In the fifth and final part of our series on planned cities in China, Dieter Hassenpflug takes an intercultural perspective on the Lingang New Town designed by GMP in south-eastern Shanghai. His comments on this ideal city design conclude a series of critical observations whose main aim is to raise awareness of the intercultural challenges faced by architects, urban planners and city planners […].
In the fifth and final part of our series on planned cities in China, Dieter Hassenpflug takes an intercultural perspective on the Lingang New Town designed by GMP in south-eastern Shanghai. His comments on this ideal city design conclude a series of critical observations whose main concern is to raise awareness of the intercultural challenges that architects, urban designers and urban planners face when they move outside their familiar – and therefore always formative – socio-cultural milieus in a global context.
Lingang, the planned city for around 800 thousand future residents designed by GMP in the south-east of Shanghai, is circular. This also applies to Dishui Lake, which forms the unusual center of the city. With a diameter of around 3 kilometers, the circumference of the lake is approximately 9 kilometers. The actual length of the shore is of course somewhat longer, perhaps just under 10 kilometers, due to projections or artificial peninsulas extending into the lake. The structural center of the planned city is formed by three concentric ring roads. The distances between these main streets are approximately 500 meters. While the two inner ring roads form the space for the ring-shaped city center, the Central Business District (CBD), the two outer ring roads provide space for an equally ring-shaped green zone, for a picturesquely designed ring park crisscrossed by bodies of water. It should be borne in mind that the length or extent of the ring-shaped or wheel-shaped city center clearly exceeds the length of 10 km. These are enormous dimensions, which should have already been noticed during the work on the master plans and should have warned us to be cautious when realizing the construction.
The aforementioned ring-shaped urban spaces are intersected by radial axes whose task is to connect the center and periphery of the planned city directly with one another. In the original designs, 8 axes can be identified, four of which are aligned to the main cardinal points of north, south, west and east and four in the middle between them. In this way, 8 circular sections (circular sectors or ring sections) are initially created, each of which is divided in the middle by another lower-ranking radial road. This symmetrical arrangement of the radial roads results in 16 pie-shaped circular sectors. These ultimately form the trapezoidal neighborhood zones of Lingang.¹
A prima vista, this is an aesthetically pleasing design that makes it easy to understand why the jury and decision-makers were won over by the GMP architects. However, the experts’ decision to allow the design to become reality contains two questionable assumptions. The first is of a technical nature and concerns the relationship between the scale of the plan and reality; because what appears plausible, reasonable, coherent or even aesthetically pleasing at a scale of 1:1000 or comparable can be unreasonable, incoherent and even dysfunctional as a built reality, i.e. at a scale of 1:1. The second assumption is of cultural provenance and concerns the difficult to resolve contradiction between a radially concentrated basic structure and a socially desirable and legally prescribed southern orientation.
Let us pick out one aspect from the Lingang master plan: At the plan scale, the concentric streets in their geometry supporting the ideal form appear anything but out of place. In reality, however, the radius of the concentric streets is so large that the circular arc of the streets is barely perceptible. Of course, this is all the more true the further these streets are from the center. These outer streets look almost like straight axes and you have to look very closely to recognize their curvature.
Or let’s take the city center that is repeatedly drawn in the plans: if you just look at the plan, you might think: “interesting idea, a wheel-shaped city center, a CBD like a Saturn ring”. Why not? But if you switch to the 1:1 scale level, things look a little different. For people, such as women with baby carriages or senior citizens, who visit a city center for shopping and other everyday errands, walking distances of 500-800 m can already turn into work (which is why, for example, retail frequency studies like to consider distances of #300 m as a guideline for pedestrian access systems). Even enthusiastic city tourists are likely to be overwhelmed by conquering 10 km of urban space on foot. No wonder that current framework plans for the city center of Lingang envisage the development of at most a fraction of the central ring road, a maximum of 30% of the available space. A glance at the current outline plan (see above) shows that this built-up “ring arc” is part of a western and northern section of the circle, which will apparently make up the area of the future city of Lingang. The development of the entire available circular area is apparently no longer planned – with corresponding effects on the projected number of inhabitants.
