Swat Cities

Op-Ed submitted by Andrew Karas ’15 and Matthew Goldman ’15.

Folks at Swat know that we love cities. Some know this through SwatCities, the urbanism interest group we founded together last year. Others have been bombarded with Matthew’s charming obsession with New York City–his home–where he learned to read from the subway map. Others may have heard of Andrew’s public transit-riding urges or his horrified fascination with the famous urban planner Robert Moses. But most of friends here know that we both spend a whole lot of time thinking in terms of cities.

We’d like to make the case that you should try thinking this way, too.

Today, more than half the world’s population resides in metropolitan areas, a figure that is growing steadily. While cities have always been centers of information, capital and cultural exchange, their contemporary significance is unique. As individuals who will lead our peers, ideas and communities well into the twenty-first century – we need to devote more attention to city planning, urbanism, and regional studies.

The city is the locus of some complex, sometimes shitty stuff. As we were reminded just this week, cities are sometimes the targets of terrorism, both foreign and domestic. They’re places where natural disasters, like earthquakes and hurricanes, as well as almost-natural disasters, like the Chicago fire, hold the lives of thousands if not millions in the balance. As population density incarnate, urban areas also put humanity on stage, revealing our societies’ successes and failings in particularly salient fashion. So whether we live in them or not, we’ve staked a lot on our cities, and they can teach us lessons we need to learn. Cities are our subject, our tool, and our solution.

Not all urbanites live examined lives, but nevertheless cities are slowly rising in the public consciousness. Let’s face it: cities are cool these days.

When we talk about Brooklyn or Portland, Berlin or Shanghai, we’re often talking about the cafés, art galleries, and walkable neighborhoods that make urban life a life to be desired, not feared. Many Swat graduates, in search of a job, an internship, or even simply new friends, move straight to one of these cities or the many like them.

Even absent the people that make places great, the material fabric of cities can be beautiful and downright impressive. What architect hasn’t dreamed of putting their stamp on the popular imagination in the form of a skyscraper? City green spaces, too, like Chicago’s Millenium Park and Boston’s North End Park (which sits where an elevated highway once stood), invite us to share in music festivals, art shows, and the general spirit of community. Then there are the unique monuments to our cultural heritage, like the Statue of Liberty, the Eiffel Tower, or even the Hollywood Sign, that live in our minds whether we’ve visited the cities they inhabit or not.

Cities are home to all of this and more. But beyond icon and adventure, ambition and entertainment, cities are a locus of many of the terrible social forces shaping our societies as a whole.

When #occupy protesters took to the streets in 2011, the largest protests happened in cities where banks, public figures, and picketers put inequality in vivid relief. But cities big and small are also the sites of inequality itself, where the 1% on Wall Street, LaSalle Street, and Pennsylvania Avenue exist mere miles (or less) from the 99% in the neighborhood blocks that make headlines only on the occasion of a school closing or a double-homicide. Cities across the world are staggeringly divided between those who have and those who aren’t given.

Take Detroit, the auto capital of the twentieth century, where global economic shifts and discriminatory government policies helped encourage whites to abandon the city on the broad highways to the suburbs. Or take Dubai, where the world’s tallest building and the luxurious islands just offshore were built by immigrant labor, largely unnoticed by the visitors jetting in from London or Hong Kong. Or take Mumbai, where colonial-era density restrictions have helped trap literally millions of residents in crumbling shantytowns like Dharavi.

The story of transnational oppression–expressed in sweatshop labor, dispossession, famine, and disease–is based in the city. It’s based in the metropoles of yesterday’s empires that screwed over the global south as well as in the metropolises of today’s consumption world that thrive by exploiting the communities they take from.

At the same time, cities are hubs of innovation and governance. Silicon Alley, in the middle of Manhattan, is producing apps and websites that rival those coming out of Mountain View and Palo Alto. The Washington, D.C., area has mushroomed in recent decades into a thriving center for research and advocacy–for public health, education, military technology, and all the rest.

As cities thrive in this way, they grapple with the wrenching impact of gentrification, the constant battle between the enviable success of privileged newcomers and the persistent plight of the less-enfranchised, who are constantly pushed farther and farther towards the geographic and social margins of our urban areas.

Cities can be places of the greatest discovery and the most empowering opportunity. We in the twenty-first century are increasingly challenged to make that true for residents of all races, ethnicities, languages, and incomes.

