London on the Huangpu
2 December 2009 - 5:00am
Thames Town is a new suburban development outside of Shanghai that mimics the look and feel of a small English town. Photographer Dave Wyatt paid a visit.
Wyatt writes, "The 'One City –Nine Towns' plan seeks to construct nine satellite towns around Shanghai. Six of these towns are to be themed on European style cities from the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain, Sweden, and Italy."
Copyright Dave Wyatt
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Thames Town
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Dave Wyatt, December 1, 2009
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Interesting, If Kitchy, Chinese Suburbs
If we can ignore their kitchiness, there are a couple of interesting things about these "European Themed" suburbs of Shanghai:
- Chinese who have more choice seem to want human-scale development rather than the usual impersonal highrise development.
- But, fortunately for the world's environment, they are building this human-scale development in walkable suburbs, rather than the auto-oriented suburbs that we in the United States built to escape from our cities.
Clearly, they should avoid the kitch by using traditional Chinese models rather than European models. http://emergenturbanism.com/2009/09/20/poundbury-in-china/ gets it right by pointing out that "Down the canal from Thames Town’s lake, traditional Chinese organic urbanism persists, waiting to be rediscovered."
It is ironic that it takes a French graduate of the Sorbonne writing in emergenturbanism to tell the Chinese that they should be using their own traditional architecture as their model, rather than imitating European traditional architecture.
Charles Siegel
Good insight
Good insight, Charles.
I could certainly relate to not wanting to live in high rises. Chinese versions of walkable human scaled communities sounds like a good plan.
Video available
CBS News did a tour of the development project and showed the difficulties the Chinese have adopting the suburban lifestyle that comes with it. Very interesting.
http://emergenturbanism.com/2009/09/20/poundbury-in-china/
Odd
I suppose if I were English I would like thiss new development. However, I find it odd.
This seems like architectural colonialism in a sense.
I guess
It's weird in the sense that China is artificially fabricating the immigrant cultural enclaves common to western multicultural societies. Once the Chinese went all over the west to increase their opportunity and wealth, now China is reversing the experience and westerners come to China bringing their culture and traditions, next it'll seek fake Japan and India towns, Arab and Mexican communities just a train away. It craves the America effect of having the world's bounty for consumption at home, make it the envy of all middle classes, even western ones as it takes it a step further to actually reconstruct native communities, not just let immigrants redecorate apartments. It's the only way China will feel like the global predominant power it's destined to be. But it's all fake, there are no British pubs and festivities in that suburb, not even English football on TV, the only British flocking to China's shores are businessmen and expats who want to live like Chinese. This wasn't done to honor the British, not even an attempt to introduce Chinese to foreign culture like Japan's Huis ten Bosch, but simply to cater to growing middle class tastes for foreign luxury. Bastardizing culture for profit, the accuracy only reflects how much money they believe they can fish out of this thing.