IN CHINESE CITIES - Phantom Shanghai
Distracted by the pace and scale of Shanghai’s well-documented recent development it is easy to overlook the reason so much of the city’s period architecture has survived so long: urban development for profit was suspended for nearly a half century.
For more than four decades after the People’s Republic of China was established, Shanghai looked like a run-down version of itself circa 1949. As China emerged from its isolation following the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) Shanghai experienced little of the development that was taking place in southern coastal cities like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and other places benefiting from China's reforms in the early 1980s. Not until 1992, when Deng Xiaoping declared that Shanghai should “catch up”, did Shanghai begin to make itself modern again.
Until recently a former resident of Shanghai from the 1930s or 1940s, returning to the city decades later, would have a good chance of being able to locate his or her old residence or place of work. Although streets were renamed following Mao’s victory over the Nationalists in 1949, most of the houses, apartments and other buildings survived the passing decades more or less intact. Faded exteriors notwithstanding, a closer look would reveal the compromises (caused on one hand by class struggle unleashed by Mao, and on the other by the real need to house a growing population) forced on the buildings and their tenants: single-family apartments or houses were sub-divided to accommodate multiple families, churches became factories, car garages and storage sheds became homes.
Many of these compromises continue to shape the way these buildings are used and lived in today. However, as Shanghai modernizes, and seeks acceptance as an “international” city, buildings and neighborhoods that were once preserved “by accident” -through the ideologically inspired neglect of the times- are now being purposefully demolished. The present formula is: development for profit plus central planning minus public debate.
For the past five years I’ve been photographing the buildings, shops, homes and neighborhoods that are unlikely to survive Shanghai’s vision of its own future.
Greg Girard
Shanghai
2005
