THE SPEED AND THE FRICTION
Deyan Sudjic

Fifty years ago Shanghai was an island of floodlit art deco cinemas, modern skyscrapers and electric trams, marooned in the midst of a China that had hardly changed in a thousand years. As the city petered out on the road to Nanjing, the neon signs and the street lights disappeared into the darkness of a medieval night. To drive across the city in those days, you needed three different driving licenses to negotiate your way from the Chung Hwa Road to what was then called the Boulevard des Deux Republiques, to Edward VII Avenue and Broadway. You could have worshipped in your choice of onion domed Russian Orthodox churches, the product of the army of White Russian refugees who sailed out of Vladivostock with the Bolsheviks at their heels. It's a history that suggests a city shaped by a mix of pragmatism, opportunism and anarchy. Shanghai was China's window on the world, its most industrially advanced and commercially sophisticated city. And it still is, even as Beijing is working hard to re-establish pre-eminence with a building programme in the capital that is just as frenetic as Shanghai's. Shanghai's decision to hold an Expo in 2010 is its own response to the 2008 Olympics in Beijing.

There is a tendency among western observers to look at China's two great cities, Shanghai and Beijing, as vast urban agglomerations that have broken the bounds of size and scale and so isolate themselves from conventional urban precedents. But in terms of population size, Shanghai, with around 20 million people is a city of the same order of magnitude as New York, and London, both metropolises with a population of around 18 million. The most striking differences between Shanghai, London and New York are political organisation and urban culture. Shanghai is effectively a city state, with the powers of the central government at its disposal to annex satellite towns and villages and to open up territory into its direct control. We know Shanghai is big because there is no obfuscation about the difference between the city in the political sense, and in wider definitions of it as an entity. But, as much as we are ready to analyse London or New York as urban regions, the perception is still shaped by political boundaries.

Shanghai, where one in five of its population is made up of temporary in-migrants from predominantly rural China, is the key city setting the pattern for the explosive urban growth in Asia. It is as much a phenomenon of our times as the equally rapid and - to its contemporaries - equally disturbing transformation of Western industrial cities of the early 19th century. It is a phenomenon which is producing a sense of strangeness and dislocation, this time bound up with the overwhelming impact of speed. When the British happened on the Chinese walled settlement of Shanghai towards the end of the Opium War and fought for their right to sell the opium that they cultivated in India to the citizens of the Chinese empire, there was nothing on what is now the Pudong side of the Huang Po River. British traders, attracted by the river traffic on the Yangtze river and its many tributaries linking inland China and the trade routes from Europe, America and later Japan, persuaded their government to insist on their unhindered access to Shanghai's port.

Fossilised through the Mao years, the Bund still looks like a hallucinogenic transplant of a European city to Asia. But Shanghai was never a traditional colony. The city was run, by a series of different, but parallel administrations. It was an arrangement that allowed a hybrid culture to flourish in the cracks between regimes. In large parts of the city, it was never entirely clear exactly who was responsible for enforcing any kind of legal system.

The long freeze on Shanghai's development only lifted at the end of the 1980s,with the introduction of the market economy to China. In terms of physical development and planning, this triggered a great deal of research into appropriate models for Shanghai. Of course Hong Kong, with its carefully managed state land bank and the government's use of auctions to fundraise and control development, was studied with care. But so was the experience of Barcelona as it emerged from its transformation for the Olympics of 1992. Before the wave of new building really took hold, Shanghai staged an architectural competition for a redevelopment strategy to deal with the whole Pudong area. It showed both the strengths and weaknesses of Shanghai's position. Many of the world's leading architects - Toyo Ito, Massimiliano Fuksas and Richard Rogers among them - were invited to take part. They all put forward more or less radical attempts at masterplanning, all of them mutually exclusive in their approach to land-use and form. The city claims to have adopted the best features of all the competitors, and the development of a new business district in Pudong has proceeded at breakneck speed, although along lines that bear little resemblance to anything that emerged in the competition.

