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\u201c\u2026Writing complex history and politics is definitely not easy. Reading several of Non Arkaraprasertkul\u2019s publications both in English and Thai in the last few years has proven that it is possible to make these topics both interesting and informative. His latest book Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form is not an exception.

His curiosity about places, peoples and cultures is extraordinary and matched so well with his capacity to \u2018map\u2019 complexities of history, urban geography, physicality and politics with a simple discourse that is easy to follow. He convinces us to see multiple layers of local realities beyond the \u2018western\u2019 perspectives on the global city of Shanghai. He describes the making of this cosmopolitan city can complete in a globalized economic context despite its fragmented urban fabric. It has undergone significant crisis, through challenges from semi-colonialism, socio-political collapse by war and lack of coordination in the planning process. Interestingly, the author suggests that the selling point of Shanghai\u2019s tourism in the early twentieth century was the elegant image that

replicated \u2018western\u2019 neo-classical styles. However, he proposes that a new Chinese identity can actually be enhanced through a mixture of diversified sub-cultures on Shanghai\u2019s streetscapes. This book clearly points out that the absence of human scale in the city streetscapes can diminish contact, the sense of security and the pedestrian energy level of the city. In general, it answers two simple questions: how a \u2018global metropolis\u2019, in particular Shanghai, is defined and transformed, and what is to be expected from its changing images or representations. It is therefore worthwhile to read this book especially as a case study for those policymakers, urban planners, urban designers, architects, academics and scholars who would be keen to learn more about urbanism of the global cities through different lenses in order to see hidden dimensions. The Chinese largest urban \u2018global village\u2019 of Shanghai has more historical complexity and dynamic development than arguably any other world city in this century. For those wishing to broaden their perspectives on all these issues, I highly recommend this book.\u201d

Dr Polladach Theerapappisit

Lecturer and Course Advisor, School of Social Sciences

The University of Western Sydney, Australia

\u221e\u221e\u221e\u221e\u221e\u221e\u221e

\u201cShanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form offers a well-thought-out perspective in understanding the amazing transformation of urban Shanghai. Having been a short-term visitor to Shanghai and overwhelmed as most, the book offered me a framework for understanding what I have experienced and a platform for exploring contemporary city questions. The historic Bund \u2013 lively, and with fear of being run over by the traffic \u2013 and the dull Pudong New Development \u2013 offers an intriguing comparison and an effective way of summarizing the new

urban China. My stay was short, and my background is curiosity in how and where people live in cities, but clearly city centers give the starting point, the image and the tone of a city. But this understanding brings new questions and issues for reflection.

One wonders if the need for Shanghai to build a bigger Bund to herald its arrival as a world city is a missed opportunity: it is a dynamic city of the present but not a city of the future. The Bund was built before the internet, e-commerce, and all the other technological wonders which question the need for a center as in the past. Symbolic importance still remains in the more traditional sense, but the need for proximity as a guiding principle is being increasingly questioned. The time traveler today may see nothing particularly new in Shanghai, but perhaps things that are only bigger and more grandiose. Shanghai had the opportunity to demonstrate the future, instead of flaunting its newly acquired economic prowess through a \u2018the same but one better\u2019 approach. The bigger high-rises, the more advanced faster trains do not signal new concepts of city development.

One wonders if the current \u2018tremendously dull atmosphere\u2019 that confronted the time traveler in Pudong is only a temporary state. As the traveler continues onward in his journey, he may be confronted with a different Shanghai entirely. It is unlikely that the city will stagnate, and new uses with new responses to urban form most likely would take over \u2013 cities, as nature, abhor a vacuum. We read that the Bund was built over a longer period which offered flexibility to respond to changing circumstances and adjust to needs. Pudong is instant \u2013 it is a \u2018one-shot\u2019 effort, with little time to adjust while being developed \u2013 it is a belief in knowing

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Shanghai Contemporary: The Politics of Built Form

This book is an attempt to integrate research, architectural knowledge, and fieldwork to understand the phenomenon of the urban transformation in Shanghai, one of the fastest gr... (More) This book is an attempt to integrate research, architectural knowledge, and fieldwork to understand the phenomenon of the urban transformation in Shanghai, one of the fastest growing cities in the world. Having once been a lucrative treaty port city, Shanghai has re-embarked on the mission to become an economic global city through a combination of assimilated industrialized cityscape and the startling industriousness of Chinese pragmatism from 1980 onwards. Driven by the momentum of free-market capitalism within the politics of a state-controlled quasi-communist socialist entity, Shanghai’s built form and environment have been conceived as a cultural construction of the conspicuous consumption of global financial marketing and of ostentatious expenditure of the elite. Nostalgic hearkening back to the glory days of foreign occupation does not adequately explain the phenomenon that exists today. Central to the aim of this thesis are the questions on how the global market was utilized, what internal and external forces were at play, and the importance given to the perception of values. By critically examining the history of the city’s planning process and the reality of its urbanism, this book outlines the city’s pragmatic developments dominated largely by its politics. The New Shanghai is a production of image, as it has always been the façade of China by virtue of its strategic location for international trade. The mediation between the representational built form, through politics, and the internal social transformations, by means of its soft cultural infrastructure, has created cosmopolitanism unlike anything else in the world. The author Non Arkaraprasertkul, Associate AIA, is an architect and a Harvard-Yenching Institute Fellow in Chinese Studies at the Oriental Institute, Oxford University. He teaches architecture and urban design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he received his training in architecture and urban design, and was a Fulbright scholar and an Asian Cultural Council Fellow (Affiliate of Rockefeller’s Brothers Fund) in History Theory Criticism of Architecture.
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Category:	Books - Non-fiction
Rating:	(3 Ratings)
Upload Date:	07/21/2009
Copyright:	Attribution Non-commercial
Tags:	MIT shanghai cultural infrastructure new china politics of built form hybrid urbanism (more tags) MIT shanghai cultural infrastructure new china politics of built form hybrid urbanism non arkaraprasertkul (fewer)