Better City, Better Life? Visioning a Sustainable Shanghai through the Expo
Cameron McAuliffe
As Hilary He discussed in the previous chapter, the last thirty years have seen the ‘opening up’ of the Chinese economy, along with reforms that have triggered an ‘urban transition’ as China’s rural hinterland moves to the city. This Chinese urban transition parallels the emergence of urban theories that recognise the functional importance of cities in the global economy. Global cities have emerged, in theory and practice, as dominant nodes in flows of trade goods, people, and money in the new global economy. Over the last twenty years (in particular), the extraordinary urban development of Shanghai has positioned it within the ranks of emerging global cities. And in 2010, Shanghai Expo arrived at a time when Shanghai was looking to acquire its status as a truly global city.
Global city discourses rightfully emphasise the ways in which cities are increasingly disarticulated from their national contexts as they are drawn into global networks of flows. Yet what does this mean for the global aspirations of Chinese cities – such as Shanghai – that are still set within a highly regulated national context? Shanghai Expo may have signalled the new rise of Shanghai as a global city aspirant, but – even with the opening up of the Chinese economy – is it possible to think of a global Shanghai disarticulated from its economic, cultural and political Chinese context? This chapter will consider these questions through an examination of the way Shanghai Expo mobilised narratives of sustainable urban development.
As the case for Shanghai will show, the disarticulation of global cities from their national contexts is never complete. Indeed, trajectories of urban development play themselves out simultaneously through global and local contexts. Through its representations of sustainable urban development, Shanghai Expo presented multiple pathways for its future. This analysis takes as its focus two dominant representations of future urban development that permeated the expo: an ‘external’ global narrative of sustainable urban development, and an internal Chinese national narrative of modernisation through urban development. How these dual (and sometimes competing) narratives were presented at Expo 2010 provides some insight into the local politics of urban development in globalising Shanghai.
INTRODUCTION: TRACING TWO PATHS TO AN URBAN FUTURE
Much has been written on the rise of Shanghai as an emerging global city.[i] The project to install Shanghai within the upper echelons of global cities has been strongly and unselfconsciously state-led (Wu 2000a; Newman & Thornley 2005). In contrast to Beijing, which is routinely seen as the cultural heart of China, Shanghai’s ascendance has been symbolically tied to the rise of twenty-first century China as an economic power. As David Rowe discusses later in this volume, this ties in to efforts to present the expo as the ‘Economic Olympics’. But beyond the economic realm, the built environment – and more particularly the dramatic rise of the Pudong skyline – has become an important symbolic realm of China’s ascendancy, where gleaming towers and modern mass transit speak to innovative and ‘world class’ urban futures.
Whilst Shanghai is being positioned as an emerging global city, Shanghai in its Chinese context is just one city subject to what has been described as the largest rural-urban movement in history. Driven by a program of modernisation through urbanisation (involving a combination of state-led urban investment and ongoing political reform in industry and agriculture), Chinese estimates suggest that between 15 and 18 million people a year are making the move from the rural hinterland into the city (although the actual figure is likely higher; see UNFPA 2007; UN Habitat 2010b). By 2030, one billion people will live in the towns and cities of China (McKinsey 2009). Following these projections, by 2025 China will have 221 cities with more than one million residents (McKinsey 2009) and, according to UN figures, by 2015 Shanghai will be the seventh largest city in the world.
A dual narrative of urban growth has been taking place in Shanghai (e.g., see Kong 2009): one narrative tract depicts the growth of Shanghai as an emerging global city, increasingly tied in to networks of global relations, and another imagines Shanghai enmeshed in its national context, as an exemplar of China’s broader program of modernisation through urbanisation (see Logan 2008). As a global event with a predominantly domestic Chinese audience, the expo provided an interesting platform for this dual narrative. The expo fostered an explicit embrace of global discourses about urban development, and produced a spectacle of the modern city for domestic consumption. Reflecting on some of the universal challenges of contemporary urban development, the official theme of the Shanghai Expo, ‘Better City, Better Life’, coalesced around the theme of sustainable urban development. Yet (as Hilary He points out in her chapter), the Mandarin translation of the theme, ‘City, Makes Life Better’, represented a domestic focus on the emancipatory power of the city as the site of modernity. The tensions between these two narratives – one global and one local – will form the focus of my analysis of Shanghai Expo, and will provide a platform from which to consider both Shanghai’s aspirations to become a global city and the ongoing importance of the Chinese nation as a context for Shanghai’s global interaction.