The same applies to the central lake as to the inner city ring. The body of water is so extensive that it is perceived as dissolving the urban space rather than holding it together, separating rather than connecting it. In order to be perceived as an element of the urban space and to function as a public urban meeting space with its banks, it should be significantly smaller. It would then be easier to grasp visually and integrate into the urban context. From this perspective, it is hardly surprising that Lingang’s central lake is particularly popular as a public recreational space where there are areas that project into the lake. These promote the sensory perception of the space, making it comprehensible and accessible.
European ideal cities as a problem
The second fundamental problem concerns the intercultural dimension of urban development and urban planning. And here the starting point is quite clear: the geometry of the ideal Western city works poorly in China, regardless of whether it is a small or large city (such as Lingang). The layout of Lingang could perhaps be realized in Europe if the baroque or absolutist framework conditions existed. It would then work reasonably well – but probably only in a dramatically shrunken version. In China, however, a radial-concentric plan fundamentally hinders the successful construction of a city, no matter how big it is supposed to be. Not only can this basic form not meet the wishes of prospective residents, but it is also not supported by Chinese urban planning laws.
Apart from the circular lake that forms the center, the plan refers to the ideal cities that were usually enclosed by star-shaped jagged fortress walls, as they were first designed in Italy during the Renaissance. Some of these early modern planned cities, whose main aim was to optimize the fortifications with a view to new, more efficient weaponry, were also built in the age of absolutism. In Germany, these included Karlsruhe, Mannheim, Glückstadt and Freudenstadt.
Ideal city designs have never ceased to fascinate urban planners and architects. Perhaps the most famous planned city design, which is explicitly located in the tradition of European ideal cities, is Ebenezer Howard’s design for a garden city of the future. There is no doubt that consciously or unconsciously elements of this powerful plan, which aims to combine the advantages of urban and rural life, have also been incorporated into GMP’s plan for Lingang. This applies, for example, to the ring-shaped city park, which we also find in Howard’s design.
Among others, the Italian traveler Walt Disney was also inspired by the ideal cities of the Renaissance for the designs from his urban planning laboratory, the EPCOT Center (Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow). The exclusive planned city of Celebration near Orlando, Florida, is a built creation of this research center, although the basic radial-concentric forms have been almost completely abandoned in favour of fictionalizations of old European (piazza) and baroque (central axis) urban elements.
Regardless of the marketing strategies used to launch the design by Gerkan, Marg and Partners in the Chinese professional public (keyword “drop of water” as a metaphor), it also stands in the tradition of the ideal city and was inspired by it. But is renaissance possible in China? Hardly. This is because the basic radial-concentric structure is very difficult to reconcile with the urban traditions of Chinese spatial production. The most important reason for this incompatibility is the freedom of orientation of the residential buildings required for the structural filling of such a basic structure. Such “freedom” does not exist in the tradition of Chinese urban planning. This is because the south-facing orientation of residential buildings is a socio-cultural imperative in the Middle Kingdom. Developers of housing estates know that deviations are not exactly advisable; after all, the south-facing orientation of residential buildings is not only required for climatic reasons, it is also part of the rules of Feng Shui and at the same time an indispensable element in gaining or securing social prestige.² South-facing orientation is therefore also one of the most important ‘selling arguments’ for the housing industry. Moreover, this is prescribed by building law in many parts of China, including Shanghai. An exemption from the building authorities is required to deviate from it.
In China, ancient urban planning traditions refer to world creation myths in which the – cosmologically based – north-south orientation is central. In this respect, the Chinese practice of urban space production follows rules that are comparable to those of the militarily motivated city complexes of the Romans. This applies in particular to the likewise cosmologically derived, but also partly romantic³ determination of the north-south axis (cardo) and the east-west axis (decumanus) of Roman garrison towns. As a consequence, this axial cross defines an orthogonal urban layout. In this, there can be no concentric streets and, in the absence of a circular ground plan as a reference form, no – genuine – radial streets either.
