I'm happy to introduce Anna Greenspan. She is an assistant professor of media studies at NYU Shanghai. She holds a doctorate in philosophy and Kubernetes culture from the University of Warwick, UK. Her research focuses on the philosophy of time, urban Asia and technological trends. Her most recent book is Shanghai Future, you see it over there, Modernity Remades, which is published in 2015. So this is brand new, so to speak.
Anna is the co-founder of the Shanghai Studies Society and Hacked Matter. She also is working on a project to preserve Shanghai's street food. So I think our students were participating in Shanghai Design Biennale are very well used to what you are going to preserve in Shanghai. Thanks for coming. Yes, first of all, I would just like to thank so much to the organizers for having me here in this fascinating day, in this wonderful building, in this wonderful city. So it's great to be here. As Anton said, so first of all, maybe just say that we're sort of switching regions,
but I think that a lot of what I'm going to talk about echoes a lot of what has already been said this morning, And also that the sort of situation in Europe at the moment has interesting lines of connection with what is happening in China today and the construction, the vast construction of new urbanisms with the rural to urban migration that is taking place there. The fastest and most extreme migration that has ever happened in history. So, yeah, I'm a philosopher trained as a philosopher interested in the future, and that made me interested in Shanghai, where I've been living for over the past decade.
Shanghai is a city oriented to the future and really delights in its position as a showcase for the city of tomorrow. and this has been in a positive feedback loop with Hollywood's representations of Shanghai as the future city. This began really with this film Code 46, Michael Winterbottom's film, when he wanted to create a science fiction film that was set in the future without using any special effects. And he did that by filming in Shanghai and then also in Dubai. But it also is echoed in the sort of skylines of Mission Impossible,
in the recent film Her, which has as the future landscape L.A. overlaid with Shanghai, and then in the film Looper, which I don't know if many of you have seen, but from a Shanghai perspective is very interesting because its own narrative of templexity echoes the temporal sort of confusion or the temporal complexity of Shanghai itself. But what we can see with all these sort of spectacles of Shanghai as a city of the future is that most often it leaves out the street. This is an image from the Shaoxing street market where you can go to buy crayfish.
And this importance of the street is really what I want to focus on today. so what I sort of my argument is to really ask how can we think about street life and street culture and street markets when we imagine and create the future metropolis and as I say I think this is you know I've been thinking about this in the context of China but I think it also has a really important relevance to what's going on in Europe today because a lot of the places where migration is happening to are cities that do have a vibrant street life. And as we know, even in areas that are sort of labeled as slum, often does street life
and street market and street culture quite well. So how do we incorporate street life into the future metropolis? Shanghai's own sort of obsession with the future really crystallized around the Shanghai Expo. And it was awarded the Expo in 2002, the year that I came to Shanghai. And its lead up to Expo for the next eight years was really quite astounding. The entire city, you know, skyscrapers were built. Every sidewalk was remade. The subway system went from two subway lines when I arrived in Shanghai to now I think
they're working on line 16. So a really astonishing transformation and the expo was seen as a place where Shanghai could showcase itself, a kind of coming out party for Shanghai. And in this project we really see those of us who aren't sort of trained as architects or urbanists, really see that the project of city building is kind of, in some ways, the project of modernism. You know, for me, I had been used to thinking about modernity and modernism as a project in the arts, most infalledly, but actually to really see this as a project of building
and specifically this project of imagining and creating the city of tomorrow. the metropolis of the future. So while world fairs are events that are sort of intrinsically oriented to the future, Shanghai's own world fair was also an echo of the past. and the enthusiasm that it had for the World Fair struck many as naive. People were like, why is Shanghai so excited about this event? Isn't this event just totally passe?
And that phenomena really interested me and it really brings up, I think, a really fundamental question about the nature of Shanghai and other new, these new cities and their relation to the future. Are these cities just repeating something that has already occurred elsewhere before? Is the future something that is sort of up there on a point up ahead? And, you know, we in the West are a little bit further, and there's a sort of catching up to do this kind of model that we often talk about when we think about the future. Or is the future, is there an absolute future in which, you know, is still sort of radically open?
And so that interests me in Shanghai's own position in relation to its ambitions to create the city of the future. The two pavilions here are, this echoing was most dramatic. This is the GM pavilion for the 2030, for the 2010 World Fair, and echoed very strongly, very consciously, the GM pavilion of the 1939 New York World Fair. Fair, the Futurama Pavilion, which was the most popular pavilion at the New York World Fair. And what's interesting is that the GM Pavilion in the Shanghai Expo, like the Futurama Pavilion,
modeled a world that was 20 years in the future, so Shanghai 2030. and the vision was one where people were in these kind of pods and they were flying around this green city that was envisioned by the pavilion. The GM pavilion of 1939 was presenting the world of 1960 and the world of 1960 was a world of highways and the automobile and so this is echoing what Anton opened with, this real essential aspect of the automobile, of a car-based, road-based urbanism in the construction of the future city.
