The Shanghai Surprise: Urban Planning Is Sexy!

 
I'm writing this on the plane flying back after a ten day trip circumnavigating the globe. I started in Oxford (for the wonderful TEDGlobal conference) where my wife and I walked alongside the ancient wall built around the original town limits. I ended it taking the 200 mph MagLev train to the Shanghai airport. In other words, the trip started in the 12th century, and ended in the 22nd. 

On my last morning in Shanghai, thanks to many Twitter recommendations, I visited the Urban Planning Exhibition. It's justifiably famous for the vast scale model they have of the entire city. But what I was most struck by, however, was the rest of the exhibition—and the general fact that there was an entire museum, prominently located, devoted to the art and science of city planning. There were sections of the space devoted to Shanghai's past that felt like other city museums I had been to. But what set this one apart was the top floor, which featured elaborate displays documenting the massive projects underway in the region: high-speed rail, the rapidly growing Pundong area, the revitalization of several urban riverfronts, and many environmental initiatives. This was not an archive of Shanghai's past; it was an advertisement for its future.
If you happen to be a planning nerd, as I am, this was nirvana, an Apple Store of urban infrastructure. But I think the displays were exciting enough that you'd find it inspiring just as an ordinary citizen of the city. This is in part because you can already feel the positive impact that planning has had on the city--not just in that MagLev train, but also in the many delightful parks that have been build in the past decade or two in the downtown area. It got me thinking that we could use a comparable exhibition space in New York. We are in the middle of many epic projects in NYC right now: the massive riverfront designs, including Brooklyn Bridge Park, the Second Avenue Subway, the steady improvement of JFK, the million trees project. It is, empirically, the most active period of public works innovation since the heyday of Robert Moses. But it's hard to see all those enterprises as a coherent unit, as something to be excited about. In fact, the opposite usually happens: they're a construction site, complicating traffic, creating noise and chaos.

This is symptomatic of a larger problem, which is that states and central planners generally do a terrible job advertising their achievements. Every miraculous new toy that is produced by the marketplace (along with all the ordinary toys) arrives on the shelves with millions of dollars worth of advertising explaining how great it is, and how it will improve our lives. But the innovations that come from the public sector rarely have those promotional budgets. Every election year, we get ads telling us how great the politicians are, but we never get ads telling us how great Brooklyn Bridge Park is. That imbalance ends up cementing our existing assumption that markets are better than governments at improving our quality of life. But that isn't always so. I'll take one Brooklyn Bridge Park over a thousand new brands of detergent, thank you very much.

I realize this may sound a little odd coming from someone who wrote an entire book celebrating the power of bottom-up, distributed systems, a book that took the Jane Jacobs side in the Jacobs-vs-Moses dispute. I'm still a big believer in those decentralized forces, and indeed the streets of Shanghai are full of them. But you can't self-organize a subway system. There are certain parts of urban life that will always have to be centrally planned (though hopefully with true community feedback along the way.) My point is that we could learn from the way Shanghai has celebrated its planners' vision for the future of the city, in part because it's fun to see all the cool stuff in the pipeline, and in part because it's important to remind ourselves that governments can be a positive force for innovation and change too.

What's fascinating in all of this, of course, is China's communist history, and its long (and often dark) tradition of celebrating the achievements of the state. (It's worth noting the urban planning exhibition is right off of People's Square, and around the corner from Tomorrow Square, now populated by Ferrari dealers.) I suppose the argument could be made that states are already powerful enough; they don't need marketing budgets. But I think if the achievements you're celebrating are indeed real ones, whose benefits are shared by the wider population of the city, then creating something like the Exhibition of Urban Planning can make a lot of sense. I don't pretend to know enough about contemporary China to evaluate whether there are exaggerations or omissions in Shanghai's Exhibition. But I know enough about the plans underway in New York to think that the city could benefit from marketing its own achievements and ambitions. It's not propaganda if you're actually telling the truth.

Comments

[Greg J. Smith]

Re: central planning - "But you can't self-organize a subway system"

That is true. However, in many nations the state can't arbitrarily mass evict residents around the whims of developers/development projects. Look at the backstory to the 2008 Summer games - 1.5 million evictions.