Historically, expos have played an important role in communicating development, acting as windows into the progress of human endeavour. The Bureau International des Expositions (BIE) plays a central role, guiding the structure and focus of expos towards ‘a future of limitless progress’.[ii] Shanghai Expo continued this historical role, taking on its central ‘Better City, Better Life’ theme at a time when ‘the way we manage our cities will make all the difference in not only our present ability to prosper and make choices freely but that of our future generations’ (BIE 2010d: para 5). In closing the final Theme Forum for Shanghai Expo, which focused on urban innovation and sustainable development, the Chinese Premier noted that: ‘China will unswervingly follow the path of peaceful developments of all civilizations, deepen mutually beneficial cooperation with other countries and make greater contribution to the progress of human civilization’ (Wen 2010: para 17). As a reflection of this mission Shanghai Expo culminated with the announcement of the ‘Shanghai Declaration’, which is ostensibly intended as a ‘roadmap’ for future urban development. In line with the theme of the expo, the Declaration notes that ‘the abundant fruits of modern civilization’ are accompanied by ‘the unprecedented challenges [...of] population explosion, traffic congestion, environmental pollution, resource shortages, urban poverty and cultural conflicts’ (BIE 2010e: 7). Here the Declaration points to the way Shanghai Expo negotiated dual narratives of urban development in operation in Shanghai: that is, while it embraced the global narrative of sustainable urban development, it remained true to the modernist visions of the BIE, mapping out pathways of ‘limitless progress’.
As Tim Winter has previously noted, expos find themselves at a particular juncture in an evolving global context, wherein these very international events must contend with a decidedly transnational world. One important feature that has worked in the favour of expos is the focus on the city as a site. As cities have become more important in global flows of goods, people, and information, the expo – ever a city-scale event – has become the perfect mega-event to signal the coming of age of a global city aspirant. While (as is argued consistently throughout this volume) Shanghai Expo continued the historical tradition of representing nations as the geopolitical norm, with the national pavilions dominating both in terms of their space and their status, but it also reflected upon the rise of the city and the relevance of global city discourses to the contemporary story of Shanghai. Indeed, Shanghai Expo advanced the expo tradition of city-valorization not only through the promotion of its central theme but also with the introduction of its ‘Urban Best Practices Area’ (UBPA). As we shall see below, this city-scale initiative, which involved 65 exhibitors presenting their metropolitan reflections on the sustainable development themes of ‘Liveable Cities’, ‘Sustainable Urbanisation’, ‘Protection and Utilisation of Historical Heritages’, and ‘Technological Innovation in Built Environment’, formed a key representational framework through which the narrative of urban sustainable development was mobilised.
SHANGHAI AND URBAN DEVELOPMENT
To better understand the dual narratives of urban development on display at Shanghai Expo and the way these tied to the contemporary urban development trajectories of Shanghai, it is necessary to try to understand a little of the historical context of Shanghai’s urban development. Historically, Shanghai has played a central role in Chinese urban development. The Treaty of Nanjing in 1842 saw the opening of the Chinese treaty ports, including Shanghai. British, American and French concessions followed as Shanghai became the most important port in the region. By the early twentieth century Shanghai had developed into a complex cosmopolitan trading centre, dubbed by some as the ‘Paris of the East’ (Wasserman 2009; Chen 2009). China’s designation of Shanghai (along with 10 others) as a ‘special city’ in 1927 ceded further control to the municipal government. With their Anglo-American architecture, many of the buildings in The Bund date from this period – a time when Shanghai dominated Chinese trade flows. By 1936, Shanghai was ranked the seventh largest city in the world (Yusuf & Wu 2002) and this period saw Shanghai hosting about 90 per cent of the nation’s banks. The Second Sino-Japanese War (1937-1945) merged with the Second World War and marked a change in fortunes for Shanghai. The Foreign Concessions were disbanded during this period and the rise of the Communist State saw a shift in the economic arena away from Shanghai to Hong Kong.
