Model Cities

Model Cities is written by Lize Mogel, who stayed with us at the writer’s residency.

The centerpieces of the Beijing and Shanghai urban planning museums are their city models. These fetishize the rapid urban development that is a key economic engine for China, allowing some cities to gentrify and expand exponentially. Recent development booms are linked to the Beijing 2008 Summer Olympics and the Shanghai World Expo 2010 — mega-events with an eye to the world stage.

Both museums are situated near cultural focal points — Shanghai’s Urban Planning Exhibition Hall is at one edge of People’s Square, Beijing’s is just south of Tiananmen Square. The city model is the main attraction, set in the major part of a floor of the building. Balconies on the floor above allow you an aerial view of the model (Shanghai’s museum also has a VIP balcony that is somewhat lower so special visitors can get a closer look). Light shows from above and within, LEDs buried in the model, highlight newly built areas of the city and important historic areas. This is urban planning theater at its most sublime.

At this scale, your relationship to space and place changes. You are the planner, the architect and the state – with the ability to visualize the entire territory at once. This Lilliput is not troubled by social problems or political disputes; buildings are without inhabitants, roads are without traffic, and there is barely a hint of infrastructure like sewage or electricity. It’s a city of architecture.
Beijing’s city model reproduces the city that is also central to tourist maps. The Forbidden City, the “starchitecture” of the new financial district, and the Olympic area are specially lit. The model is inset into a thick glass floor, tiled with a black-and-white, backlit aerial map of the city – a room-sized Google map. Visitors squat to locate themselves, their history, running fingers over the glass. While they can touch the map, they can only gaze at the model from behind a barrier. Chrome stanchions with red belts enforce the border between the model and the map. The border is between the old and the new; between skyscrapers and hutongs; dense central city and land for agriculture or industry. The model is the glittering representation of progress, of construction, development and growth, of Technicolor reality. The photomap, with its quaint greenish tint, depicts the out-of-date, the less important. This dichotomy portends the future, as eventually more tiles of the map will be removed and replaced with model as development spreads in the actual city (perhaps with similar speed and finality).

China’s top-down development policies and relocation tactics result in displacement of disempowered residents, who are often moved to the city’s periphery, their community ties broken and access to transportation and work made difficult, if not impossible. However, unusual care was taken with the former residents of the Shanghai Expo 2010 site on opposing banks of the Huangpu River. The original master plan called for a site a few miles further upriver, in a mostly residential area. This was scrapped because it would have displaced many thousands more people than the mostly industrial site that was eventually chosen. The developer (one of Shanghai’s largest) who built the apartment complexes that many of the displaced residents moved into is proud that they are only 2.5 kms away from the original village.

Shanghai Expo 2010, like Expo 86 in Vancouver, was built on former industrial urban waterfront. Vancouver’s False Creek was once home to milling industry and production, as well as tracks and service shops owned by the Canadian National Railway, until the mid-1980s when the last businesses were shut to make way for the Expo. The Shanghai Expo was built on 5.28 square kms on the north (Puxi) and south (Pudong) sides of the river. In Puxi, the Jiangnan shipyard, built in 1865 and one of China’s oldest, was dismantled and operations moved to the Changxing “Ship Building Island” at the eastern edge of the city. The Pudong side contained a working Krups steel factory and related businesses; at least 19,000 people living in several hutong-type villages that had been there for more than 40 years. Similarly to False Creek, the idea of air pollution was publicly invoked as a justification for clearing the area.

Expos, Olympics, and other mega-events have almost always been used to affect change. They are used to further government and business agendas under the rubric of ‘revitalization’, which ranges from urban renewal to slum clearance. These events can result in public amenities like transportation — Vancouver’s SkyTrain was a result of Expo 86, which had a transportation theme, and the Canada Line to the airport was built in time for the 2010 Winter Olympics – and parks – New York City’s World Fairs helped Robert Moses turn an ash dump into the City’s largest park. However, these events are also used deliberately to remove unwanted places and people who are not considered by governments to be as valuable as potential real estate development. This has included low-income or homeless people, marginalized populations including people of color, small businesses, working industrial areas, low-rise housing and more. Displacement resulting from mega-events is so rampant that the Center for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), an international human rights NGO, recently released a major report condemning governments for this practice. The report laid out stakeholder guidelines for creating affordable housing legacies and promoting human rights rather than destroying them.

COHRE’s statistics are damning: more than 1.25 million people evicted and displaced during the Beijing Olympics, 720,000 people evicted for the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, 30,000 people suffered from secondary displacement in Atlanta, 18,000 people affected on the Shanghai Expo site and 400,000 in secondary displacement and gentrification from development projects around the city, 300,000 people evicted for the 2010 Commonwealth Games in New Dehli, and up to 2000 low-income housing units lost during Expo 86 in Vancouver, as landlords took advantage of the opportunity to rent to visitors, evicting low-income, elderly and disabled people.

During Vancouver’s Winter Olympic Games, activists and organizers kept the housing crisis in the spotlight. They even secured housing for dozens of unhoused people through a visible campaign that included pitching a tent city in a vacant lot owned by Concorde Pacific, Vancouver’s largest developer and sponsor of the Games. However, the City’s pledge to create new affordable housing, from a significant percentage of the Millenium Water development (formerly the Athlete’s Village), failed. Cost overruns and bad financing decisions caused the city to cut the number of affordable apartments originally promised and spend millions more to finish the remaining units. This created a backlash as some Vancouverites questioned why low-income people deserved to live in prime waterfront real estate, ignoring the fact that, just across False Creek, Concorde Pacific’s waterfront development includes a percentage of affordable housing (although as a private development, most people are unsure exactly what percentage, or where it is).

During the Olympics, Canadian regional pavilions were located on a swath of land owned by Concorde Pacific. Rainbow-colored banners advertising this “community celebration zone” and Concorde’s “shaping horizons for the future” hid chain link fences that separated the public walkway from the concourse, and that from infrastructure and outdoor storage. Concorde opened up its real estate sales pavilion to the general public in order to display its architectural models and carefully crafted slogans for new communities, built alongside Olympic infrastructure such as the Canada Line and the widened Sea to Sky highway.

The centerpiece of the pavilion was a city model centered on False Creek North, the former site of Expo 86. Concorde Pacific acquired the land for a relatively low price during a period of government consolidation and divestment of False Creek land. Visitors could circumnavigate the model and were allowed to take photographs, a practice previously forbidden to tourists. One’s focus was drawn to several buildings at False Creek’s Eastern edge, made from Lucite and lit from below. These were the same buildings pictured on the banners – Concorde’s plan for 2020, for the future. Here, the model is not a record of what is, but what will be. But like the Beijing and Shanghai models, the fantasy it offers belies the on-the-ground reality of the displacement that helped create it.