The Juxtaposition

While I stood taking the photograph above, a sardonic voice from behind me said 'ah, I see you're doing The Juxtaposition'. 'It's ok, I did that all the time the first few weeks I was here'. The Juxtaposition is, however, all but irresistible for the amateur architectural photographer in Shanghai, as many articles and collections have made clear. So here is The Juxtaposition in its purest form – a decidedly low-rise, tumble-down old Chinese street, with washing and power lines criss-crossing above your head (the washing lines have apparently been attacked in a 'Be Civilised!' campaign on behalf of the city government, along with the wearing of pyjamas inside) that terminates in a skyscraper.

The point of The Juxtaposition is that it's the easiest way to capture in a single image the process of either a) the unrush of development that is soon to transform everyone's lives for the better, or b) the way that wealth has hardly 'trickled down' in contemporary China or c) the denigration and domination of traditional housing in the form of imported skyscrapers, depending on your aesthetics and politics. It's a potent image, so here it is again -

This time you'll notice that the more ostensibly traditional houses are in rather better condition; as are many of the courtyard and terrace housing compounds that still make up a large proportion of the city, and once made up its majority. They're not what they seem at first, and to straightforwardly call them 'traditional' or 'indigenous' or whatever is to make something of a category mistake. In fact, the main forms – the alleyways of the Lilong, the redbrick compounds with their stone gates called Shikumen – are as much a product of modernity as anything else, a form of speculative housing created in the early 20th century combining 'Western' models – the English terrace, the profitable maximisation of space, and quite often art deco detailing – with the hyper-dense models of Chinese cities. The photograph below is another way of doing The Juxtaposition. Again, the low-rise housing with the washing hung out to dry, with this time the skyscrapers in the further background (this is a question of angle – just behind, but at a tricksy angle are the massive towers and malls of Xujiahui), and if you look closely at the windows, you'll notice that they look like Crittals – the same metal windows you'd get in a 1930s semi. Which is also appropriate, as there's also a lot of 1930s semis in Shanghai.

The climate is not that of the places where 1930s semis are usually to be found. The city is stiflingly humid, even in October, and there's all all-pervasive smell which seems to be made up equally of exhaust fumes, open drains, sweet food and the plane trees planted everywhere by the French when they ran (this part of) the place; and all this is at its worst in the areas where there's most space and least shade. An extremely dense Lilong area like the one below is, for all its deficiencies of private space, climatically highly appropriate, the way the houses rear up to provide access and enclosure also a means of catching one's breath. It's an excellent way of (unintentionally, no doubt) providing a truly pedestrian architecture. This is where one might lament the destruction of these forms in favour of a pomo-meets-Corbusier landscape of towers and expressways, but actually this place is recently renovated, and in excellent nick, right down to the small details.

This sort of light, small-scale preservationism is not what is generally expected here. Some of these dense low-rises have been even more heavily Regenerated nearer the centre, selling various nick-nacks, with the probably unintentional effect of making the place feel like The Lanes in Brighton in clientèle, product and urban form. Here, more happily, it's just housing.

The place above is something else entirely. There is, famously, a housing development on the outskirts of Shanghai called Thames Town, which simulates suburban England; yet that's not merely some Evil Paradises-style innovation of the neoliberal city, but also a continuation of the urbanism of the International Settlements, when Shanghai was a semi-colonial city with an intricate proto-Apartheid system. The former French Concession is full of these houses, and at first I thought this was the one which was once home to the 1930s city's most famous infant resident, JG Ballard, because of an article at Rick McGrath's site that I found via Ballardian a little while ago, which showed how the house had been taken over by a restaurant called SH508. While I'm not entirely certain, I think this is actually the house the restaurant owners moved to when Ballard's old house was demolished, but if so it's not at all dissimilar. They were already building the disingenuously traditionalist, hedge-protected, class-and-race-ridden world of classic English suburbia here in the 1920s – or was it partly an import from the imperial periphery into the imperial centre? There's an essay surely waiting to be written that places the birth of suburbia, as a way of sheltering from the urban proletariat, in the colonial city rather than Letchworth or Bedford Park.

The gates at SH508, worn and tagged, have a visible zig-zag and circle motif which you could easily imagine on one of the more raffish semis in East Finchley.

Yet even more than in North London, you have to leap through a fair few hoops in order to take photographs of these houses, so heavily guarded are they by sundry gates, hedges, driveways and walls. Both of the houses above were photographed through the gates, with only the vaguest notion of what the photographs would look like after. Some of the villas are picturesquely worn, some of them so heavily restored that it's very hard to tell if they were built in the 1920s or 2000s. Not for the first or last time here, my finessed Hegelian ordering of architectural history is completely confounded. Is this kitsch because it's a recent remaking of a colonial villa or is it kitsch because colonial villas are inherently kitsch? Or both?

