Aim for intensityNick Land / text
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Aim for intensity
Shanghai Star. 2003-10-02
By Nick Land
Last week's Shanghai Star (September 25 - October 1) dedicated two News
Focus pages to the question: Is Shanghai growing too high, too fast?
Many locals tend to respond in the affirmative, perhaps in the spirit of
romantic ruralism that so often possesses modern urban souls.
Yet, interestingly, when local residents are asked directly which part of the
city they would most like to live in, most say Puxi, especially the downtown
area. In fact, most would probably like to live in exactly those parts of the city
that are packed with 40,000 people per square kilometre - and, fortunately,
40,000 per square kilometre can, and do, live there.
Urban density brings with it certain problems, of course, although mostly of a
relatively trivial and technical nature - such as congestion, light reduction and
geological stress. It should be well within the capabilities of a sophisticated
city to solve them, by introducing advanced transport systems, the latest
structural engineering techniques, new materials and imaginative urban
design.
More positively and significantly, dense cities also optimize the benefits of
urbanism in general, maximizing human proximity, communication and
mutuality. These factors, far from being narrow technical issues, capture the
essense of social evolution and advanced civilization.
The process of urban intensification, packing ever more people ever more
tightly together, is almost certainly the single most important driver of
historical progress on earth - amounting to something like a cosmic
transfomation in the nature of the human species.
Rather than moaning about the soaring, delirious growth of Shanghai, it
would be far better to celebrate and foster it. If explicit goals are called for,
they should be to double urban intensity within a decade, and in each decade
subsequently, mobilizing the swelling pool of social ingenuity in the interests
of experimental human collectivity.
Nothing could be more depressingly inappropriate, from this perspective,
than appeals to a Tokyo (density 11,800 per sq km) or Paris (density 20,300
per sq km) model - when these cities are proving to be vastly less successful
and dynamic than contemporary Shanghai.
Paris is mostly familiar to Shanghainese from the movies, no doubt appearing
sophisticated and genteel in comparison to the brash cityscape mushrooming
around them. Yet Paris (like Tokyo) is a metrocentre within a basically
stagnant society, an architectural museum marooned in sprawling - and
increasingly dysfunctional - suburbs.
Paris is spacious because predominantly low-tech 19th century buildings
dominate the urban "core" and because the world's first modern totalitarians
designed it with the convenience of the national military in mind - clearing
space for broad boulevards which were impossible to barricade and easy for
armies (in fact, usually German) to march down in order to suppress
outbreaks of revolutionary chaos.