Shanghai has moved beyond the first rush of crude tower building, and the mood has changed. In central Shanghai, the American architects led by John Portman who were responsible for many of the early high rises, have given way to a wider selection of designers, who are beginning to demonstrate a more considered range of approaches. As demonstrated by the property investment in the Bund, and in some of the surviving fragments of 19th century Shanghai, the city is also beginning to develop a more nuanced attitude to its own past. Under the Pearl television tower you find the Mayor's call to his citizens to "Rejoice in the present, while recalling the past" carved in both Chinese and English into a low granite wall. Shanghai is determined that every visitor knows all about what is going on now, and expresses this in language that seems to recall the days of the Red Guards. "Persist in the development of Pudong without wavering until it is done" reads one giant billboard. The city is busy planting trees and even the flyovers are fringed with planting boxes dangling green over the side of the road. It has installed its famous $700 million Maglev train system to make the 40 km trip to Pudong airport at an awesome 400 km per hour. And it is metamorphosing with such speed that it dynamited the central railway station built as recently as 1988. The city had already outgrown it.

At the regional level, Shanghai is developing a policy for its position at the centre of the Yangtze delta. On a national level, it is competing with Hong Kong and Tokyo. It is moving beyond manufacturing to advanced service industries, as much a part of the rhetorical agenda for every ambitious city as culture-led renewal. The question facing Shanghai is if its best model is New York, London or Tokyo, or perhaps California, as it attempts to create a balance between its suburban industrial estates, and its high rise city centre. It is still working to reduce cycling by another 25 per cent in the next five years, just as it is working to reduce population densities in the inner city where there are still particularly crowded areas such as the Old West Gate, with people living at 760 to the hectare.

Getting to grips with a city that has been undergoing double digit economic growth for more than a decade demands a set of conceptual tools rather different to the conventional repertoire employed by those who spend their time thinking about urban issues. The inescapable fact is speed. Shanghai is a city whose development over the last ten years has by any standards been extraordinarily rapid.

The story of Shanghai's speed and friction can be told in summary. Since 1990, living space per person has doubled to reach 15 square metres per resident. In the same period, the city has built 40% more roads. There are approaching two million cars. The metro system has reached a daily capacity of 1.4 million people, and is intended to reach five times that figure. The city has developed an entirely new business district in Pudong in less than two decades and it has embarked on the construction of a ring of satellite towns - designed in German, Italian, Scandinavian and Chinese urban styles. In the rush to build office towers to catch a perceived market, speed has been the determinant of form. Rather than give architects and engineers the time to produce considered technical solutions to optimise net to gross ratios, developers have demanded instant starts. Without time to make sophisticated calculations, engineers have over-specified structural cores. Buildings less than ten years old have aged with remarkable rapidity. Some have become redundant even before they are finished.

In Shanghai, friction comes with speed. It's the kind of friction that comes as development accelerates, and decelerates, the friction that fills the gap between the imperatives of what is still operating within the framework of a Marxist control and command economy, the actual results, and often unintended consequences. This provides an echo of the gaps between the administrations that ran the old Shanghai. You can see the will to centralise in the language of Shanghai's plans. Not just in the huge signboard that exhorts its citizens to "Persist without wavering until it is done", but even more in what the city calls "the six pillars", not a Maoist call to arms, but a policy to build a strong economy based on cars, semiconductors, petrochemicals, trade, finance, real estate and construction.

After New York, Shanghai is the second in the Urban Age investigations on cities. It provides a chance to learn from a city in the midst of a spasm of change so violent that it questions the extent of human resilience, to explore the meaning of speed and friction. It is a city which is moving so fast that it's possible to see the impact of theory on practice like nowhere else in the world.

Deyan Sudjic is the Architectural Critic of the Observer Newspaper and co-chair of the Urban Age Advisory Board