Troy, N.Y. — Shanghai, a city of commercialism and consumerism, is a place where any Westerner would feel at home. Yet underneath this facade of coffee houses and fast food restaurants lies the regimented order of Communism that controlled a physical and economic transformation unparalleled in urban history.
 
“It’s absolutely peculiar, this marriage between communism and consumerism,” says Alan Balfour, author of World Cities: Shanghai (Wiley, 2002). Balfour is dean of the School of Architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, N.Y.

The onset of Shanghai’s transformation stemmed from the late 1970s decree by Deng Xiaoping to turn China into a modern nation by the year 2000. Now Shanghai is a city of power and influence that rivals the capital Beijing; it is a city that benefits from “crass consumerism.”

But Balfour says this rush to modernize Shanghai has led to the “radical simplification of reality. For all their seeming energy, the forces that are shaping the city at this time are simplistic and crude. All activity is being forced into three distinct building types: high-rise housing, low-rise housing, and mixed-use commercial development,” Balfour says. “It’s often difficult to tell whether a new building is commercial or residential.”

Balfour notes that the effects of communism under Mao Zedong after World War II broke the imagination of the people of Shanghai. Any vision of Chinese progress was essentially destroyed, he said, due to the heavy hand of authority. When Deng Xiaoping came to power in the 1970s, he lacked a specifically Chinese model to which to attach his dreams, explains Balfour. The current situation is improving, although he believes the model set forth by Deng Xiaoping is “an illusion, a mere pretence of a commercial city.”

This pretense is evident simply from the fact that just about everything in Shanghai is borrowed from elsewhere, especially Japan and the West. For example, says Balfour, any native of Shanghai will admit that the most interesting buildings in Shanghai were designed not by Chinese but foreign architects.

Yet Balfour warns against categorizing the city as a “naive representation of Western reality.” There is confusion in the culture from the incredible changes that have occurred over the last decade, but one must remember that Shanghai has emerged “out of the 3,000-year history of urban culture in China — a culture whose rational administrative and financial structure has in many past ages managed human populations in a state of harmony and prosperity unmatched in the West.”

This strong history and intense desire to succeed will make Shanghai into one of the world’s most populous cities, and one of its wealthiest, Balfour believes. “Even if the city is unable to escape the seduction of the West, the result will not be failure. Throughout its history, this has been a city of wily pragmatism,” he says.

About Alan Balfour
Balfour was named the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Year 2000 Topaz Laureate, the highest recognition given in North America for excellence in architecture education. He was formerly Smith Professor and dean of architecture at Rice University, and before joining Rensselaer was chairman of the Architectural Association in London.

Shanghai is Balfour’s third “World Cities” book, following New York (2001) and Berlin (1995). The latter, which documents the transformation of Berlin after reunification, and the earlier Berlin: The Politics of Order: 1737-1989 (Rizzoli, 1990), were winners of the AIA International Book Award. Additional books are Portsmouth (Studio Vista, 1970), and Rockefeller Center: Architecture as Theater (McGraw-Hill, 1978). He contributed to The Edge of the Millennium (Cooper Hewitt, 1993), Cities of Artificial Excavation: The Work of Peter Eisenman (Rizzoli International/CCA, 1994), and Recovering Landscape (Princeton Architectural Press, 1999). He lives in upstate New York.

Contact: Patricia Azriel
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