When we think about injustice, many of us think immediately of the environment, as well. Our species’ destruction of so many of the ecosystems and natural balances that keep our planet running has been perpetrated in part by the way we’ve planned urban spaces. And even the best-engineered, LEED-platinum, carbon-neutral buildings are implicated in that environmental destruction through the extraction of resources that sustain their inhabitants. From factory neighborhoods (and, these days, factory suburbs) to the beltway interstates that invite endless suburban sprawl, the city has been at the heart of our collective crusade against the environment. Therefore, the city needs to be at the heart of our collective crusade to replenish what’s left of it.

When we aspire to transform injustice and inequality, we believe we must think first, most critically, and most creatively about cities. We must conceptualize how to make them truly sustainable, ecological, collaborative, productive and fair places for well over half of tomorrow’s world population to call home.

If you care about the buildings, bridges, monuments, and trees that help make up our cities, or if you agree with us that cities’ significance goes far beyond the easily visible, we want to hear your voice. SwatCities holds informal conversations on a near-weekly basis, and this weekend we’re hosting a symposium for students, faculty, and everyone in our community.

At 3:00 pm Saturday in Kohlberg 116, you’ll have a chance to meet and talk with three recent alums–Anson Stewart ‘10, David Burgy ‘10, and Ben Bradlow, all urban planners–and ask them about their amazing experiences (at a planning firm, in community organizing, and on a Watson Fellowship).

Anson, David, Ben, and both of us all think in terms of cities. We hope we can encourage you to do so too.

By Wonbin Sohn ‘13

[Wonbin is an international student at Swarthmore College from Seoul. This piece is the second in his series about Asian cities and is an abridged version of a paper he wrote for a class at Swarthmore. Please email swatcities@gmail.com for a copy of the bibliography.]

National and social revolutionaries both seek ‘to assert and make good their claims to state sovereignty.’ Then, it could be asked, what was the role of Chinese architects under China’s modern struggle for a nation-state? The Confucian metaphysical philosophy devalued material artifacts, and as a result, architecture was not traditionally seen as a scholarly field throughout pre-modern China. Architectural study as a formal academic discipline began only in the last decades of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), when it was introduced as a field of study by Westerners. For example, the Old Summer Place, known as Yuanmingyuan in Chinese (圓明園 Yuánmíngyuán), was an extensive collection of imperial gardens and eighteenth century neoclassical mansions, constructed by Jesuits Giuseppe Castiglione and Michel Benoist, who were employed by the Qianlong emperor to satisfy his taste for exotic buildings and objects (the initial construction began in 1707, during the reign of Kangxi emperor). The garden was destructed during the Second Opium War, when British and French expeditionary forces marched to the imperial capital of Beijing. Since then, on the strength of substantial foreign influx of Western presence to China, Chinese scholars have produced a significant body of architectural history that has helped shape the way that Chinese people think of architecture and urban planning.

Following the historic opening of China to the Western world, and the turn of the twentieth century, foreign architectural and planning influences started to appear in Chinese urban landscapes, mostly imported directly from the West. As in Shanghai, a prototype of cosmopolitan modern cityscape in China, foreign architectural firms, such as Palmer and Turner, Spense Robinson and Partners, and Atkinson and Dallas, made an appearance. Since the signing of the Nanjing Treaty, Shanghai had been the most open and lucrative economic entity in China during the period, and the city has consistently encapsulated foreign influences and progressive modernism, as the formation of the politically autonomous areas (i.e. the international concession and the French concession) and the forest of Neo-Classist and Art Deco architecture epitomizes. For example, the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Cooperation headquarter in Shanghai, the quintessential example of Chinese neo-classicism architecture, was acclaimed as the most luxurious building from the Suez Canal to the Bering Strait.

The Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation, Shanghai. Source: Peter G. Rowe, and Seng Kuan, Architectural Encounters with Essence and Form in Modern China.

Besides the direct foreign presence in architectural employments, by the early twentieth century, Western-educated Chinese architects had returned to the motherland, and joined the projects for modern institutions and new commercial enterprises. Most of the so-called China’s First Generation of modern architects, including Zhuang Jun, Liang Sicheng and Dong Dayou, had theoretical and empirical origins in the Western Beaux-Arts tradition, and furthermore, the architects incorporated ambidextrous building designs that amalgamated different styles and methods. Corresponding to the return of Chinese architects, foreign engineers in China had already experimented with incorporating Chinese architectural features into their designs, as Henry K. Murphy’s Yenching University project in Beijing exemplifies, and during the 1920s, there arose the ‘Chinese Form’ movement (中國固有形式 zhōngguó gùyǒu xíngshì), which was characterized by the use of a Chinese roof on a steel and concrete structure, and the use of traditional decorative motifs and sometimes of traditional spatial organization.  According to Jianfei Zhu, this was an attempt to restore traditional cultural values and Confucian learning in modern Chinese architecture, and this practice was further promoted by the republican government in the Shanghai and Nanjing planning proposals in 1929. For instance, the Mayor’s Building in Greater Shanghai Civic Center, which was designed during the 1930s, had neoclassical proportions and adhered to the Western compositional principle, while employing decorative elements from the palace and temples of ancient China in its façade and interior spaces.