Some related links:
http://www.worldpress.org/Asia/2784.cfm
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSPEK12263220070605

Anyways I agree that the idea of a repository of "civic vision" and proposed futures is brilliant - and I love scale models as much as the next guy. :)

[Dlevinson]

Actually, you can self-organize a subway system, the New York and London systems were privately developed by (in London's case) numerous entrepreneurs. The systems were eventually consolidated, and were built and operated with government/Parliamentary approvals, but the core of the system remains a product of those many undirected decisions. See e.g. Levinson, David (2008) Density and Dispersion: The Co-Development of Land use and Rail in London. Journal of Economic Geography 8(1) 55-57. http://dx.doi.org/doi:10.1093/jeg/lbm038

[Qedrealestate.wordpress.com]

Of course we can't self-organize all aspects of our lives, but I am not ready to congratulate urban planners as a group. We have plagued the next generations with the misconstrued idea that urban planning and architecture are art pieces. This idea has left huge monuments and planning that did not work that the next generation has to clean up. It reminds me of parents who keep collecting all this crap thinking it is valuable and significant and then their children have to take care of their mess.

City planning and architecture until recently has been the privilege of a few. When it became accessible to many we ended up with developments and cities that are monstrosities of inefficiency. We may think they are impressive, but like grandma thought that the velvet painting of Elvis was art. If they do not serve the next generation they are expensive things to clean up. At least grandma's velvet Elvis painting could be disposed of rapidly.

Most urban plans served the wealthy who at various times abandoned what they built. In our society we do not hold urban planners and developers accountable for the ongoing maintenance of what they build. And they often mistakenly think they are building something far beyond a utilitarian method of serving humanity. They really think are doing aesthetic work. At least prior generations kept most of their artistic endeavors to facades that left the rest of the building and area as adaptable to change.

[Matt Edgar]

Hi Stephen,

Great post. I'm reading Jane Jacobs' 1961 book now - amazing how fresh and insightful it feels nearly a half-century later.

I'm curious about your idea that "the trip started in the 12th century, and ended in the 22nd". Most cities surely lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum - neither medieval masterpieces, nor blank canvases for grand planning visions. I wonder how an "Urban Planning Exhibition" in New York, London or Leeds would balance the contributions of past and future?

Matt

[Jodi Schneider]

Christopher Alexander's approach comes to mind: when planning walking paths at a college, the paths followed the walkers. After a year or so (iirc), paths were laid down based on where people had walked. This is a centralized project based on the bottom-up walking patterns.

It's also interesting to look at how the subway influences the city; the results are a bottom-up response to the centralized planning. I remember reading about this result of the London Tube in
"Underground Man—Can the former C.I.A. agent who saved New York’s subway get the Tube back on track?", William Finnegan in The New Yorker, February 9, 2004, abstract at http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/02/09/040209fa_fact_finnegan

@Dleveinson - Thanks, that's news to me!

[Jordan 1]

Just wanted to say that I read your blog quite frequently and I’m always amazed at some of the stuff people post here. But keep up the good work, it’s always interesting.

[phil.ashlock.us]

Just such an exhibit was open for NYC this summer. Unfortunately I didn't have a chance to see it in person before it closed, but it sounds much like what you're describing - http://nny2010.org

[Retro Jordans]

I really love your blog, Its great to find not absolutely everyone is just posting a ton of rubbish these days!

[Douglas W. Green, EdD]

Steven:
I see you are a Keynote presenter for NYSCATE in November. I am also on the program. I would like to include one of your books in my blog. This should promote sales. The book coming in October would be exciting, but all of your works are interesting. Check my work at DrDougGreen.Com. The books I summarize are mostly provided by the authors. Authors who send me books can approve my summary before I post it. You might find today's post of "Social Pollination" to be of interest. Let me know.

[weny]

http://www.storeingame.com

[Ruimtelijke Ordening]

I visited the expo in Shanghai. It was amazing!!

[freund]

Shanghai is such a lovely city... just great!!