The practice of the grid-shaped urban layout largely disappeared in Europe with the decline of the Roman Empire. Largely, as it found a medieval, regional and to a certain extent ‘Christian’ continuation in the form of the Occitan bastides in southern France. In China, on the other hand, the orthogonal urban layout was perpetuated in the country’s spatial cultural memory primarily through the preservation of cosmologically based rules and supported by the regulations of feng shui. In addition, as already emphasized, the row and point buildings of neighborhoods must face south for climatic, legal, traditional and, above all, social prestige reasons in order to be fully accepted by the residents.
However, a circular or star-shaped urban layout, such as that of Lingang, does not support precisely this – with minor restrictions: these exceptions concern the axes running in the immediate vicinity of the main cardinal points. Only along these can buildings be constructed in such a way that they roughly correspond to an orthogonal ground plan. However, the residential buildings on the main axis running south ‘look’ at the center with their northern side, turning their backs on it, so to speak. The buildings on the two main axes running west and east, on the other hand, must, to stay in the picture, face the center with their ‘shoulders’. And for all the rest, the buildings cannot be aligned towards the center without serious consequences that distort the cityscape. This is because it is not possible to integrate an orthogonal basic structure into a radially concentrated one without contradiction. If you try to do this anyway, the radial-concentric structure is corrupted by the orthogonal one and the orthogonal one by the radial-concentric one. It was precisely this irresolvable conflict between basic structure and infill structure that was encountered in Lingang at the latest when they set about building the planned city with its attractive layout in stone, concrete, brick, steel and glass for Chinese city dwellers.
In contrast, the European traditions of (parceled) perimeter block development established since the Middle Ages not only allow freedom of orientation, but in fact presuppose this freedom. Radial-concentric concepts therefore do not pose a fundamental problem for European urban planning. The access roads, building blocks and not least the buildings themselves can all be flexibly aligned towards the center, thus supporting the integrity of the ideal form. South, east or west orientation and even the north orientation of façades are possible and fit harmoniously into a radial-concentric basic structure that accentuates the center. The view of the ideal Italian city of Palmanova demonstrates this impressively.
While in the case of Anting Neustadt, the problem of the Chinese usability of the “German” urban space arises primarily from the concept of mixed use and the orientation-free perimeter block development, the situation is slightly different in the planned city of Lingang; here the problem is the impossibility of supporting the radially concentrated spatial structure with a flexible, orientation-free development. A comparatively small-scale mixed use is not planned, apart from the inner ring directly on the lake. The same applies to the perimeter block structures. In principle, there is plenty of space available for the construction of Chinese neighborhoods, for “compounds”. However, this cannot be used as desired due to the urban planning traditions, the still living rules of Feng Shui, the concepts of distinction of Chinese citizens and, last but not least, the legal framework conditions.
Irrespective of human error, poor building quality or inadequate development, Lingang is threatened with failure – if not syntactically and functionally, then semantically or narratively and aesthetically – by a failure that derives from the contradiction between the given radial-concentric and required orthogonal basic structure. It only takes a bird’s eye view of Lingang to realize how difficult it is for urban planning to cope with the filling of the given structures. It should have been clear to the local experts that a Renaissance design cannot work in China. GMP will very probably have to come to terms with the fact that their planned city will never be as they had initially imagined and as the design suggests. As is already apparent today, Lingang New Town will remain a torso, an irritatingly inconsistent and fragmented urban structure.
If you look at the details in Lingang, not only can you find evidence of the incompatibilities mentioned, but you also have to realize that many traffic areas and housing estates were completed in very poor construction quality. If you ask knowledgeable people about this, you often get the answer that there was a lack of money or that the available money had somehow run out prematurely… However, not only is the incompatibility of western and eastern basic urban planning forms evident everywhere, but to make matters worse, what has been realized is in a sometimes deplorable structural condition. My speculation is that the glaring problems in filling the existing basic structure have a demotivating effect on capable project developers and housing associations or lead to a reluctance to participate in tenders.
