Lanzhou / moving mountains (literally…almost)

China can lay claim to all sorts of world’s-best titles … the biggest population, the fastest train service, the oldest panda (perhaps not a surprise) and the longest human domino (10,267 people in Inner Mongolia last year).  It is also home to what is often deemed to be the world’s most polluted city, Lanzhou.  It’s a place that (luck abounds!) I now have a project, so I have become a regular visitor over the last few months.

   

Located at the geographic centre of China, Lanzhou is an industrial city, housing hundreds of factories and processing facilities and power plants.  Geographic conditions don’t help.  The city has developed along the Yellow River, hemmed in by steep mountain ranges on either side of this major river.  It lacks air flow.  It also lacks rain, meaning that the mountainsides are mostly free of vegetation (resulting in regular dust storms) and that toxic air just tends to hang around.  On many days, the air quality is poor that the mountains just adjacent the city cannot be seen through the haze.

The journey to the city from the airport (oddly enough for a smaller city, located 70 kilometres out of town) is pretty desolate.  A new motorway weaves through the bare mountains, lined with massive power cables and outcrops of colourful advertising billboards.

     

Dotted through the mountainsides are hundreds of holes.  According to our driver, these have been created by the shepherds who need to spend nights outside with their herds.  I didn’t see any sheep or shepherds, but perhaps it was out of season.

     

Closer to the city, the mountains have undergone more significant modification. Their sides have been cut into terraces, creating a series of horizontal platforms on which vegetation has been planted.

But plants need water to grow, so millions of litres of water are being pumped to, and sprayed over, the mountain sides.  It’s a huge, not to mention environmentally frightening, undertaking.

But, I guess it is an improvement on the previous solution being supported by the Lanzhou authorities – to demolish a number of mountains next to the city.  Just like opening some windows to allow the breeze in, they said.  This idea was tested, yet failed.  Now the focus is on reafforestation, as well as programs to reduce air use, use cleaner energy and relocate polluting industries.

Some of the hillsides are getting greener.

Flying out the city, you can clearly see how the river system defines the areas that can support vegetation, and by extension, agriculture.  You can also see the enormity of the re-vegetation program being undertaken … and the probable futility of trying to change something that cannot be changed.

The Unfinished City

A city never gets finished.  It keeps getting built and rebuilt, piece by piece, changing to reflect the people who live in it.  For me, it’s a really exciting (not to mention humbling) thought.

As you’d expect (given my residency in China as well as my field of work), I get to see loads of construction sites.  To seems that almost every street in Shanghai has a massive construction effort going on, and if it doesn’t, it’ll have in the next month or so.  Buildings are knocked down and constructed at an amazing pace.

Here’s a good example – a hotel that got built last year in Changsha – 15 storeys shot up in 6 days.  An amazing video (click on the image above for the link).

Mostly though, it seems that things are getting knocked down quickly.  Just on the end of our street, most of a block has been demolished but as yet, there is no sign that anything will be built there.

Interestingly, a number of the small apartment buildings across the site have been retained and appear to be inhabited still.  I am hoping that the plan is to keep these older buildings and integrate them into the new development, but I am probably being naive.   They are in pretty bad shape and I can’t see developers seeing much potential in keeping them, especially when they can easily be replaced with a few high-rise apartments, an income-generating Starbucks and a windswept plaza or two.

It is a shame though, as in this area at least, historic buildings are valued by many.  That is, ex-pats looking to live in “authentic” Shanghainese digs for a while …

It’s pretty common to see people living in the midst of construction sites.   As the government commonly moves people out of their homes to make way for redevelopment, I guess many residents aren’t quite ready to relocate.  Rather than be dislocated from their established social networks or favourite wet market or place of work, they stay living amongst the stacks of reinforcement rods and demolition refuse for as long as possible.  A fervent disregard for common-sense safety is not uncommon here either.  I like to call it NoH+S.

Sometimes, you get quick a good peek into sites, like this one in Hangzhou.  I am wondering what was going on with the structural engineer.  That is some crayzy beamwork, my friend.

The good news is that some of the historic facade is being retained, reinforced so it doesn’t collapse (by accident or otherwise) during construction and will be integrated into the finished product.  Even though this is pretty rare, there is very little waste generally, with all materials carefully divided into type, reused on site or picked up by recyclers.  At least the third R is being embraced!

