China Dérive: Shenzhen's Urban Ambitions

In August 2006, I made my first visit to the city of Shenzhen, a special economic zone in China's Guangdong province that was just a small community before 1980, but is now a city of around 14 million. At this time I dismissed the city as a sprawling spiritless mess that existed simply for the execution of corporate fantasies about maximizing profits and enslaving an entire population of desperate migrant workers within its vast factory parks. I visited again in July 2008 to film a group of tacky theme parks for a documentary project. This experience caused me to dismiss the city once again, this time as an excessive, cultureless, childish junkyard of pseudo-tourist 'attractions' and chain hotels. My third visit last month, upon exploring the more intimate parts of the city, and the rather disjointedly named 2009/10 Shenzhen and Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture, changed my mind forever.

Instead of the brutal mess of incoherent mega-structures and apartment complexes I initially saw in Shenzhen, this time I saw an urban frontier being conquered by its citizens and the imagination of the world's most pioneering architects at the forefront of their practice. One of these architects happens to be Rem Koolhaas, also a prominent urban theorist, who famously cited that "the world is running out of places to start over". Evidently Shenzhen is one of the few that remain (along with Dubai and Abu Dhabi).

While Dubai is a failure in many people's eyes, due to its property market that went from the most 'healthy' in 2007 to near collapse in 2009, and its tourist industry that is barely afloat, Shenzhen is a raging success. Arguably, Shanghai's development has been more rapid and impressive compared to Shenzhen. Though Shanghai has always been an urban hub, while Shenzhen was only a small community before 1980. I got the sense that anything is possible in Shenzhen, seeing as a city of this size normally takes centuries to achieve a population touching 14 million, not to mention its significance in anchoring the global economy of small appliances and clothing.

My reason to return to Shenzhen, after two previous trips that led me to believe the city had little to offer, was the architectural biennale that took place from December 6, 2009 to January 23, 2010. I heard it was putting a new spin on what Shenzhen meant for China and the world. I visited two of the three biennale sites on a gloomy and cold day in early January. Upon entering the indoor underground exhibition underneath the Shenzhen Civic Square, I was confronted by Hideyuki Nakayama's Walking on Water, which encouraged visitors to pull on a pair of wellington boots, supplied by the exhibition, and walk through a number of pools of water with a base of little black pebbles. Her intention was to stress the importance of involving water within city space, due to its calming qualities. Above this work was Ball Nogues Built to Wear, a sort of wave suspended in mid air created out of American Apparel t-shirts made in the USA. This piece played on the idea of a reversal of the influx of goods leaving Shenzhen bound for North America.

In the civic square above ground, outside the mammoth Shenzhen Exhibition Centre, stood Studio Pei-Zhu's Urban Oasis, an intriguing curved structure constructed from bamboo scaffolding, and Rigo 23's Snow Bull Station, a large mesh, mud and straw bull with a number of videos projected inside. Possibly the most popular piece was the Bureau Des Mesarchitectures Double Happiness, a pair of swings attached to a platform that invited participants to swing five meters up in the air. I had a go, and as I swung I felt like I was being propelled into the city, into some distant future. This is what I feel has been created here in Shenzhen: the future, depicted within the world fairs of the earlier decades of last century. As I walked around the biennale I found my mind wandering into a future of endless architectural possibilities.

What was most striking about the biennale was its location. The civic square is surrounded by a collection of dreamlike architectural arrangements, such as the Shenzhen Public Library, an eclectic building of jagged glass towers, polished concrete surfaces and giant USB-looking attachments. In fact most of Shenzhen's public buildings look like giant pieces of technology: DVD players, blenders, circuit boards, computer monitors intersected by scale electric highway flyovers and piles of Lego blocks. The overall effect is somewhat childish and overwhelming.

Strangely, the civic square itself and the biennale exhibition appeared empty, as did the Children's Museum and the Shenzhen Art Gallery. This is something that always baffles me about China: how an enormous construction project captivates the public's interest, how countless journalists write it about, and how an overblown opening ceremony is organized upon its completion. But when the building is actually finished, it is either underused, or sometimes vacant, leaving armies of cleaning staff looking bored and perplexed. Maybe the best example of this is the South China Mall in DongGuan, hailed as the future of shopping malls back in 2007 and touted as the largest mall in the world, but in 2010 and it resembles a mammoth crumbling pink and yellow dinosaur with a MacDonald's attached.

The biennale was accompanied by a leaflet and map of public art in Shenzhen, a guide to the city's 'instant art'. Most of the works, some of which I visited, look like children's playthings, positioned awkwardly in the odd square, pool or park. The Dafen Art Village on the outskirts of Shenzhen's suburban fringe presents many examples of these public art trophies, to honour the work of Dafen's large community of artists. Dafen's artists have carved success from the free wheeling globalized ambition of its mother-city, replicating the world's most famous paintings from Da Vinci's Mona Lisa to Van Gogh's Sunflowers. The town is almost entirely dedicated to the production of exact replicas of famous works, but also serves the global market for photo to painting conversion. I talked to Emma Huang, an art dealer who works for Shenzhen Fine Art Co., Ltd. The company has clients send in photos (of themselves or their family, for example) and then an artist converts the photo into a pop art, impressionist, abstract or photo-realistic painting.

The second part of the biennale was out at the Holiday Plaza. This upscale shopping mall looks out upon replicas of the Eiffel Tower and the Pyramids of Egypt, with a little sense of irony, I'm sure. These structures are part of the Window of the World theme park, which I explored in the 35-degree heat and 90% humidity of August 2008, and which felt like a re-enactment of the Bataan Death March as I trudged from a miniature New York skyline to a performance from a group of Russian dancers with my camera and tripod.

At the Holiday Plaza, a collection of photographs were presented, taken by a Western tourist in the summer of 1980, just before Shenzhen became China's first special economic zone. The photographs depicted a sleepy fishing town of around 20,000 just as the foundations were been laid for what would be one of China's greatest urban success stories. The photos depicted a time before the foreign investment arrived, before the migrant workers appeared in millions, before the factories operated, and before the designer stores and American fast food chains opened up. The town of Shenzhen in 1980 appeared peaceful and content. The photo that was most resounding was a shot of Shennan Avenue with only one or two buildings standing, which is today Shenzhen's main thoroughfare lined with a kaleidoscopic array of skyscrapers and office developments topped with spires and advertising screens.

Despite my newfound admiration of Shenzhen, I still find the city unsettling. It is in my nature to feel more comfortable in intimate environments built to human scale, which Shenzhen is seriously lacking. From the six lane highways that run through the heart of the city creating a series of high rise islands, to the overwhelming scale of the public buildings, Shenzhen reduces its citizens to termites. This appears to be a persistent theme throughout the urban design in places that experience a sudden influx of capital (at least over the past 30 years or so). China's urban planners appear to be feasting on the utopian urban visions of some distant future. As interesting as these visions are, they seem to be unfit for people to actually live in.

Despite feeling uncomfortable in an urban environment built to such a giant scale, I couldn't help but feel awe in the face of such a city. Walking around the biennale in the civic square I got a sense of the sheer scale of China's urban ambitions and what it means for the for the world. Shenzhen is not the creation of city planners and starchitects but a conception of the world's collective consciousness. I can imagine the future we dream about as children being created in Shenzhen. A future of flying cars, extraterrestrial apartment blocks perched on the sides of the surrounding mountains, a spectacular agoraphobic-inducing, super-electronic drive-thru dystopia. Evidently the foundations of the future are being laid here whether they are appropriate for people to live in or not.

Previously in China Dérive:

China Dérive: Collapsing Environment

China Dérive

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