By Jonathan D. Solomon
As Shanghai's new Free Trade Zone amid announcement of policy reforms, there is much discussion over the its role in the future of Shanghai, and China’s economy. Few seem to be asking whether it will even have walkable streets, public transportation, and buildings with a mix of uses at a mix of scales.
A Brookings Institution report has shown that walkability – a neighborhood’s accessibility by public transportation and on foot – influences a neighborhood’s economic performance. A recent study in China showed that walkability has serious implications for public health in the country. Mixed-use development encourages walkability and improves health. Looking to build an innovation economy? Build more coffee shops. Cities are drivers of economies, and Chinese cities already have many of the right elements: a growing middle class is seeing rising household incomes. An ambitious infrastructure program is set to add 800 miles of subways to China’s cities in the next two years. Seen in this light, the urbanism of Pudong may well have a more lasting effect on China’s economy than the policy’s it is a testing ground for.
The question of what kind of city will be built within the Free Trade Zone's borders may not be being asked because unlike the sparsely inhabited agricultural lands that China developed as Special Economic Zones in the 1980s and 90s, the Free Trade Zone is largely already developed, a discontinuous territory of warehouses, port facilities, and airplane hangers. When Deng Xiaoping inaugurated the Shenzhen SEZ in 1980, it was with the purpose of building a new city. The Shanghai Free Trade Zone, four sprawling sites comprising 11 square miles, has more to do about changing the rules of business for a part of the country already defined by economic exceptionalism.
Occupied by agriculture and small villages as late as 1993 the 467sqm Pudong New Area Special Economic Zone is today home to over 5 million inhabitants. With a GDP estimated at $77 billion. Pudong is not so much a city as a patchwork of special economic districts: At the Western edge, opposite the staid deco facades of Shanghai’s colonial Bund, is the Luijiazui Financial District, where the 121 story Shanghai Tower recently topped off at 2,073 feet. To the northeast is the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone. The Jinqiao Export Processing Zone is a major industrial area. Zhangjiang Hi-tech Park is a special area for technology-oriented businesses.
Aside from a few showcase projects, urban development in the area has not been integrated. Focusing on showcase infrastructure, the area’s growth has not been designed to develop neighborhoods. Planned communities such as the Pu Jiang and Feng Cheng new towns – part of the “One City Nine Towns” plan launched in 2001 – were modeled after European villages to attract middle class residents, but have failed to compete with real estate in the center city. These neighborhoods have the walkable blocks of a small town in Europe or North America, but they lack the energy and potential that make Shanghai a place where people want to live.
Luijiazui, with its wide streets and glass towers, may seem like a strange place to look for walkable urbanism. Once mocked for being soulless, the neighborhood is now on the rise among the city’s growing middle class. One addition that has helped make the neighborhood work: a new, elevated pedestrian walkway joins together a series of shopping malls and links the metro station with the area’s parks, office towers, and waterfront promenade. Shanghai Tower’s "vertical communities" also offers a possible solution. Sky lobbies offering shops, restaurants, and urban amenities amid light-filled gardens appear every 12 to 14 stories in the tower design. Joined by the world’s fastest elevators, the building will be a city within a city, including offices, hotels, retail space, and links to transit.
Will walkable urbanism in China look like it does in Europe and North America? Not necessarily. If Shanghai Tower and other buildings like it can become neighborhoods, they will be a driving force in Pudong, Shanghai and China’s urban future, creating both opportunities and challenges. Not the least of these challenges would be the question of how to provide public rights to a city composed of private pieces. With an urban population of 712 million and growing, answers to questions such as these may ultimately have greater a greater impact on the country’s future than any economic reforms.
Jonathan D. Solomon is Associate Dean at the School of Architecture at Syracuse University and the author of Cities Without Ground, a book on the complex three-dimensional urbanism of Hong Kong.
