Flyovers

'Nothing in this world develops absolutely evenly; we must oppose the theory of even development or the theory of equilibrium.'

Mao Zedong, 'On Contradiction', 1937

First of what will be several Shanghai posts over the next week or so, to try and avoid the gigantic-post-which-nobody-reads problem of an earlier excursion to Moscow. Thanks are due to Justin O'Connor, Chris Connery and Ma Haili.

There is a theory about the People's Republic of China, voiced most recently in Boris Groys' intriguing, if historically nonsensical The Communist Postscript, that what seems like merely the administration of capitalism by an oligarchy that is a Communist Party in nothing but name, is actually a gigantic, prolonged version of the New Economic Policy embarked upon by the Bolsheviks throughout the 1920s – the use of a dirigiste, state-planned capitalism to build up productive forces to a level where the population has gone from being poor to being reasonably comfortable, after which the Communist Party could take command of this wealth and use it for the building of full Communism, something which can, after all, in 'stage' theory only be achieved after the development of a mature industrial capitalism. This is at least what Deng Xiaoping always claimed was going on.

And this stage of 'building up the productive forces' has lasted thirty years - why not? Lenin, for instance, clearly envisaged that NEP would last a lot longer than the 8 years it got before it was replaced by Stalin's forced collectivisation, chaotic industrialisation and total suppression of private commerce. If we make what seems – with good reason – to be a rather extravagant theoretical leap, and see this as a super-NEP, what could the future Communist China do with the hypercapitalist infrastructure, the gated communities, the skyscraping office blocks, of the largest Chinese (and, in terms of 'city proper', largest world) city? One symptomatic question is – if, as is often claimed, China is making the world's biggest investment in green technology, then what are they going to do with all those flyovers?

Shanghai is laced with elevated roads, all built over the last ten years or so, at roughly the same time, but to rather more impressive effect, as the Metro system. That system of private transport is very nice, but aesthetically forgettable; this system of flyovers is monstrous, dominant and utterly unforgettable. Chris Connery, who is showing me round the city on my second day here, tells me of a conversation he had with a Party member, on the (apparently still extant) left-wing of the CCP. When global warming really hits, when the oil runs out, and the use of the car has to be curbed, what will the Party do with all this? Can they just ban people from driving? Will people accept it? Yes, was the reply, but the Party merely lacks the will. So before I had even seen these constructions, I had in mind the idea of them cleared of the traffic which is too thick and dense even for their astonishing capaciousness, with bicycles and walkers making their way along these lofty elevated roads. They're one of the most impressive works of engineering I've ever seen, for the less than impressive function of moving the private car with its internal combustion engine from A to B – though, at least for the moment, taxis are so abundant and so cheap, sometimes equalling the levels of private cars, that to call it wholly 'private' feels a minor misnomer.

After driving along and under a few of them in a dazed, numb state when off the plane, the first of these flyovers that I really saw was in a working class district in the north of the city, near Caoyang New Village, a 1950s housing development which Chris was showing to his students. The area around it was so impossibly dense, the width of its expressways so yawning, the clusters of towers so high, the metro station toilets so abject (the PRC's inegalitarian public convenience policy receives a severe reprimand from the Socialist Lavatory League – in an area where there are likely to be westerners present the loos are impeccable, elsewhere they're some of the worst I've ever seen) and the crowds so massive that I simply gave up and went back to bed, taking the photograph above of two towers seemingly being eaten by the flyovers before passing out.

Much of my time in Shanghai was spent commuting from the centre to the suburban campus of Jiaotong University (subject of a future post), so I saw some of the infrastructure in the areas where outsiders aren't generally looking. While the flyovers in the centre have the smoothest-finished cream concrete you're ever likely to see, here it's a much more standard material. They still tend to be rather dominant, but they're not meant to be looked at, and they travel through what is still a heavily industrial landscape, with huge factories on either side of the motorway. While some flyovers are meant for spectacle, these don't feel like they're meant for people at all, instead inducing the feeling of being a vulnerable fleshy part of a metallic network of freight, lessened only by the all-too-human aggressive driving that is ubiquitous here. There was one horrible moment on one of these expressways where various container lorries constantly overtook each other, manoeuvring into position to the point where it seemed as if they were actually intent on crushing the pathetic little car we were in. But, as I said, many of the flyovers really are meant to be seen.

Above, you can see one of the flyovers rising gingerly in the vicinity of some 1920s courtyard housing, which will also be the subject of the later post, but it's a mere preparation for what comes next.

Near People's Square, the former racetrack for the Europeans transformed post-revolution into a large public plaza, there's some sort of flyover convention, an intersection which is less spaghetti junction and more the intestines of a terrifying mythological beast. These sorts of organic metaphors tend to come to mind here, because there's little rationalistic or machinic about this place. Anyway – the three images above are there mainly to indicate the sheer, unnecessary height of these things. Note not only how the concrete itself is of the very highest grade, but also how there is planting running half the way up the concrete pillars, an effort at civic beautification which is visible mainly to the pedestrian, more than to the driver. Presumably this is there as a gesture to The Harmonious Society, with nature intersecting with technology in non-antagonistic manner, but it's far more like the engineers kept in mind the possibility that sooner rather than later these monuments will be obsolete, so made them pre-ruined, with picturesque vegetation creeping up them to simulate what they might look like when they've fallen into desuetude.