With the ascension of the Communist regime, urban development was severely handicapped as revenues from Shanghai were diverted to the Central Government to fund national development. Urban infrastructure suffered from a sustained lack of investment during this period and rural-urban migration served to exacerbate urban problems such as overcrowding, traffic congestion, and pollution. The combined impact of lack of investment and overcrowding resulted in a rise in informal housing. By 1949, makeshift huts (pengwu) and shacks made up 13.7 per cent of the living space in Shanghai (Zhu & Qian 2003).
As early as 1959 (and as laid out in the Shanghai Master Plan of that year) there was an awareness of the need to decentralise urban growth in Shanghai in order to reduce the stresses of urban development (Haixiao 2006). To facilitate the movement of industry from the inner city, 10 nearby suburb industry areas and several satellite towns were designated with a view to relieving population pressure on Shanghai. These urban developments were influenced by British urban sociology, including the early-twentieth century Garden City designs of Ebenezer Howard (Haixiao 2006). This mid-twentieth century vision of Shanghai’s urban growth relied on the strict control of settlement patterns through the hukou household registration system. Yet, even with this structural top-down population control rural-urban migration continued and urban population growth continued to stand as the main challenge to urban planning. This growth was in part driven by the labour needs of the growing manufacturing sector in Shanghai as (by 1975) the city had become China’s leading heavy industrial centre (Wasserman 2009: 95). During the period leading up to the onset of reforms, this industry-fuelled growth further contributed to the serious deterioration of urban infrastructure in Shanghai.
REFORM AND THE RE-GLOBALISATION OF SHANGHAI
There is little contestation of the fact that China has undergone an unprecedented urban expansion in the reform period, which began under Deng Xiaoping in 1978 with the intention of producing a ‘socialist market economy’. Since then, the opening-up of China under the reform process has been an exercise in outward-oriented industrialisation, tied implicitly to processes of urbanisation. Urban development was positioned by the Chinese government as key to alleviating rural poverty, and partial reforms to the hukou system were introduced to both account for and facilitate increasing rural-urban migration. Of the more than 150 million estimated rural-urban migrants to Chinese cities since the 1980s, approximately 20 to 25 per cent have eventually become permanent urban residents. The rest have maintained a ‘floating’ pattern, moving back-and-forth between urban and rural environments (UN-Habitat 2010c).[iii]
Wasserman (2009) has referred to the remarkable growth of Shanghai under reform as a process of ‘re-globalisation’. This process had its seeds in the move towards reform in the 1970s, but was not fully realised until Shanghai was more targeted by the reform process. Deng’s reforms initially led to the development of special economic zones (SEZs) in China, designed as frontier zones in the process of opening-up the centralised Chinese economy. These first SEZs (including the cities of Shenzen, Zhuhai and Shantou in Guangdong Province, and the island province of Hainan) were designed as windows for foreign direct investment (FDI), with special tax incentives and a degree of legislative autonomy helping to facilitate joint ventures between Chinese and foreign companies, and an increase in export-oriented flows of Chinese manufactured goods. Following the formation of the SEZs, in 1984 China opened 14 coastal cities to FDI, including Shanghai. However it was not until the announcement of the developing and opening of the Pudong New Area (PNA) in 1990 that Shanghai was embraced as a vanguard city in the Chinese economic reform process. The initial omission of Shanghai (and the wider Yangtze Delta Region) from this program of explicit economic reform has been recognized by Deng himself as an oversight. On his 1992 southern China tour, Deng conceded: