The Rise Of New Shanghai

What about Seattle?

As someone who has visited over 70 countries and seen nearly all of the world’s great cities, Shanghai is absolutely a contender. I agree there is some room to grow in terms of overall lifestyle (I’ve lived in SH), but if you don’t feel the energy of a place like SH then you don’t understand the world around you.

Sydney, Buenos Aires, Paris, NYC, Capetown, Hong Kong, London, San Francisco are the places that do it for me. It’s totally personal and objective but to say Shanghai isn’t alive is plain wrong.

There is nothing organic, or natural about Shanghai or Beijing. Both are the products of somewhat reformed Communist central planners with a chip on their shoulders, and a great deal of money to spend and the requirement to spend it quickly before the next apparatchik gets his hands on it.

Old neighborhoods are bull-dozed, any culture and history are treated like potted plants and as we know, nothing happens that is not approved by the authorities or that is outside their gaze.

Having lived in Shanghai, I feel the city has a lot going for it, but doesn’t quite match up to a place like London yet (I’ll focus on London because, of the cities Dan mentioned, it’s the only one where I’ve actually lived as well). A few specifics: Let’s say you enjoy good cinema. In London, you can easily find at least one, potentially good, movie to go see each week. Meanwhile, in Shanghai, at any given
time there are just a couple of foreign films being screened, and not precisely
the cream of the crop. (And, just in case someone is thinking this, watching
the knockoff DVDs at home is not the same!) Shanghai also lacks good parks like
Hyde Park and the other major London parks (or Central Park in NYC, not to
mention the country parks in Hong Kong), which help take the edge off urban
life (something you need to do more in Shanghai than in London). Moreover, the nightlife starts getting old fast: There just aren’t that many places that are appealing to a foreign professional in his 30s, especially if you want to get out of the expat bubble (although there are a couple of gems). To be honest, I wasn’t
terribly keen on London nightlife, but at least there were always new places to check out. Even the run-of-the-mill neighborhoods had pubs where you could stop and have a drink; in large swathes of Shanghai the only option is a can of beer from a convenience store. Overall, much of “cool Shanghai” is a parallel
city largely created for and by the expats and a small cosmopolitan sliver of
the local community. The result is a lot of artificiality in Shanghai. I know some people will take issue with this but, face it, the city would look very different without all the expats and tourists. Tianzifang, Xintiandi, the lounges and fancy restaurants
on the Bund, cool bars like Vue at the Hyatt… would there be enough local fuel
to keep them going, as they currently exist? In London (and New York, and Hong
Kong), there are of course large expat communities who help shape the city, but
the fundamentals would remain in place even if there was a large exodus. To get
an idea of what Shanghai might look like after such an exodus, just go to a
Wuhan (it even has Bund-like buildings) or Guangzhou (though it has a lot of expats). The soul of Shanghai is not that different from that of those places, neither of which is widely considered a great world city (unless you have spent your whole life in the Hubei hinterland). As Dan said about Seattle, perhaps part of their charm lies precisely in the fact that they are not world cities.

Fascinating article. I sent a link to my architect/urban design colleagues. As and architect, I tend to judge a city’s greatness by the quality of the skyline. But that article made me think about what really makes a city great. Is it the skyscrapers? Shanghai seems to have one by each of the world-renowned firms. Tall shiny buildings make great photo opportunities. I don’t think they enhance people’s daily
existence. Too cold and unfriendly. The article listed things such as cultural architectural history, accessible public spaces where you can lay in the grass and throw Frisbees, diverse entertainment, and personal human interaction. From the article, it seems like Shanghai, and other large Chinese cities, lack all of those. The city planners addressed these issues by transplanting the physical objects such as buildings but not the culture. I guess after living in Beijing a year, I miss my American neighborhood and city.

Shanghai seems to me similar to most Chinese cities. There are pockets of uniqueness but most Chinese cities on the Mainland have that same feel to them. Hong Kong is the only exception to this rule in China. It is more modern, more international, more expensive, more diverse than any other city in China. So if you label any city as great in China, Hong Kong would get my vote. Beijing and Shanghai have good qualities, but not on the scale Hong Kong does.