[url] Seminar: Dec 19

[Anna Greenspan]

'Shanghai: City of Tomorrow?'

Seminar, Laboratory on Urban Research, http://urbanresearchlab.net/

Presenter: Anna Greenspan
Date: Saturday 19 December,, 2009
Time: 2-4pm
Venue: Xindanwei, 4C, Bld 4 in Shanghai Hub No. 727 Dingxi Lu,  
Changning, http://xindanwei.com
Abstract
Modernism’s alchemistic promise has been a failure, a hoax: magic  
that didn’t work. Its ideas, aesthetics, strategies are finished.  
Together, all attempts to make a new beginning have only discredited  
the idea of a new beginning.  - Rem Koolhaas S,M,X,XL 1995

Touch the Future  - Slogan on a Shanghai billboard advertising the  
2010 World Fair

In much of the Western world the future now belongs to the past. The  
very idea of the city of tomorrow  - with its multilayered skyways,  
housecleaning robots and flying cars -- seems doomed to the realm of  
nostalgia, the sadly comic promise of a future that never arrived.

Today – much to the alarm of opinion makers in America - this future  
is resurfacing in Shanghai. It is most apparent in the science  
fiction skyline, which functions as an Illuminated ad for itself -  
the deliberate showcase of an approaching urban destiny.

Yet, this economy of anticipation is evident far beyond the city’s  
most famous icon. On the periphery, in the satellite ‘new towns’ the  
gardens are manicured and the guard booths are manned, but the  
streets and squares stand empty. Signs –built long before their  
destinations - point to markets, schools and hotels that do not yet  
exist. Closer to the city center, remnants of an industrial past are  
being transformed into ‘creative clusters.’ Disused factories and  
warehouses – now gutted and wrapped in glass - seek to unlock the  
city’s creative potential.  In a metropolis of close to 20 million  
people, these abandoned places seem eerie, like ghost towns lying in  
wait, haunted by those who have yet to arrive.

Of even greater concern to the columnists of New York Times and  
Newsweek is that these physical manifestations are coupled with a  
palpable optimistic energy, or to use David Brooks’ formulation, an  
“eschatological faith in the future.” Faced with unprecedented  
urbanization and runaway technological growth, China’s giant  
metropolis has responded– like the cities of the industrial age  -  
with a confidence in science and technology, a positive belief in  
progress and a hopeful – even exultant - futurism.

My work explores this new futurism as it emerges in Shanghai .

It does so, first, by examining Shanghai’s ambitions for the 21s t  
century alongside the 20th century project of imagining, planning and  
building a future Metropolis. With its skyscrapers, satellite towns,  
networks of subways and labyrinthine overpasses that are currently  
under construction, Shanghai is creating the retro-futurist monuments  
to a new modernity. This project receives its most overt expression  
in the approaching 2010 world fair, which explicitly seeks to  
reanimate the great exhibitions of a previous age.

In mapping the ‘City of Tomorrow’ as it resurfaces in a new time and  
place, my work asks whether the same dynamic that eclipsed  
yesterday’s dreams of a future metropolis in the West is fated to  
replay itself in Shanghai. Or, whether, instead, Shanghai might  
produce its own unexpected and alternative (neo)modernity .

In searching for the contours of this new  - and unfamiliar –  
futurism, my work looks for the foreshadowing of a creative epoch  
that is unique to Shanghai, one that is based not only in the  
spectacle, visions and plans that come ‘from above’ but also in the  
shadowy world of unintended, unanticipated innovation out of which  
the future will undoubtedly arise.

Anna Greenspan received her PhD on the relationship between the  
technology and philosophy of time in conjunction with the cybernetic  
culture research unit at the University of Warwick, UK.  Her  
postdoctoral research resulted in a book on India and the IT  
industry. Anna has been based in Shanghai for most of the decade and  
now teaches and writes on the city’s dynamic growth. Anna maintains a  
website at www.wakinggiants.net



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