Henry K. Murphy’s Design of Yenching University, Beijing. Source: Jeffrey W. Cody, Henry K. Murphy’s “Adaptive Architecture,” 1914-1935.

Dong Dayou’s Mayor’s Building in Greater Shanghai Civic Center. Source: Seng Kuan, Between Beaux-Arts and Modernism: Dong Dayou and the Architecture of 1930s Shanghai.

At the most superficial level, the primary issue, which confronted the nationalist officials was that of constructing a bound polity drawn together by a set of grand symbols, shared cultural legacies and moral consciousness of political unity. As a result, the architects of Nanjing attempted to promulgate a set of horizontally universal values via their building designs, which could effectively replace the hierarchically stratified values of a previous cultural order under the Qing Dynasty. 

The Ministry of Railways, Nanjing. Source: Charles D. Musgrove, Building a Dream: Constructing a National Capital in Nanjing, 1927-1937.

Thus the architecture of Nanjing can be summarized by an amalgamation of the cultural spirit of Chinese culture – curved roofs and traditional interior ornaments – and the modernity of Western civilization – Beaux-Arts influenced imperial design with modern construction materials, which would result in an ostentatious display of national dignity and the political authority of the regime. Through the hybrid of Chinese culture and the Western concept of architecture, the new city-designs of Nanjing focused on a promotion of ‘societal consciousness’ (民主意識 mínzhǔ yìshí) to create a sense of national community under the nationalist regime. Republican China saw the popularization of the term “monumental”(紀念 jìniàn) within the public domain, including its use in such phrases as jinian hui (紀念會; defined as commemorating gathering), jinian guan (紀念館; defined as museums), and jinian youpiao (紀念郵票; defined as a commemorative stamp), and for example, when inviting public participation of architectural designs of the city, the government stipulated competition guidelines, such as a requirement to have “classical Chinese style with distinctive and monumental features (獨特而有具有紀念性意義的 中國古典形式).” Thus, through emphasizing “monumental features” of its cityscape, the nationalist government promoted both visual monumentality and the profound psychological memories of Nanjing, associated with modern political sovereignty.  In addition, with the influence of the City Beautiful Movement that emphasized the creation of large-scale public spaces and elaborate public buildings along wide parkways, the architects of Nanjing attempted to benchmark the layouts of other capital cities in the world, mostly those of Washington D.C. and Paris. Therefore, the planners envisioned the new capital with wide boulevards, malls and parks, resembling the National Mall of Washington D.C. In short, Nanjing’s main streets and districts were an extravaganza of Chinese cultural consolidation and nationalist displays. 

Top-ranked plan for Nanjing’s central administrative zone. Source: Charles D. Musgrove, Building a Dream: Constructing a National Capital in Nanjing, 1927-1937.

Through Nanjing’s architecture and city layout, the nationalists attempted to reorder society through the imposition of an ideological and aesthetic discipline, and to foster ethno-nationalist pride and development. As Zhu summarized, Nanjing as a republican capital can be explained in ideological, spatial and social terms: (1) Ideologically, the architectural style of Nanjing was the consequence of Lenin, Sun and Chiang’s varying but consistent support for constructions of national independence from colonialism and imperialism; (2) In spatial layout and construction, the overall nationalist social order was pervasive in all cities and regions ruled by the party; (3) In social terms, a Chinese bourgeois space and cosmopolitan society had already existed before 1927, and the KMT’s imposition of a new layer of urban order and meaning – with a nationalist ideology and modern state-building – was not only visual and symbolic, but also real and instrumental.  As discussed earlier, the nationalist government in Nanjing was a result of the prolonged geopolitical revolution against the anachronistic Qing Dynasty and Western imperialism, and as the KMT regime sought to openly inculcate a modern cosmopolitan urbanism, with the new national pride and sense of “Chineseness”, a vibrant aesthetic and architectural culture appeared in Nanjing. Certainly, as Figure 4 demonstrates, the urban landscape of Nanjing was an amalgamation of Chinese-style architecture upon modern configuration. The capital plan of 1929 displays a civil construction of a modern city with a set of commercial buildings and private industries as well as the KMT’s government and municipal complexes. The forms of government offices and public buildings were required to adopt a Chinese architectural design, with the prolonged tradition of pre-modern imperial palaces included, while the city layout adopted a Beaux-Arts composition of diagonals in a grid of orthogonal lines. In addition, the distinctiveness of a large and open space, specifically aimed at holding a large-scale public gathering, should be noted. 

