Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
from the air, from the pages of a glossy magazine,” based around tall sky-
scrapers and “central axes built around cars,” producing a dead street life
“more suited to a parade route than a place to walk.”
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Two decades after
Pudong's development, Shanghai urbanization and suburbanization para-
doxically recreated the monumentality of the skyline as mirrored by the
stage-set miniaturization of nature, itself captured in the vortex of Shang-
hai's real estate development model, which also has a dead street life and
stage-set quality.
h ese sustainable developments are themselves captured by the fl ip side
of Pudong's megaskyscrapers, two sides of the same coin. Krupar describes
the eco-city romanticization of suburban lifestyles and its norms as “a pri-
vate Eden of commodifi ed residential real estate and lush greenery.”
40
h e
lush greenery of the suburban small-scale models look like an inviting little
dollhouse. I almost expected the miniature fi gures to jump out of this
diorama. h ey are also the most accurate rendering of the actual experience
of walking around in the suburban developments.
nature sucks, drive more cars
Walking on the crowded streets near the historic Bund, I saw a T-shirt with
the slogan “Nature Sucks, Drive More Cars” worn by a teenager. I did a dou-
ble take, as this expression contrasted sharply with all of the sloganeering
pro-environmental world expo ads that extolled low-carbon living. It also
made me think of An Ting, developed in an area that is already one of the
centers of China's automobile industry, both on the production side (a joint
venture with the German fi rm Volkswagen), and as the site for China's fi rst
Formula 1 racetrack. An Ting is fi ve square kilometers, built to accommodate
eighty thousand people, and costs about ten billion yuan to build (1.2 billion
U.S. dollars).
41
h e German architectural theorist Dieter Hassenpfl üg off ers a highly
technical reading of An Ting's spatial attributes in relation to the typical
