Today we went to Shanghai South Station mid afternoon. The approach seemed odd at first as you are denied a view of the station on the approach. You blindly follow signs including up two escalators where you can’t believe you’ll find trains in so elevated a place. But then the scene opens out at the top of the escalators as a futuristic, circular building of huge proportions, more like an airport than a station, full of light through the stadium-like domed roof and hard surfaces reverberating the sounds of human traffic like a swimming pool does. The structure is tiered as an outer circle where anyone can walk, a security check system through which you can go without a ticket, and a further inner circle where a ticket is required to pass through the gate and down into the centre, a lower space that the upper circle can look down into. This area was full of rows of seats in front of gates to the trains, holding pens where people looked dazed and vacant in a not unpleasant way. At the ends of each gate area were screens displaying the same content to all gates: advertising, train journey advertising/information, and a ticker-tape line of news along the bottom of the screen. In the centre of the lower circle a middle aisle displayed another screen with a message to the citizens, written in characters and without images.

As we watched we thought that the station had provided a space of relief from the anxiety that travel induces (getting to the station in time, being prepared, avoiding contingencies and so forth). Getting there, travelers were funneled into particular places at particular times, and it involved waiting at each stage. But waiting looked like light relief in this huge space where everyone was visible to everyone else, and the people who reached the central holding area automatically became the object of attention for those in the outer circles. The screens seemed to reproduce this sense of being on automatic pilot (the repeated loops of content), and also reassuringly bland in content (not demanding too much consciousness).

My over-riding impressions: guards blowing whistles not when the train is about to leave (the train isn’t visible) but at people lining up in a non-linear fashion, people carrying washing bags full of goods on poles balanced across their shoulders, people carrying plastic drums of oil and other stuff, teenagers with smart haircuts going home, a very alert baby strapped into a basket on a man’s back, a small drunk man persistent in his begging, rows of people filing onto the upward escalator as though they were scaling the heights, the whole scene organized as though it were choreographed for visual effect.

In the evening we had dinner at a French restaurant near the hotel, and then cocktails at a tower on the ‘other’ side, looking over at old shanghai. A mist came in and the lights were shaded out eventually, but it felt like a new information and banking area (Docklands) looking over at an old imperial quarter as if it were a relic. We had a long discussion about shopping malls and the history of the concept (I was trying to think through its relation to department stores via Friedberg), and enchantment as illumination, aspirational culture and boredom in stations (Rachel on Heidegger’s essay on boredom that opens at a station).

Janet Harbord

 

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