A large “open” space in front of the Sun Yat-Sen Memorial. Source: Jianfei Zhu, Architecture of Modern China: A Historical Critique.

While proclaiming a Chinese cultural heritage and ethno-nationalist legacies, the architecture in Nanjing was also an exchange of ideas, designs, construction and engineering technologies between the West and East. The Capital Plan of 1929 advocated a combination of “principles of European-American science and technology” with the artistic tradition of China. Influenced by the early-generation of Chinese architects, who were trained either in Western Europe or in the United States, and with the presence of Western architects in China (i.e. Henry K. Murphy and Ernest Goodrich), Nanjing’s urban landscape was a hybrid of the imperial architectural tradition from pre-modern Chinese dynasties, with European Beaux-Arts and neo-classical compositions. Therefore, Nanjing’s architecture and urban planning were an active “reinterpretation” of Chinese culture in a modern, republican setting: diverse constructive elements were alloyed to promote a hybrid synthesis of Western science and technology with Chinese culture and values, thus demonstrating a progressive and modern ideological politics of the nationalist regime.

The People’s Republic’s national embodiment (國粹 guócuì) includes some of the Confucian and Taoist legacies as well as some selections of Mao’s revolutionary ideals, with a central focus on filial piety and the qualified extrapolation of these principles to the communist political arena – that is, the need for socialist peace, harmony and stability in China. As in Nanjing, the state-centered architecture of Beijing has been in charge of guarding the guocui and the day-to-day workings of the government coincide with the core ideological symbol. Thus, during the early and mid-1950s, at the pinnacle of the nascent nation-building process of the People’s Republic, the second wave of Chinese nationalism in architecture and urban planning made an appearance. Under the title of Socialist Realism, the architecture of Beijing during this period was a part of strong upsurge of national pride and optimism over the establishment of the People’s Republic of China, and to some extent, over the “defeat” of American imperialism in the Korean War. Within this framework, modernism and the international style of architecture were condemned as expressions of Western imperialism, capitalism and bourgeois culture, and as a result, streets in Beijing openly demonstrated communist ideology, which proclaimed that public architecture should embrace socialist content and should adopt a national form. The architect Liang Sicheng, one of the early-generation Chinese architects, integrated the popular symbolism of the Chinese Revolution in 1951, and this architectural composition has served as the aesthetic basis in many projects of the period, including Zhang Bo’s Friendship Hotel.

Friendship Hotel, Beijing. Source: Jianfei Zhu, Beyond Revolution: Notes on Contemporary Chinese Architecture.

Attesting to the magnitude of engineering feats accomplished in China, the communist architecture reached its pinnacle in the late 1950s and the early 1960s, when the central government commissioned ‘Ten Grand Projects’ for the celebration of the tenth National day on 1 October 1959. As noticed before, the buildings employed Chinese roofs and traditional decorative motifs within a Western classical composition. Moreover, the contemporaneous architects intended to incorporate modern Soviet building designs by devising the impressively massive and clearly functional designs of buildings. The Ten Grand Projects connoted the highest political and symbolic importance in Beijing, and the buildings dominated and defined the landscape of the capital of the People’s Republic. As Zhu summarizes, the plans for the ‘Ten Grand Projects’ were strictly symmetrical and hierarchical, and the architectural styles were comprised of a very particular combination of eclectic, historicist and ‘classical’ compositions. For instance, some of these buildings, such as the Beijing Railway Station and the Cultural Palace of Nationalities explicitly display traditional architectural themes of China, while others incorporate Chinese decorative motifs within a Western classical composition. Pivoted around the Tiananmen, the Museum of History and Revolution, and the Great Hall of the People stand, flanking the east and west, respectively. Furthermore, as a part of political symbolism, communist slogans, iconographic images of the red torch and stars, sculptures depicting the ‘revolutionary masses’ and even portraits of Chairman Mao himself appeared in buildings of Beijing.

Cultural Palace of Nationalities. Source: Hung Wu, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space.

Beijing Railway Station. Source: Hung Wu, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space.

The Museum of History and Revolution. Source: Jianfei Zhu, Beyond Revolution: Notes on Contemporary Chinese Architecture.

The Great Hall of the People. Source: Jianfei Zhu, Architecture of Modern China: a Historical Critique.

