developed which seemed nicely landscaped but quite familiar in a mediacity generic way. We walked in the other direction to look at the extensive Fudan University campus. By this time it was dark and the various light displays on almost every building took over the landscape: the lights that block-outline high-rise offices and apartments, the ‘falling rain’ light displays across the whole surface of a building, the multiple colours and patterns that change and pulse, and defy you to look away until you have understood the sequence. The illumination of the city was far more elaborate and beguiling than anything I’ve seen in other cities.

We were pacing and stretching time in the hope that the dancing might start, but it didn’t. Maybe it was too cold, we were.

Janet Harbord

 

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