Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
“international” designers. And, in a radical break with typical Chinese
urban development and unlike central Shanghai, the plans would avoid the
construction of high-rise buildings, focusing instead on low or multilevel
architecture.
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h e renewed focus on the environmental benefi ts of cities,
especially in light of energy usage, is gaining serious attention in topics like
Edward Gleaser's
Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us
Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier, and Happier,
in networks like the Urban
Climate Change Research Network, and in climate governance agreements
at the global urban scale between mayors of cities across the world (i.e.,
through the World Congress on Cities and Adaptation to Climate Change).
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Suburbs have long been defi ned in the West as places of retreat from the
pollution, density, and disease associated with urban life. Without industri-
alization in the nineteenth century, the Garden City movement would never
have taken off in England at the dawn of the twentieth century. Fifty years
later in the United States, car-driven suburbs exploded after World War II as
predominantly white city-dwellers sought their own version of the Ameri-
can Dream, with a lawn and a white picket fence. In other words, the condi-
tions of urban life are the problems that suburbia purportedly solves. From
nineteenth-century Britain to postwar America to contemporary China:
Shanghai's urban policy and suburban real estate development adopts a
somewhat similar grammar of nature, comfort, and escape (or at least the
1950s version of American suburbia, before the realities of sprawl ruined the
dream, along with the air). One major diff erence from the United States is
that the Shanghai real estate and urban development model has typically
depended on large-scale apartment complexes connected by transit, not the
single-family home based on the car, although the One City, Nine Towns
project deviates from this model.
h ese developments are indeed a successful Rorschach test for some-
thing—the di' culty of defi ning or evaluating “success.” h ey are empty
towns, devoid of people and commercial or street life, confi rming critical