Through this practice of pervasive influence of communist ideology on the central landscape of Beijing, the government of the People’s Republic envisioned a monumental urban layout that could both represent its zealous communist pursuits by adopting Soviet architectural models, and its instillation of nationalism and patriotism by embodying a traditional cultural identity. However, it should be noted that there exists a persistent trend across the architectural conventionality of the first and second waves of Chinese architecture. Despite the seemingly unbridgeable gap between the political ideologies of the nationalists and communists, architecture in both Beijing and Nanjing displays a Chinese roof set on a modern building structure, a continuing legacy of the 1920s Beaux-Arts model. In regards to the communist architecture along Tiananmen Square, Jianfei Zhu briefly outlines the historical development of political symbolism in the People’s Republic.

“Here, against the background of the historical imperial city, the legacy of the École des Beaux Arts intersected with the aims of the Chinese Communist Revolution: the Western classical approach, already localized and tested, was used in the representation of the revolutionary state…In the evolution of the Chinese Beaux-Arts model, the ten projects as a whose marked a transition from the tradition-based National Form to an ideologically based political symbolism.”

In sum, nationalism not only was effectively inculcated throughout this period; its content was very much manipulated to serve the government. The new sacred symbols of nationhood that were taught all served as instruments both for the new Chinese nation and the communist party-state. The socialist cause, the party leadership, and the Chinese nationhood all merged into a set of architecture, representing a unified identity. As the prolonged continuity of Beijing and its traditional concept as an imperial heartland of pre-modern China was overwritten by the juxtapositions of the newly erected communist government buildings and memorials, this newfangled symbolic structure of Beijing attempted to represent an egalitarian combination of history and people on a spatial plane. Indeed, Beijing, and its central plaza at Tiananmen Square have been frequently used as a space for massive public demonstrations, often praising the rule of the CCP and agitating people against the common enemy – the “bourgeoisies” within the Chinese society and the foreign antagonists, namely the United States and later the Soviet Union. The city even endured a series of severe domestic upheavals from the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Although both incidents had casted a mortal blow to the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party and the Chairman himself, the revolutionary future that Tiananmen Square promised eventually survived the turmoil and remained upon the resilient Chinese public, all until the principles of market economy and Western-style liberalism made an appearance during the late 1970s.

A Bird’s Eye View of Tiananmen Square in 1977. Source: Hung Wu, Remaking Beijing: Tiananmen Square and the Creation of a Political Space.

Contemporary Cityscapes of China. Source: Terry Hill, Solutions for a Modern City: Arup in Beijing.

So far, the study of nationalism and the subsequent political symbolism in architecture and urban planning have examined the top-down nation-building process through Nanjing’s nationalist era and Beijing’s Maoist period of the People’s Republic of China. Unlike when both leaders of Nanjing and Beijing struggled to accomplish their nationwide dignity, China is in the midst of an unprecedented economic growth since the 1980s, and the country seems to be gradually evolving toward a fuller realization of the concepts of nation and political citizenship, not to mention the increasingly confident perception of its position in the world. Considering the increasing demands for greater participation and inclusion in the polity by various elements of the population, as epitomized by the erection of the Goddess of Democracy during the June Fourth incident, the architectural scenery of China may be gradually redrawn by private, and more creative civilian influences from below. Rather than the old dichotomy of traditional and modernist approaches, architectural scenes in China are being influenced by a fusion of regional, contextual and even late modern-formal compositions. The retreat of the radical communist ideology of the past made possible a renewal of interest in both the traditional and early modern Chinese culture as well as Western architectural composition, and as a result, the contemporary buildings in China are less dictated by the government and more pluralistic in its artistic expression. Certainly, on the strength of open and dynamic socioeconomic developments, Beijing’s architectural scenes and its prolonged cultural tradition of socialist realism have recently undergone a significant commercialization – a reflection of the increasingly heterogeneous urban culture. For example, Soho China Limited, a private real-estate developing corporation in Beijing, has worked to develop commercial properties in China, and the firm has incorporated internationally renowned architects to produce modern iconic architecture. Also, through open design competitions, many Western and Chinese architects have won the commissions of state or state-related buildings with new and radical architectural modernism.

By modern iconic architecture, I mean projects that do not involve a systematic state-centered building plans or construction decrees, and architectural designs that deviate from the outmoded combination of Chinese roofs and Soviet-style buildings of the 1950s and the 1960s. Thus, with the presence of aesthetically motivated international architects, and the gradual dissolution of “state-centered” architectural decrees, the contemporary Chinese cities have witnessed the convergence of different ideas and approaches in designing its own skyline. After a century of struggles, China is approaching a new plane of aesthetical consciousness, opening up new possibilities for the commercialization of the architectural tradition; the fast-developing economy of China has contributed to the unprecedented collages of traditional elements mingled with the ultra-modern signs and screens. In sum, China is leaving behind not only its past legacies of the Maoist Revolution, but also the hybrid modern tradition of Beaux-Arts composition with the traditional design motifs in which both the nationalists and communists were bound for so long to express their political legitimacy.

