Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
Urban land reform is a primary function of state revenue generation, with
major social costs for residents. In other words, the goal to promote urban
growth is largely “disconnected from the interests of residents living on the
land.”
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At the same time, the scale of relocation has produced “property-
based activism” as residents seek to negotiate the best deals for their par-
ticular housing situation.
Like Burtynsky, the photographer Greg Girard documents these changes
in his
Phantom Shanghai.
Girard says that he makes “photographs that show
what a place,
this
place, looks like when it's used in this way. Here is Shang-
hai's
lived-in-ness,
the vanishing evidence of the hard fl ow of time through
this city.”
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Both Burtynsky and Girard document the beauty of destruction
and the juxtaposition of so much destruction with large-scale high-rises
under construction. h eir typical image is of a house in rubble, with mounds
surrounding it, looking utterly alone, with a new fi fty-story apartment
building just above. h e science fi ction writer William Gibson writes in his
preface to
Phantom Shanghai
that Girard's photos represent “the actual van-
ishing, the hideous twentieth-century urban hat trick itself . . . the line of
dawn rushing through desert, causing stones to explode.”
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h e planning
historian h omas Campanella argues that the human collateral and psycho-
logical costs of the craze for new building projects in China is immense. He
calls it domicide, or the “emotional, psychological and social trauma caused
by the deliberated destruction of home by human agency in the pursuit of
specifi c goals.”
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h e sheer number of people relocated for urban redevelopment in Shang-
hai is immense, but the meaning of this dislocation for the inhabitants is not
well-known outside of the city. h ese changes are often hugely unsettling,
especially for the older generation. My own family left Shanghai in the 1950s,
not to return until the 1980s. When my parents fi rst returned, many places
from their youth hadn't changed much at all, while others had already dis-
appeared. h
e fi rst places to change were near the historic core, one of the