Not so for this building … Seeing it carefully shrouded in (bamboo) scaffolding, I wondered whether the plan was to keep and refurbish it.  It was quite tall (8-10 storeys) and in good condition, and by my use of past tense, it obviously was demolished soon after I took this photo.  Proof, at least, that I can be a little naive at times.

Oh yeah, in case anyone is in doubt, they do use steel scaffolding here too.

A few times I have been fortunate (?) enough to got onto some construction sites.  They are pretty captivating places … swarming with hundreds of workers (except the exact moment that I took this photo…) and speeding vehicles and huge piles of construction materials and demolition waste.  I visited this site by accident, looking for my client’s office which was on the other side of the site – a short 15 minute walk away.   I would have loved to hang around and take lots of photos, but we were running late for our presentation at that point and there was a family of angry-looking dogs blocking our path.

The same client took us to another one of their sites.  Set on the edge of town as well as the edge of a mountain, it was tagged for residential development.  All the existing buildings (farmers’ cottages) had been torn down, except for the home of a family who remained on site as pseudo-caretakers/security guards.  Along with another angry-dog family.

They were actually very welcoming to the clipboard-carrying foreigners, even though we were part of the redevelopment process that was taking them from their land.  They had just finished their annual peach harvest, and after picking and offloading 300 tonnes of stone fruit, were happy for us to grab whatever we wanted from their orchard.

I asked our client whether they planned to keep the little house in the photo above.  His slight smile made me realise that once again, my naivety was getting the better of me.

My first year in Shangers

I am just about to reach the end of my first year in Shanghai.  Time has flown … thus is the curse of being too busy and being too old …

Here is a highlights package of Year One.  I have themed it around the colour red.  Red is – most of the time – a colour of good fortune in China, so its often appears around the city.

Around this time of year, people sometimes wear red to bring good luck.  But, to be humble about it, it is often red underwear.  I have red longjohns that I have been wearing all winter (for warmth, not luck of course).  I was inspired by the man downstairs from our apartment, who would hang his very fetching LJs in the stairwell.  After weeks of looking, I finally found my own pair.  I am wearing them right now!

For my blog post about our stairwell (yeah, the one with dead chicken) … click here > Our new apartment (1) and Our new apartment (2)

For many Shanghainese, the last year has been all about Expo.  I got to Expo once for a couple of hours and never made it back.  My own lack of organisation reflects the importance of planning, just like the Expo theme (Better City, Better Life).

For more, click here > My first trip to Expo  or for the one about Expo’s wacky mascot Haibao > Give Praise Unto Almighty Haibao

For me, the city was the real event.  These red things spell out the name Cool Docks, a new and kinda unsuccessful development near the old city.  Cool Docks is an exemplar of the ongoing tension between economic development and historic preservation in Shanghai.  See more here > Goodbye Docks! Hello Cool! as well as this post on Xintiandi > The Fine Art of Fakery

I am always looking for special times where elements of the city compose themselves into an interesting photo.  I call them Jeffrey Smart moments and I have been compiling a gallery here > Now, that IS crayzy!

I also made other galleries devoted to funny buildings > Small Man, Big Hair and food > Fun with Food … as well, the most popular of all, Chinglish > Huh Wot?

While we haven’t done as much travelling as I would have liked, we did get to visit a few places closer to Shanghai.  We did a weekend trip to Nanjing and saw lots of amazing old buildings, including this Hall of Scarifice.  The Nanjing posts > The other great wall and > A nice place to spend eternity and > Avoiding the Tiger Summer

    

Suzhou is another nearby city, full of canals and old buildings.  The candles are from the main temple in the city centre.  Suzhou stuff > Canals, gardens and silkworms > It could hardly be called humble… > Suzhou Museum: it’s all-white

These hire bikes are found all over Hangzhou, which we just visited last week.  Stay tuned for future posts on this city, often referred to as “Heaven on Earth”.

    

And a few trips to Hong Kong … catching up with friends and family and renewing visas.  This is the pulling mechanism of the Peak Tram which gave us the amazing view included in this post > City, nature and nothing in between

And not to forget the ever-fascinating Macau which I had a bit of trouble working out … It’s like the Portugal of China! > No, no, the Disneyland of China! > No, actually, the fake Venice of Asia!

And speaking of trams and stuff, here is a shot from Line 10 of the Shanghai Metro.  The red seat is for the mobility-impaired.  I cannot talk enough about how amazing the rail system (Metro, heavy rail, fast rail) is here.  I did a few posts about transport > High Speed Rail? China Has It. > My Walk to Work (2) > Another Crayzy Motorway > The Rules of the Road > but must do more.