The block of flats below, for instance, with its red brick and its 1930s frieze, is apparently a recent new-build. I'm lost, and would stay lost for most of my ten days.

Lots of the villas were subdivided during the Cultural Revolution, when briefly Shanghai was the Shanghai Commune, governed by an alliance of non-state bodies – militant, factory-based bodies like the Workers' Headquarters - which had in mind something resembling the Paris Commune. An optimistic Maoist would be pleased, then, with this shop sign.

In Shanghai, the largest industrial city in China at that time, as it was until very recently, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was more a genuinely 'proletarian' thing than a matter of student Red Guards having pitched battles with each other, something analysed in this book. Here, if not elsewhere, the Cultural Revolutionaries' logic was undeniable – in a city this dense, it is and was obscene for one family to have so much space to themselves. What makes this place so unlike Finchley, or, one suspects, Thames Town, is the sheer closeness of such typical suburbanism to, not only the extremely dense Chinese compounds, but also the ultra-metropolitan architecture built in a more obviously European style. Take this, a typical piece of late 19th/early 20th century Groszstadtarchitektur, occupying an entire block, which is right next to several one-family villas, like the burbs were built next to the metropolitan centre.

This is all a mild digression from the main matter of The Juxtaposition, because these photos might lead one to assume that the villas exist in their own space, that a viable suburbia could still exist in the centre of Shanghai. On the contrary – most of them are loomed over by high-rises. The example above, next to an intriguing, almost brutalist-meets-deco-meets-Chinoiserie block of pre-war flats in purple engineering brick, has banners on it which I'm told are protesting the apparently poor remuneration being offered by the city council to purchase the plot.

Here The Juxtaposition is once again in full effect, with the sheer gigantism of the towers making their precursors look even sillier. On close inspection, there's rather a lot going on here. What you have is, facing the street, basically what would have been facing the street in 1937 – the villas, obviously, the shops and restaurants, and also clusters of small blocks of flats, sometimes with architectural ambitions, like these Frank Lloyd Wright projections – and behind them, tower after tower of residential flats. I'm guessing here, but this might be the result not so much of demolitions as a genuine, legit example of what the somewhat hysterical have lately taken to calling 'garden grabbing'.

Yet there are still many of these villas and low-rise blocks of flats in the French Concession, particularly strangely, lots of them aer left lining the main road, Huaihai Lu. On a train to Nanjing a few days later I flick through a bilingual in-train magazine, which has an article profiling this 'aristocratic' street and one of its former inhabitants, an industrialist who was involved in philanthropic causes of various kinds. The article was centred on the question of what really makes An Aristocrat, and asked in conclusion – is the true aristocrat merely someone who drives an SUV, who buys expensive gadgets and clothes, and surrounds himself with beautiful women? No – a true aristocrat is someone who is highly educated in arts, culture and science, keeps appraised of the social issues of the day, and donates to charitable causes. The ideological implications of all this were too much to think about on such brief acquaintance with contemporary China.

There are still, if you have someone telling you what to look for, ways of discerning the class and national differences in these places, though. The proliferation of satellite dishes in the block above, for instance, is a sign that it's a block occupied largely by expats, as, in a less high-tech version of the Great Firewall, Chinese residents are discouraged from getting dishes, lest they pick up television of dubious provenance. I did get the chance to watch some legal Chinese-English television, in a Nanjing hotel. It was a show called Luxury Time, in which a Chinese presenter spoke to a French couturier about the fact that he makes his clothes in China, something deeply unusual in the high-end market. As the presenter repeatedly pointed out, the moral of the story is that China can produce niche goods too, not just mass-market sundries (This luxury has a Potemkin quality, sometimes. Nanjing, a place even more precipitously uneven than Shanghai but which I spent little enough time in to feel less qualified to pontificate about, has the most strikingly empty branch of Prada). Those socially concerned aristocrats, again.

It would be a fallacy, meanwhile, to assume that villas = rich, high-rise = poor, as the really untrained English eye might. These gates open out to a gated community of enormous concrete towers, not of little houses with gardens. The development, again in a strangely Brightonian moment, is called Embassy Court.

The long art deco block above is also, if scaled down a little, something you could imagine on the Sussex coast. It is after all the sort of place those who used to live in the villas here might have moved to after 1949.