By Wonbin Sohn ‘13

[Wonbin is an international student from Seoul. This piece is the first in his series about Asian cities in the present day. The series also kicks off our push to open up the Swat Cities Blog to any Swattie who wants to write about how we as people interact with the built environment around us.]

As of 2010, more than 23 million people are proud to call Shanghai home. A commercial capital of the People’s Republic of China (Shanghai is responsible for more than one-fifth of the aggregate economic activities in the nation), Shanghai is still growing in a rapid phase, craving more foreign capital, talented people, and a rich cultural heritage. If you ever visit Shanghai, and want to actually feel how fast China has grown over the last three decades, I strongly recommend you take a maglev train from Shanghai Pudong International Airport to the downtown area. The train operates at an average speed of 280 miles an hour, and moves people from the airport to the city like a bullet, covering the distance of 50 miles just in 13 minutes.

Shanghai’s airport maglev

The maglev reaches speeds around 280 mph.

Pudong, the financial district, at night.

Pudong by day.

The ever-widening income disparity in Shanghai is increasingly becoming a social problem. Facing such a problem, Shanghai in the near future may face serious social upheaval and violent protests.

Due to the seemingly endless construction and industrialization, Shanghai’s air is heavily polluted, and its tap water is simply unsuitable for drinking.

In contrast to the current image as a mecca of international commerce and cultural exchange, pre-modern Shanghai was an insignificant village inhibited mostly by independent farmers. Shanghai, as its name demonstrates (in Chinese, Shanghai literally means “above Sea”), most of the present-day jurisdiction of Shanghai was composed of muddy rice fields along low-altitude plain in the past. As the agricultural production of the region was largely insignificant and unproductive, the imperial authorities of the Ming and Qing Dynasties did not pay much attention to the area. It was not until the Opium War and the gradually increasing presence of western imperialism of the 19^th century that Shanghai underwent a major transformation. Located along the coast of the East China Sea, Shanghai had a propitious geographical advantage in terms of international trade, as it served as a major port connecting the Guangzhou and Hong Kong region and the imperial metropolitan areas of Beijing and Tianjin located in the north. Soon, the small agricultural town became a flourishing nexus of radical political ideologies, booming international trade, and the spread of western imperialism, that would soon transform the entire Middle Kingdom in a few decades.

When completed, the HSBC Headquarters’ building was widely praised as the most beautiful building in Asia.

(Photo courtesy of: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/4/4e/HSBC_Building,_the_Bund,_Shanghai.jpg/800px-HSBC_Building,_the_Bund,_Shanghai.jpg)

With many privileges, including the extraterritorial rights and monopoly on trade, foreign concessions and markets for international trade were established while local Chinese inhabitants became increasingly marginalized under a severe political discrimination and economic disenfranchisement. Meanwhile, the Jesuit missionaries, who had been striving to disseminate Christian ideals in Mainland China, had founded a number of gothic-style cathedrals around the city. By the late nineteenth century, Shanghai became a city that no longer belonged to the imperial rulers of the Qing Dynasty, or to the local Chinese dwellers. Shanghai had developed a striking inconsistency in its skyline with the sights of gothic bell towers and beaux-art architectures, along with pagodas and temples that resembled traditional Chinese culture. 

The Shanghai Bund in the past.

(Photo courtesy of: http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1HAJdFevd-A/T08GrvL_WXI/AAAAAAAAAKg/KxZdTyoJ3q8/s1600/2154216483_bbc615a6ef_b-crop2-sm.jpg)

The Bund today.

As a part of the Self-Strengthening Movement of the late 19^th century, the Qing Dynasty sent a number of Chinese students overseas, largely aimed at learning and benchmarking the technologies of western nations. Mostly comprised of descendants of elite scholar-gentry families, the students attended prominent educational institutions of the era, including the University of Pennsylvania in the United States and Heidelberg University in Prussia (present-day Germany). Once receiving their degrees, the students sought to apply what they learned to the realities of their homeland, and Shanghai became a real-world laboratory for those foreign-educated intellectuals. Staring from the fields of architecture and urban planning, the intellectuals amalgamated the western technologies (i.e. the Beaux-Arts architecture) with Chinese traditional identity, thus engendering the movement in search of the national identity of China.

East Nanjing Road was one of the districts in Shanghai that had mixed influences of Western architecture and Chinese tradition as early as the mid-19th century. 