And to finish off, here is what some workfriends and I wore to our company’s annual (Chinese New Year) dinner.  I was concerned that our interpretation of the theme “Your Chinese Best” as the uniform of the Red Army may have been risky, but everyone loved it and there was much clapping and laughing when we arrived.  Here are some of the ways I celebrated the various festive seasons > Festive celebrations / let me count the ways and > Carpet-bombing in the new year

It’s been a great year and I have enjoyed remembering all the crayzy things I have seen since I arrived.  Hope you have enjoyed hearing about it all too …

Onto Year of the Rabbit.

Thanks to everyone for your readership and for your comments over the last year.

x The Doctor.

Another one for the trainspotters…

The trains here are something else.  I’ve posted before about the amazingly fast and fast-growing rail network across China: click here for more.

A few months ago, they opened the fast train service to Nanjing, just over 300 hundred kilometres west of Shanghai.  As I have a project in Nanjing, I’ve caught it a few times – a mere 70 minute journey.

And last weekend, we hopped on the train to get to Suzhou, one of the nearby canal cities.  In the rush to buy tickets (they were selling out fast), I selected Deluxe Class – still cheap at about $12.  As it turned out, they were the Mostest Deluxe Possible – the first four seats on the train, positioned directly behind the white-gloved, highly-focused driver.  I guess everyone could see him, so clean hands and a sense of focus were important traits to display.

We got a great view straight down the tracks and travelling at over 350 km/h, it was quite an experience.  Had things gone horribly wrong, I imagine we would have had little time to realise, so it was easy to place oneself in a state of fatalistic calm.  Besides, the trains and so roomy and clean and comfortable and they even hand out free drinks (in the Deluxe section only, of course…)

The building infrastructure for all these new trains is pretty amazing too.  The stations are vast, like airports, teeming with thousands of travellers, packed with shops and services, and connected with multiple Metro and elevated roadways. There are three main stations – Shanghai South Station is probably just a few years old…

and this one, at the Hongqiao Transport Hub (containing dozens of platforms for high speed trains and interchanging directly with the Metro as well as Hongqiao International Airport) opened just last month.

I guess all this infrastructure doesn’t always create the most attractive urban environment.  This is the Maglev that connects to the other airport (Pudong International) at a speed of 430 km/h.

Next year, the Shanghai-Beijing Express opens (a year ahead of schedule).  Journey time between the two cities will be cut from 10 to 4 hours and it will carry up to 80 million passengers a year (that’s around 200,000 a day).  It also just set a passenger train speed record – see this Herald article for more –  and I’m sure to the typical trainspotter, it looks pretty sexy too.

Hong Kong / City, nature and nothing in between

One thing I like about living in Shanghai is being able to get to Hong Kong easily (that was not meant to be a downer on Shangers of course…)  Last weekend, I got to meet up with the Senior Clique of the Bullshit Clan, who were heading home after a few weeks poking around Yīngguó.

The weather was pretty rainy, as it is in September.  But, as luck would have it, a change in the weather made the last day perfect for a trip up The Peak.  This stunning Honkers skyline panorama is yours! Click on it for a larger view (as with all images here, of course…)

It’s pretty cool how such a dense city sits within such a beautiful natural environment, and that the division between the two is so sudden.  No buffering of the CBD with seemingly endless suburbia, where little pieces of nature (if you can refer to backyards as such) are divided up and guarded by Colorbond fences – Sydney, I’m looking at you!  In Hong Kong, nature is preserved for the good of all.  People share space, not own it.

I know, I have heard all the arguments about why apartment living is so inferior (in fact, many of them from one of my weekend companions…) but consider the advantages of a dense city like Hong Kong – great public transport, you are close – if not literally on top off – everything you need and everyone gets a good view.

Plus, you get to keep a lot of nature.  From The Peak Tram station (just a 10 minute ride from Central), you only need to walk 10 minutes to cop a view like this… 

You’d hardly know you were so close to 8 million other people.

The sea that ate Old Bar

While in Australia, I caught up with the family in Old Bar, a small but rapidly expanding coastal town a few hours north of Sydney.  We stayed in our usual spot, a bunch of villas perched on the edge of the Pacific Ocean.

Since our last visit – about 2 years ago – the ocean has been busy, ripping away the dunes and vegetation along the coast.  The resort owner claims that in this time, about 15 metres has been lost from the coastline.  Fortunately for him, his buildings are set back.  But, the neighbours haven’t been so lucky.