so just to I'm going to really race through this kind of urban planning history that many of you just know very well probably better than I do in many cases but obviously this arch modernist of Le Corbusier who had this kind of real reaction against the street right houseman's paris who really destroyed the alleyways in order to create the boulevards but of course as uh um the boulevards were were developed with the pedestrian in mind and had uh houseman was careful to think about the views of the pedestrian and the and the boulevards as
we all know sort of gave rise to a particular type of city dweller the flaneur so it really the this kind of so the this car-based urbanism this road based urbanism rather was already set in stone in in or was already set in the imagination in Europe but really came to pass with Robert Moses in New York the sort of master builder as Caro, his biographer, calls him. So that with Moses, the modern city that is New York becomes the city of the car. And again, as you know, this is challenged by
the great urbanist Jane Jacobs in her book, Death and Life of American Cities, which was a critique of city planning and really looked to the street, to the rhythms of the street, what she called the street ballet, to talk about what is a successful city and, you know, how should we go on to create these successful cities, learning from the examples of the streets that are around us. Okay, so this is a potted history of urbanism that, again, you know, but just to give it that context, because I think that that context is very much there in the building of Shanghai.
And there are, we can talk about it maybe in the thing, that there are developers who are quite consciously looking at Le Corbusier, etc., in their plans for the latest buildings in Shanghai. So, what I want to just, again, return to is this question of the street. This is an area called Dongjia Du in the old city of Shanghai leading to the river. And what's quite interesting about it, it was slated for development before the expo, but I think then hit the financial crisis of 2008. And so it remained in this kind of semi-permanent situation of being half demolished.
This symbol, the character there is Chai, to be demolished. So anytime you see this in urban China, you know that that area is about to be torn down. And as you can see, there's a sort of half demolished bulldozers kind of situation in the area. But yet the street survives. This was an old area where the textile market lived and the market just stays. And I haven't been there in some months, but I've heard that still now that area is a very, very vibrant street market. So I'm interested in the resilience of the street. And also if I can just sort of raise a couple more issues about the street that are sort of worth thinking about.
One is this distinction that the historian Fernand Brodel talks about after his sort of three-volume opus on the history of capitalism. And he ends that by making a distinction between capitalism and the market, a distinction he sees as going back through time. And he talks about how his corner store, corner shop that he goes and buys his newspaper can't really be called capitalism in the same way that, say, Walmart can or something like that. And so there is this distinction between the capitalism and the market. And so I'm really interested in this issue of street markets. So that's one.
The spontaneity of the street, the resilience of the street, And also, and this sort of, just to point to this book, this recent book by Sharon Zucan, and she has other editors, on the, it's called Global Cities Local Streets. and really talks about the importance of the local shopping street for what she calls a corner shop, cosmopolitanism, a kind of space of everyday diversity that makes cities walkable, bikeable, sustainable in that way, human-scaled and all those things. So, okay, so as we know,
the sort of battle between Moses and Jacobs goes on, particularly centers around the building of the Fifth Avenue, the extension of the Fifth Avenue Expressway that would have gone through Washington Square Park and knocked down Greenwich Village. And Jacobs kind of wins that battle. And there is, I think, a tension to a certain kind of the importance of street level urbanism in the West or in Europe and North America. But it seems to me that with that, come there's simultaneously a kind of recession of the future, of a sort of confidence
or of a, yeah, a confidence of actually orienting oneself towards the future. And this was embedded in the response to Expo, that one should be kind of cynical about the future. One should be kind of, yeah, that there is a sort of cynicism around the future. And I think that the Jetsons, I don't know if this is very North American reference. Does anyone know the Jetsons? okay so it's done by Hanna Barbera who also created the Flintstones a 1960s television show that projects the 1950s family into the future so a very traditional 1950s family that already by
the 1960s is looking out of date gets projected into the future with their robot maid and flying car and all that stuff. But the message there is that the future is a joke, right? And I think that is there, right? Flying cars, robot maids, all that stuff. There is a kind of retrofuturism that is at the heart of how we think about the future. And so again, what I'm interested in is how do we think the future while still retaining this emergent properties of street life? And I think in some ways if science fiction gets it wrong, cyberpunk gets it right.
And so this clip from Blade Runner, I'm sure many of you know the scene, the sort of pod goes over the skyscrapers and sees these grand spectacles being projected on the skyscrapers and then zooms down to the hero, Descartes, who's eating in a noodle stand. Right? So, yeah. So, I just, in the next little bit, just want to introduce you to two projects that I'm working on that is really about this question about how do we have street life in the city of tomorrow, and that is a project on street food and a project on Shanghai electronics. Street food, I don't know much about Vienna's street food, so I'll have to learn about that in my one day tomorrow.