The grandiose designs and planning for the Shanghai Civic Center represent the ambitious attempt of the newborn Republican government to promulgate its political authority over the city while emphasizing national identity through the traditional look of the buildings.

(Photos courtesy of Cody, Jeffrey William, Steinhardt, S. Nancy, Atkin Tony, Chinese Architecture and the Beaux-arts. 2011, University of Hawaii Press, print.)

During the late 1930s and 1940s, as Japan initiated its notorious imperial expansion throughout China, Shanghai confronted a stark reality of penetrating imperialism and international war. Once a thriving city of international trade and transportation, Shanghai soon fell under a full warfare between China and Japan. As the outburst of the state-led fascism and the imperial expansionism was finally brought to an end in August 1945, Shanghai restored its post-war status as a city that belonged to China. However, the city was forced to confront an uncomfortable postwar reality that was radically different from that of its glorious past few decades. Following the unprecedented experiences of its unconditional surrender and occupation by Allied troops, the Great Japanese Empire ceased to exist. As the flow of newfangled agendas, such as the progress of liberalism and democracy, aspirations for peace, and the promotion of postwar recovery made an appearance in public, Shanghai faced a tremendous turning point in its modern era. Exhausted by the Second World War, western nations could not reclaim their past properties and interests in Shanghai, and a severe economic recession and social upheaval soon followed. Throughout the immediate postwar era, labor unions had relentlessly declared strikes against the already-incapacitated government, while Maoist guerillas and the KMT police forces constantly engaged in urban skirmishes. Facing political struggles and radical social upheavals demanding change, the polarized society of postwar Shanghai eventually witnessed the rise of the Chinese Communist Party as a sole legitimate ruler of the country as well as the city. 

Shanghai’s WWII Memorial

It is widely known that the Maoist communists largely defeated the KMT-Republican government in 1949. Only after years of guerilla warfare and tremendous casualties, the China Communist Party (CCP) was able to gain the control of China. However, one can observe a striking continuity in the urban planning and architecture of Shanghai throughout the KMT and the CCP rule of the city. Both claiming their legitimacy as a liberator of Chinese people from past oppression (the KMT rebelled against the ailing Qing Dynasty in 1911, which was overthrown by the CCP in 1949), the KMT and CCP both concentrated in constructing buildings that ostentatious displayed their political authority. In order to glorifying the new era of China, which the both regimes continuously claimed to represent, the seemingly disparate political ideologies of the KMT and CCP did not matter much.

The Municipal Government Complex of Shanghai…

…and People’s Square: looks similar? – An extensive public space in the vicinity of grandiose buildings.

As of the contemporary era, precipitous international circumstances, including the dissolution of the communist bloc in the nineties, the unclear future of the hegemonic position of the United States, and the proliferation of the worldwide economic crisis, are throwing the question of where the responsibility and future direction of Shanghai lie. Regardless of the mixed past of the last century, Shanghai has become an affluent city that has played a substantial role in global politics and worldwide economic development. Not only has Shanghai operated as a successful participant in global trade, but it also has offered an alternative growth path to the world under the names of the China Model and the Beijing Consensus, an export-oriented industrialization based on a strong role of government in allocating investment resources toward those industries that are the most critical in attaining high returns. That being said, while considering Shanghai’s past full of ups and downs with a persistent economic foundation in international trade, it is crucial to ponder what stance and sense of mission contemporary Shanghai should embrace. Looking into the future, facing tasks and directions of Shanghai vis-à-vis its progress is to broaden its insights and understandings of modern history from an impartial perspective and to design a more balanced development to accommodate those who have been economically marginalized, and politically oppressed under the strict rule of the CCP. Furthermore, Shanghai should reform its social welfare policies and environment regulations to become a worldwide city that represents material prowess, social welfare, and environmentally-friendly development.   

Indeed Kansas City, MO, is not in Kansas at all. I challenge you to remember the last time you thought about Kansas City. Maybe the Royals come to mind, but I wouldn’t be surprised if this mid-sized city, geographically as far from the coasts as possible, has no place in your imagination at all. (When people think “cities in Missouri,” St. Louis, itself not so glamorous, surely come first.)

My family had the rare privilege of visiting Kansas City in May. We like to take off-the-beaten-track trips, but even we only stopped by because it was on our way to Kansas’ beautiful Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve.

But Kansas City was great.

Lively, interesting, and full of history, Kansas City seemed to me to be a very down-to-earth and welcoming town. My family stayed in Crown Center, a typical-enough 1970s superdevelopment just beyond downtown. The Center—an attempt by the Hallmark Corporation to create a second downtown, fit for the 20th Century—is impressive and comfortable. The downside of such a monolithic development is obvious: the hulking set of buildings is focused awkwardly inward, designed for easy access by car and not by foot, and closed to the boring and unsightly neighborhood around it, which is filled not with people but with other towering institutions and the scar tissue that is a busy freight railroad.