Since this Google image was taken in late 2007, a number of the dwellings to the south have been demolished to prevent them from being sucked into the ocean.

These are the remnants of the middle waterfront house.  Half of it is still being lived in, but not for long…

The pace of destruction (no doubt hurried by climate change) has left homes abandoned and timber fences dangling over the sandy edge.

Further down the beach, I found a brick from one of the old houses, it too beaten by the sea, into a smooth and stone-like form.

Our Smoking New Studio

My work is relocating very shortly, from our current place in Pudong to the other side of the river.  We have found a fantastic building (a former factory for Happiness Motorcycles, a famous Chinese brand) in a location that real estate agents might refer to as “up and coming”.  It’s located close to the Nanpu Bridge, near the Expo site, on the edge of the old city.  In Shanghai, whole neighbourhoods can change almost overnight, so we may not need to wait too long for the cafes and mini-galleries to arrive.

From the outside, the industrial character of the site (now named Dream Wharf) is intact.   Hopefully, that will loosen up a bit too…

But inside, it’s super.  A big space, lots of natural light and a soaring timber lined roof.  Our clever interiors people have done a very smart and sensitive fitout, based around collaboration and interaction (we have more chairs in meeting rooms than at desks…) and with a strong focus on suatainability.

I particularly like the meeting spaces that are located sneakily above two storage rooms – a great vantage point of the whole space.  Am tempted to buy a megaphone and position myself in one of these spaces as an office overlord, giving instructions from on high (just like the olden days…)

This morning, we had eight monks from the Jade Buddha Temple come to bless the new office, do some chanting and officiate over the suckling pig.  It was a good luck date, so the opening had to occur today, even though we haven’t actually moved in (and the chairs are still covered in plastic…)  I think it will be a fun place to work.

Density? Hong Kong Has It.

I had to go to Hong Kong again and this time, I got a good hotel room with a great view  of the city and the spectacular Peak.  It was quite a moody afternoon, weather-wise.

One thing I like about Hong Kong are the skinny little apartment buildings throughout the city … a product of generous height controls and relatively small development lots.  A lot of these have only one apartment per floor.

Hong Kong is one of the densest cities in the world, with an average density of 6,000 people per square kilometre (7 million people in about 1,000 sqkm).  This is about the same density as the inner suburbs of Sydney (the City of Sydney council area).  Across the whole of Sydney though, the density is much lower – just 375 people/sqkm (or one sixteenth that of Hong Kong).  In physical area, Sydney is about 12 times the size of Hong Kong.

Gosh, I’m beginning to sound like Rainman, spitting out all these statistics.

The really dense part of Hong Kong is Mong Kok.  The population density in this suburb is a staggering 130,000 people/sqkm – twenty times that of the rest of Hong Kong, and 350 times as dense as Sydney.

You can certainly get an idea of the density on the streets – it is always totally packed.  But, interestingly, the buildings are generally only 10-12 storeys, with relatively few towers above that height.  But, every site is developed to its full potential, apartments are tiny and each houses many people.

I think the average area of floorspace for each person in Hong Kong is about 12 square metres.  In Sydney, the average size of a new house is about 250 sqm, with an occupancy of about 2 people … therefore, a luxurious 120 sqm per person (10 times that of the average Hong Konger).   And yet, people in Sydney constantly moan about how space-poor the city has become …

People in Hong Kong certainly know how to use every square metre to its fullest potential.  Lots of great little balconies and sneaky add-ons…

Rooftops are highly valuable spaces too.  From my hotel, I spied quite an amazing roof space, overflowing with vegetation and housing a pack of very content dogs.  They have great views of the city and look like they are commanding at least 12 square metres each.

Here’s a closer look.

High Speed Rail? China Has It.

The current and proposed scale of China’s rail network is nothing short of amazing (sorry … crayzy!)  I was reading in the paper this week that China is upping its annual investment in rail from about 300 billion yuan (around $50 billion) to double that amount. 

China currently has about 100,000 km of railways – approximately 3 times the size of the Australian network.  But unlike Australia (where we talk a lot about the need for more rail without actually building it), China is pumping out rail lines faster than you can imagine.

