Geoscience Reference
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Figure 7. Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition. Photo by Matt Tindell
particularly invested in managing the image of Shanghai in a celebratory
mode, based largely on its centerpiece model of the city (seen in fi gure 7) and
in three particular versions of the city: as a global city, eco-city, and city of
imperialist nostalgia.
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Suburbanization in Shanghai refl ects these trends—global city/eco-city/
imperialist nostalgia—simultaneously. Shanghai's suburbanization markets
the city's cosmopolitanism and livability
through
nature. Suburbanization
communicates ideological messages and value hierarchies in the brave new
world, about transportation and abstract nature over the chaos of hyperur-
banization. SUPEH's monochromatic model shows all existing and approved
buildings and is the center of a large room where you can walk along and
above the model. h e epic scale of Shanghai's model is meant to invite awe.
Like most models, it is clean and orderly, nothing like the actual street life in
the old historic core.
Campanella recounts the history of the development of Shanghai's sig-
nature Pudong skyline, how the city held an international architectural
competition only to ultimately reject the international architects. h e
homegrown version emphasized the epic in all its full Chinese large-scale
glory in a vision of China's urbanism as a city of “photogenic monumental-
ity—a stage-set city intended to impress from a distance, from the Bund,