Still, the Center also offers easy access to some of the main cultural/tourist attractions, like the fabulous train station, described by some as the nation’s best (think Philadelphia’s 30th Street, but grander), which is now a children’s museum, and the new performing arts center by the starchitect Moshe Safdie. The very impressive art museum, which has a recent addition, is just down the street as well. It’s clear that Kansas City has been throwing money at the sort of amenities it believes will best attract the well-educated, worldly people that are considered necessary to prevent decline. Keep in mind that Kansas City is also a pro-business town; throwing money at cultural institutions is a more popular hobby than throwing money at local programs to help the downtrodden.

Will such a strategy work? Kansas City is certainly not a global city like London. But listen to the story of my mom’s first job interviews after graduate school. She had a choice of two jobs: one was with Hallmark, the flagship company in Kansas City; the other was with Hershey, the flagship company in, of course, Hershey, PA. At the time she’d preferred the opportunity at Hershey, but telling the story now, she made it clear that Kansas City would have been the perfect town for her, a Midwestern girl looking to make friends and start a career. Kansas City was and is an enjoyable, easy-going place to live a sophisticated, urban life. My mom (from suburban Detroit) was afraid to move to New York City on her own, and she’d even had reservations about Chicago. Hershey however, was on the other extreme. She says that she’d found little to do in Hershey, which is a small town outside of Harrisburg. Her male coworkers took it for granted that hunting was the thing to do on weekends, and she had trouble breaking into social circles that revolved around extended family and local roots. Kansas City strikes a balance, and it’s a balance that must still appeal to many young professionals today.

On our trip, my mom, to her great pleasure, even found the building where she’d considered renting an apartment—a building she hadn’t thought about in thirty years. It was, in fact, right across the street from Country Club Plaza, which, as my mom hadn’t realized, is famous for being the very first American shopping center built for the car. The contemporary term “lifestyle center” probably evokes an accurate mental image. It sounds like a pretty gross urban planning concept—the Plaza’s slightly gaudy Spanish architectural theme doesn’t help—but it turns out to be an incredibly pleasant place to walk around.

Granted, my Kansas City experience was brief and largely confined to the interior of a car, but over the course of my two days there, a long line of very appealing neighborhoods seemed to reveal themselves. This series of neighborhoods runs in a long line from Downtown, through the Crown Center, and all the way to Country Club Plaza, which is near the art museum. The linear series is reinforced by the new express bus line, which uses creatively designed, well-advertised bus stations to give the city a symbolic (and practical) backbone*.

So, it seemed to me, Country Club Plaza, while a far cry from the country’s über-trendiest neighborhoods like Williamsburg or Wicker Park, is an altogether decent place to have fun. Laid out on a grid, with lively streets and sidewalks, the Plaza would probably escape the failing grade Jane Jacobs gives most planned shopping centers. It wouldn’t get an A+ from her either—no purpose-built concentration of chain restaurants and stores ever will—but the neighborhood as a whole has matured into a veritable mixed use mini-city. There are beautiful parks, including river with fully-landscaped banks, a couple schools, and at least one very beautiful church.

Observing the foot traffic, it was apparent that the area attracts a rather diverse population, as well. One of the farthest south cities in the Midwest, Kansas City has large black and latino populations. I can’t claim to have paid much attention to interracial relations, and I presume that Kansas City, like many 20th-century industrial powerhouses, is quite segregated. And Kansas City is not an immigrant town. But at least a mix is present.

I don’t think Kansas City has a secret sauce, but it more than exceeded my expectations. In a nation where many cities struggle to create job growth, raise living conditions for hundreds of thousands of urban poor, retrofit decades-old infrastructure that’s long since been out-of-date, or grasp flailingly at the seeds of an artistic renaissance, Kansas City seems relatively unfazed by any major problems and relatively successful at creating a high quality of life.

Put Kansas City on your radar. It may not make many top lists, but it is a strong example of how a city that doesn’t have anything special going for it can nevertheless keep its heart beating and generate something worth checking out, even if just for short family vacation.

-Andrew

*A similar rapid bus line in Cleveland, which connects downtown to the university and medical districts, has been praised for its pioneering design. Many civic leaders hope these bus lines can provide a jolt of positive energy into bland, decaying urban areas. Cheaper than metro lines and almost as exciting, rapid bus lines are certainly a smart solution to try. But transportation can only augment the positive forces that already exist in a city, and both Kansas City and Cleveland know they have work to do.

Hello world,