But street food is this really crucial part of the urban experience. This is a portrait, a painting, a very famous painting from the Song Dynasty that presents the capital. the Song Dynasty is a period of great urbanism in China and presents the capital during the Qingming Festival. And you can't really see it on this sort of not very good rendition. But over here, there are a bunch of street vendors selling food. So street food kind of goes with the city in the same way, to a certain extent, like skyscrapers. If you see a skyscraper, there's a city. Street food is part of the urban experience. And it seems to me that there is a
kind of global renaissance at the moment with street food. This is from the New York Vendy Awards, where the sort of street truck culture of North America, which started, I think, in Oregon, but then spread throughout other cities in North America. And this is celebrated in this Hollywood movie, Chef, where the Michelin star restaurant, sort of Michelin star chef, kind of loses his authenticity, loses his creativity, and has to return to the street to sort of open a street cart to gain this sort of authentic creativity back. not only in North America
again Europe is a place that I'm ignorant about I would love to learn but this is the Taipei very famous night market in Taipei that anyone who goes to Taipei will certainly visit and of course Singapore with its hawker stands which I was privileged something went right in my life and I was privileged to attend this world street food congress in Singapore where I learned that the Singapore sort of middle class family eats a majority of their meals through hawker stands. So there is a kind of place for street food in a lot of cities around the world. And Shanghai has a wonderful street food culture.
Shanghai, like New York, is a migrant city. migration both from all over the world and also from all over China, more importantly from all over China. And so we get this cuisine from around China. This is the famous Xiaolongbao, the famous Shanghai dumpling. But also in the other corner, the sort of burger from Shanxi. And the skewers, the lamb skewers from Xinjiang. So we see all these things in the city. However, the kind of process of development that Shanghai is going through and the planners and the managers of the city really associate urban development with cleaning up the streets.
So let me try to get this to work. just the most famous example of this is a street called Wu Jianglu which was this really really vibrant as you can see place to get street food but was basically demolished one more picture like this you know it's now been redone as a kind of a place of contemporary street food and what you get there is subway sandwiches and etc etc so we and this is done with my colleague and friend Francesca from Tongji University sort of got together a group of people and this was really
envisioned initially as a community project to sort of celebrate and preserve and sorry that's not it think about Shanghai street food and so we built this website mostly Francesca built this website where we've been documenting Shanghai street food starting to do projects with mapping Shanghai's street food. And there's an encyclopedia of street food. And so it's a kind of, this isn't really, it's going to take too long to load, but you can get the idea, right?
So a project that sort of celebrates street food. And I guess this raises this question of models, right? How does one intervene in these discourses? And so perhaps a sort of celebration is a way of intervening. So that's one. The second thing that I will now end with is the project on Shanzhai. China, as you know, is sort of understood for many as a factory to the world, a factory for large corporations. And so this logo that's on the back of all of our apples, designed by Apple in California, assembled in China, really capsulates this relationship,
this idea of China as factory to the world. So I'm interested in disrupting that narrative, but that's not what I'm going to do here today. Alongside that giant kind of outsourcing, factory type projective, there also grew another mode of production, particularly around the city of Shenzhen, a kind of known as Shanzhai. And Shanzhai really started as this kind of knockoff, crystallized around the cell phones and now smartphones, and started off as this kind of knockoff production, the Nikia phone, the Motorola phone, etc. But also these kind of niche designs so you can have your phone look like
the keys to a luxury automobile or whatever. But it is now growing and really Shenzhen phones have become quite good. I just bought one for about $130. So really starting to rival the big players like Samsung and I think Apple stay for a little while but but certainly with an Android phone I think you're in trouble. The Shenzhen mode of production and distribution and marketing I will argue has more in common with the street hawker than it does with the shopping mall.
So this is Shenzhen's Huaxiang Bay area where the markets are located. And even though there's big buildings here and they look like malls, inside those malls are all these like little stands, little kind of hawker stands almost, that sell electronic components. And so it has the feel of this giant electronic bazaar. And out of that has emerged a mode of manufacturing, a production ecosystem of open source hardware where people that want to make something just go around the market and this is the components
of a smartwatch. So if you want to build a smartwatch, you just go around and buy the different components which are all available on the market. And then you can design a little, however you design around that and brand it your own. So it's a very different mode of manufacturing hardware. And it has a very DIY aesthetic to it or a DIY culture to it. And so this mode of Shenzhai production has spread throughout the culture. Shanzhai, the term means mountain village and is associated with long literature in China that has to do with a kind of quasi-formal or informal mode of existence away from the eyes of the state.
So the very sort of cliched saying, the mountains are high and the emperor is far away, right? Mode of production. And this kind of DIY, I think that Pedro was sort of talking, this sort of informal mode of production is captured by this sort of Shenjai spirit. My own work with a group called Hacked Matter, Sylvia Lintner and David Lee, focuses on the relationship between Shenjai and a global maker community. So in making the products of the next wave of robotics and the next wave of especially IoT or wearable devices, people from around the world have to come to Shenzhen and integrate with this Shenzhen culture, the Shenzhen mode of production.
And so in some ways this kind of cutting edge devices, cutting edge technology is engaged with the street markets of electronics that have grown up in Shenzhen. But precisely at this time, Shenzhen itself is starting to question Shenzhen and ask, you know, or many are arguing, oh, we're beyond this. This was just a stage of development. Piracy is a stage of development that everyone goes through. We are no longer Shenzhen. We want to brand ourselves. And they look to models, of course, like Silicon Valley to say, like, this is the mode of the future that we must occupy. So in light of that current dynamic, again, my question is, how do we retain an orientation