Of all the pre-war architecture left around – apart from the 1930s' almost-skyscrapers, more on which in the next post – which I got to see, the most memorable was the Shikumen. The comparison which is apparently usually made is to English terraces, as mentioned, and you can see some of that – and these are denser, deeper and darker than the most intricate and harsh of West Yorkshire back-to-backs – but this compound, at least, was apparently built for clerks, who could afford the elaborate ornament, rather than industrial workers, who presumably had to make do with something even smaller and darker; but, again, the darkness, if not the smallness, is a very rational approach to building in a place as humid as this. At the entrances to these courtyards there's usually a chap keeping an eye on the place, and a board with some information in Chinese. Chris was usually translating these, but stupidly I wasn't taking notes. Without wanting to denigrate in any way the much-overlooked (by the English at any rate) virtues of gigantic, serried and identical tower blocks, these courtyards and alleyways do feel genuinely special, with a feel of community and collectivity which feels very rare in any contemporary housing. Yet it would be ridiculous to insist that a population continue to live in places this cramped. Is there a way of replicating that without retro-kitsch? Could, or does, Shanghai have a Park Hill, a place that tries to transfer this accidental ethos into something truly modern?

At the entrance is a name and a date, 1927. The year that the first, abortive Communist Revolution broke out among the proletariat of this then-industrial city. It escaped to the countryside after being slaughtered en masse, returning 22 years later after having to gradually rewrite its theory about urban and industrial primacy inbetween. This photograph was taken directly opposite the sixth photo down on the Flyovers post, so while the picture does not contain The Juxtaposition within it, The Juxtaposition was most definitely present in the area.

An orphaned photograph, off the very central track of the rest of this post, the reason why this is so appalling is because I made several attempts to photograph it over several days from both metro train and cab, and this is as good as I got. It's an example of the tabula rasa urbanism of the southern districts that stretch out between the central and the suburban campuses of Jiaotong University, and it's here for its sheer incongruity, for not matching with the subject matter of the other posts, while at the same time seeming oddly typical of the things you see when travelling through the outskirts of Shanghai. It's a Klimt building! The Shanghai Secession! This piece of gratuitous Junkspace contains sgraffito work copied from the Viennese soft-porn decorator's corpus, and a silver Josef Hoffmann entrance. There are, as we shall see in the next post, many different ways of building where nothing was before, and this is one of the more symptomatic yet surreal approaches – to create here a version of Old Europe that could never, ever have existed in this form. In its wilful miscegenation it's in the tradition of 1920s Shanghai, a place which clearly always excelled at The Juxtaposition, both in architectural terms and in terms of having the extremely poor in the closest proximity to the extremely rich.

Yet the final juxtaposition here is to stand in for something I couldn't photograph. It might be the largest city of the world's largest manufacturing economy, but Shanghai itself is deindustrialising, and the Expo is on a massive brownfield site, just like the Stratford Olympics. What the city really makes its money from is a property boom, just like London. There was something horribly depressing in that realisation, akin to the amazed incomprehension when you check China's world position in terms of size of economy (2nd) and per capita income (99th, below Albania, Jamaica and Angola, amongst others). Yet, as soon as you're out of the city, you're in the Yangtze River Delta, one of the most heavily industrial areas in the world, a mostly-continuous strip of cooling towers, factory farms, blast furnaces, big sheds and cities, places like Zhenjiang, the size of or double the size of Birmingham, each crowned with a couple of their own glittering, Jin Mao-style Chinesesque skyscrapers among the residential high-rises. You could see whole new towns, which nobody has moved into yet - not that you could always tell the difference, as the railway station platforms never have people on, as they file onto the platforms from airport-style waiting rooms above, leaving all these enormous cities looking disturbingly empty to the passing commuter. This is a ground zero of primitive accumulation, the contemporary equivalent of the charred, destroyed landscapes of the north of England in the 1820s, an apocalyptic pandemonium wrenched out of the paintings of John Martin, set in and consuming an incongruously placid wetlands landscape.

Europeans born after the 1970s haven't ever seen an industrial economy going full-pelt. It's an incredible and horrible sight. I couldn't photograph it as we were on a high-speed train, which went from Shanghai to Nanjing in just over an hour – it takes 6 on the normal train. The nearest approximation to it of all the photographs I did take is the one above of some of the suburban landscape on the way to Jiaotong. Round here, it's all factories, instant cities and messy, gimcrack commerce, and in-between are small strips of the rural, with amputated villages and peasant remnants peeping out. When I took this, I thought I was looking at a wasteland in the foreground, but looking at it now, I wonder if these might be allotments.