Take, for example, the generous sidewalks that flank the extra-wide, multi-lane radial roads in particular. All too often, people walk on inferior, often cracked and crumbling paving slabs and tiles. Kerbs are often in a comparable state and even the lanes of the spacious, little-used “boulevards” show considerable damage just a few years after their construction. The same can be said of the structural condition of the newly built residential areas. At every turn, you come across peeling paint, soaked walls, falling bricks, broken tiles, rusting ironwork and unkempt green spaces. However, we also encounter considerable structural and material damage in the area of the ring-shaped center, some of which is equipped with sophisticatedly designed buildings. The fatal thing about these conditions is that they are not exactly conducive to a willingness to maintain and care for the buildings and areas and to treat them with respect – rather the opposite.
So far (spring 2018), it is mainly the areas to the west of the aquatic center that have been built on. In order to maintain a basic orthogonal structure that favors Chinese urban planning, at least in some areas, several parallel streets have been docked onto the outer ring road in a west-east direction. The rectangular blocks obtained in this way were then filled with row buildings facing south. With the exception of the buildings located directly on the west-east running central axis, the blocks of course consistently ignore the ideal urban basic structure of the master plan. The further away they are from the main axes, the more the building lines point to nowhere in the urban space.
It can be assumed (and this is already indicated) that the insertion of grid-like street layouts will be the means of choice for dealing with the ideal urban layout. This is because the grid prefigures those rectangular blocks that can then be easily filled with south-facing residential buildings. The traces of this ‘sinicization’ (and thus reorientation) are already clearly visible. As a consequence, the basic European structure is, of course, reduced to absurdity. This threatens Lingang with a fate that once befell the baroque layout of the North American town of Circleville on a much smaller scale: In just a few years, the structures of the ideal city ‘imported’ from Europe, following the Jeffersonian rules of American spatial production, were transformed into a typical US city characterized by a grid.
Unlike in China, which is characterized by socio-spatial hierarchies, in the United States the grid, which conceals a system of private ownership of land (Jefferson’s Land Ordinance and Lincoln’s Homestead Act), is interpreted as a sign of democratic equality. In this American perspective, radial-concentric designs and structures with their emphasis on center and periphery symbolize social hierarchies. Of course, one immediately wonders why the ideal urban form of spatial hierarchization is not in demand in China. The answer can only be: The radial-concentric, centre-oriented form of spatial hierarchization is contrary to all Chinese traditions and rules of urban spatial production. The spatial forms of social hierarchy must be realized here in a different way: As we saw in the example of Liaodong Bay New Town, the new port city in Panjin Prefecture, in the first article in this series, this is done by means of linear centers.
Linear center means that one or more main axes or corridors assume the function of urban centrality. This is done by assigning important urban facilities, cultural institutions and commercially used properties their appropriate place in the city. In this way, hierarchically structured, linear spatial sequences of significant buildings are created, as was once characteristic of Chinese cities and, after an urbanistically largely directionless transitional period, is once again the case. In contemporary urban planning, the model of the linear center has regained its once preeminent urban planning position.
Through the role of the main axes in the organization of hierarchical spatial sequences, the Chinese model demonstrates that orthogonal patterns are also suitable for the spatialization of socio-cultural hierarchies. This means in our context: By undermining and destroying the ideal urban structure, the Chinese practice of urban space production, unlike in the American Circleville, is not at all directed against hierarchical symbolism, but against the European, nodal or punctual form of spatial hierarchization.
Lingang can only escape the fate of Circleville, if at all, because of its size and the formative power of the circular lake in the center. However, if Dishui Lake in the center is converted into a square body of water and the existing parts of the wheel-shaped CBD (“Central Business District”) are demolished, the cards could be reshuffled. Hard to imagine, but not entirely utopian. As mentioned above, it is not uncommon in China for entire districts or, more often, entire neighborhoods to be razed to the ground due to lack of demand or serious structural defects – only to start building again a short time later.
Let’s take another look at the north-west and south-west facing sectors. In these sectors, the desired and prescribed south-facing orientation results in large losses of space. In order to avoid unsightly residual areas and spatial edges when building on narrowing plots, the European freedom of orientation has been recalled in some cases and special permits for deviations from this have obviously been successfully sought. In the areas mentioned, for example, we encounter the arrangement of residential slabs as we know them from modern European large housing estates. There, following European traditions in urban planning, the south-facing orientation – although called for in the Athens Charter for Modern Building – was never implemented as strictly as in China.