They also serve to frame the skyscrapers around, to delineate them, present them in their best light, to let them be seen from a contemplative distance, which gives a futurist flash to what can often seem crushingly dense and badly made on closer inspection. Except that's the sort of thing only noticed later on – you don't notice the details. When I first saw this intersection, I was absolutely frozen in awe, and then impressed by the fact that everyone else seemed entirely used to it, that it had become normal, just something you'd cross under on the way to work. There's a general ability to seem completely unbothered by what feels like a bloody steamroller of gigantism and force here which is admirable, although slightly worrying....Groping around for comparisons, the nearest thing seems to be the spidery expressways of Los Angeles - but those course through a low-density suburban sprawl, rather than charging through super-dense conglomerations of competing skyscrapers. But here too, any putative Reyner Banham would probably find that the flyovers are the main event, works of public infrastructure more impressive than the baubles on top of the towers of capital. Their forcing through areas of already huge density necessitates an extra pedestrian layer being inserted into them – there's plenty of these intersections that have pedestrian walkways running across, such as the blue steel and glass pedway sandwiched between the roads in the last of the pictures above. There you can also see a pillar with some dragons on, which as I recall is some sort of tribute to the non-human forces that made this intersection possible.

Yet throughout Shanghai, and here especially, it's hard not to wonder – how does this work, how does this sustain itself, and how do you get to the point where you're entirely blase about all this? Looking up at the flyovers, I'm as completely at a loss to get any impression of how all this works as I would be looking at an electrical diagram. Look at the second of the two pictures above – I'm only capable of interpreting it as an abstract sculpture or as a shocking biomorphic organism – a potentially lethal one, in both cases - but not as a road, I'd have to live here for a while for that prosaic familiarity to come. In terms of confrontation with an alien and awesome modernity, I feel here like the proverbial European visitor to New York or Chicago around 1920; the components of this cityscape are all familiar, there's no objects or forms I haven't seen before, but all of them have transformed into monstrous and illegible new combinations. There's all manner of fallacies the European in Shanghai can fall into, either of uncritical awe or knee-jerk repulsion, and I was at various points subject to both in my ten days there. This post is all about the awe, the repulsion will come in later, hopefully also with something less predictable. So – awe.

Keep the not-so-small nature of combined and uneven development out of your head for a moment, and the 'Shanghai as the Future' argument is the most seductive one of all the potential futures on offer in the dubious field of architectural futurology. To the untrained eye – very untrained – this seems the more preferable future city, more than the hooray-for-shanty-towns strain or the isn't-Dubai-like-super-interesting strain; the Foxconn factory in Shenzhen is a long way from the centre of Shanghai, and the ugliness of primitive accumulation is less immediately apparent; and I didn't see anyone sleeping under these flyovers. But the real reason why Shanghai-as-the-future is so convincing is because it looks like you imagined the future would look like when you were 14 years old. If the primary coloured wipe-clean architecture of New Labour Britain was designed by and for overgrown infants, Shanghai seems to have been designed by and for overgrown adolescent boys.

It's as if the engineers, architects and planners watched Akira and, rather than, say, picking Richard Rogers' plans for Pudong, looked at the dystopian animated city and thought 'hmm, let's build that instead.' We'd be fools not to indulge the disappointed teenagers who hoped the 21st century would be a damn sight more aesthetically invigorating than Greenwich Millennium Village. If you feel you've been denied the future, then to find it elsewhere looking exactly like you expected is a little uncanny. Disappointing, if you thought the future should be qualitatively rather than quantitatively different from the past. Yet Shanghai's sheer revelling in its own modernity is very difficult to resist, at first, and it's most difficult to resist when you travel along the flyovers at night. It doesn't seem to have a function, this lighting. 'What's this for?' I ask Chris, somewhat taken aback. 'Aesthetics!' he answers.

For the moment, then, let's completely abandon any critical edge and just salute the preposterous place, stare in abandonment at a city which lines its fucking flyovers in endless strips of blue neon at night, that makes the mundane act of driving into an abstract procession of light and geometry, that intensifies the process of commuting into this outrageous onrush of non-objective sensation. There are apparently a lot of car crashes in Shanghai.

You eventually reach ground level at something like this, with pedestrian walkways cutting across neon-lit geodesic domes, skyscrapers with searchlights cutting through the ubiquitous fog, and some rather familiar corporate logos. This massive project of state-built infrastructure is the less trumpeted of the major public works in the city. There's the Metro, of course, with nine underground lines built in the time it takes to string a tram line from one side of Manchester to the other, but there's also the Maglev magnetic levitation train. I didn't take it, although by all accounts it's marvellous, for the main reason that it gets you – at record-breaking speed! - from the airport to the tabula rasa business district in Pudong, which was not where I was going. The Maglev might be the one area where the prolonged NEP of the People's Republic entailed doing something differently, where it put a genuinely advanced technology at the service of a public, rather than private means of transport, but compared with these monuments to the hope, as P.J O'Rourke delightfully puts it, that 1.3 billion people get a Buick, it seems paltry indeed.