This freedom in the arrangement of the buildings in Lingang can only be explained by the European or German background of the planned city. Paradoxically, this argument is supported by something that is rather untypical of European modernism, namely the fact that the Chinese residential buildings have gabled and hipped roofs. From a German perspective, this is actually a postmodern ‘violation of the rules’ in relation to the standards of modern housing construction. In China, on the other hand, this is not a problem, as large housing estates here came to terms with architectural postmodernism on a grand scale shortly after the country opened up.
The gabled or hipped roof, with or without dormers, can undoubtedly be interpreted as a design feature of architectural postmodernism in large housing estates. It is probably due to the exemplary connection with the ‘German city’ that only a few sculptural roof structures have been discovered in Lingang Neustadt to date. At the same time, however, this means that an important component for the neighborhoods’ collective need for distinction has been dispensed with: a “building hat”, a structural “headgear” and thus an identity-forming architectural unique selling point – not exactly an advantage when marketing the apartments and determining the value of the properties.
Lingang New Town, which is over 50 km from Shanghai’s city center, has excellent transport links. A subway connects the “center” of the planned city, which is located on the shore of the central lake, directly with downtown Shanghai. This form of development makes it possible to make optimum use of the space between the ring-shaped city center and the shore of the lake for a variety of leisure activities. Visitors to the built-up part of the city center will thus encounter many people, parents and children, who pursue the leisure activities on offer. The new town is also livened up by Shanghai Ocean University with its almost 20 thousand students. students. There are also schools in the district, kindergartens and other social and medical facilities.
However, if you move outwards on one of the radial boulevards towards the periphery of the new town, you will very quickly find yourself in an atypical emptiness. This may still seem plausible in the picturesquely designed park zone, which is typical of China.
However, the emptiness seems strange and a little spooky by Chinese standards when you move further out of the city. The neighborhoods now seem barely frequented and often empty. All the more striking to the visitor are the groups of Africans heading towards the center, apparently housed in the surrounding settlements. They are presumably people who work in the Yangshan deep-sea port or in a company in the special economic zone.
After all, Lingang is located in the immediate vicinity of the head of the approximately 32 km long bridge that connects the mainland with the port, one of the largest and most modern in the world. It should also be noted that Lingang New Town is located in a prosperous special economic zone that attracts people from all over the world.
From an urban development theory perspective, things do not look good for Lingang. This scientifically based skepticism is fueled by various empirical findings cited above. However, as mentioned above, there are also counteracting forces. Prominent among these is the localization of Lingang in the aforementioned special economic zone with its special administration, its tax concessions, its liberal business rules (no obligation for joint ventures for foreign companies) and its global orientation. The numerous relocations of companies from overseas mean that local and foreign workers demand living space and settle here with their families. However, in order to encourage the influx and make it permanent, it is necessary to build a city in which the Chinese in particular recognize themselves culturally and spatially.
¹ In the original plans, the low-ranking radial streets were conceived as the main access and central streets of large neighborhoods or city districts. However, this interpretation assumes that all the buildings can also be aligned radially. As this view is completely unrealistic, the result is the aforementioned neighborhood zones. The current development confirms this interpretation of the use of space. The fact that restricting residential construction to the sectors in no way solves the problems of the radially concentrated basic structure is another matter.
² See the comments on the Chinese courtyard house (siheyuan) in the fabric of the hutong in Hassenpflug, Der urbane Code Chinas, Basel 2013, Birkhäuser Verlag
³ The word refers to the groma, a Roman surveying instrument for marking out right angles with a wooden cross and four perpendiculars, which was often used for the orientation of military camps, but also of garrison towns.
This concludes our examination of four Chinese new towns, three of which – the Chinese-German Ecopark of Qingdao, Anting New Town and Lingang New Town in Shanghai – have a German signature. We would like to thank our readers for their interest and look forward to receiving your comments.