The focus is on speed.  Current lines are being undergraded to take faster trains, alongside a new network of high speed rail (HSR).  Check out the stats…

China currently has the largest  HSR system in the world with 6,500 km.  Of this, 3,500 km is capable of carrying trains that travel at over 350 km/h.  Currently, there is 17,000 km of HSR under construction with a plan to have 50,000 km in total by 2012.  That will be more HSR than the combined total of every other country in the world.  All the works are being managed, planned and funded by the Chinese government.

China is proposing the construction of 2 (perhaps 3) high speed rail connections to Europe.  Beijing to London (yes, this is serious) would take a little under two days.  Other lines would link direct to Moscow and Singapore.

One of my favourite things in Shanghai is the Maglev train that links the international airport to the city.  It completes its 30 km journey in 7 minutes, at a top speed of 430 km/h.  For some reason, I am OK with this, even though at times I am a nervous flyer.  An accident on this line (especially given its urban context) would be somewhat devastating.

In a few weeks, the new Shanghai-Nanjing line will open.  Trains will travel the 300 km distance – about the same as Sydney to Canberra – in less than 1 hour.  They will run every 3 minutes.  The line took about 2 years to build.

Shanghai-Hangzhou is under construction … 170 kilometres (like Sydney to Newcastle) in 27 minutes.

The new Shanghai-Beijing line will reduce travel time from 10 hours to 3.5 hours – very strong competition to air travel which takes a little under 2 hours.  The distance is like Darwin to Alice Springs.  It is opening at the end of the year, 12 months ahead of schedule.  Trains will run every 5 minutes and transport 220,000 people daily.  My head hurts just thinking about the scale of all this…

(This is one of the main stations in Shanghai – the architecture of the system is really quite good too.)

But, to gurgle my brain even further, China is investing huge amounts in urban subway systems as well.  25 cities are getting Metro networks with many more under consideration.   The Shanghai Metro began life a mere 15 years ago, but already is one of the largest in the world – with 12 lines, 423 km or rail and 233 stations (and still growing).  Worthy of its own post…

No doubt, China benefits from centralised government, a huge population, cheap labour and an absence of community consultation.  But on top of this, they have the will to make things happen.  Sydney has a bit to learn when it comes to the delivery of rail … after my last 2 years there, I should know!

The Fine Art of Fakery

Xintiandi is one of the most popular attractions in the old city of Shanghai.  Spreading over several street blocks, it is a jumble of old-style houses and laneways, filled with clothing boutiques, bars and al fresco dining joints.

One of the buildings is where the Chinese Communist Party held its first congress, in 1921, thus changing the destiny of modern China.  Lots of locals come here to grab a photo of themselves out the front of the building, making it a challenge to get my own photo sans people (they tend to mess up photos, right?)

Xintiandi is one of the few places in Shanghai where the pedestrian is prioritised.  Most of the streets are closed to traffic and they even have streetfront retailing.

But … as the title of this post no doubt reveals, the whole thing is a fake.  Less than a decade ago, Xintiandi was built from scratch, designed around the style of the ‘longtang’, the brick tenements that popped up all over Shanghai at the start of last century.  Somewhat ironically, a swathe of existing longtang was demolished to make way for the development, displacing thousands of residents.

Not entriely a bad story, however.  Due to its commercial success, Xintiandi has been a good lesson for developers and bureaucrats alike, who now can see the economic logic of keeping and restoring the city’s historic fabric.

Adjacent to Xintiandi, another part of Shanghai is undergoing transformation.

Perhaps a sign of changing attitudes, this area has been spared the bulldozer and a more sensitive redevelopment is occurring.  I noticed that many materials are being carefully removed and stored, presumedly for reuse.  And that people are still living in some areas of the site.  It’s good to see that slash-and-burn-and-rebuild isn’t the only way to get things done here.

One of the buildings is where the Chinese Communist Party held its first congress, in 1921, thus changing the destiny of the 21st century China.  Lots of locals come here to grab a photo of themselves out the front of the building, making it a challenge to get my own photo sans people (they tend to mess up photos, right).

Seoul / Making green from grey

Now, here is something that is super-good!  Running from one side of downtown Seoul to the other is Cheong-gye-cheon, a creek and parkland corridor.  Sandwiched between two roads and sunk below street level, it changes from urban plazas with fountains to a more naturalistic (albeit constructed) creek, with waterfalls and rapids, bridges and stepping stones.

Nothing remarkable in itself, except that for a long time, and until fairly recently, the whole corridor was devoted to an elevated roadway.  Before and after shots below…

The current mayor of Seoul decided it might be a nice idea to rip down the motorway and build a park in its place.  Sound thinking … it is a very popular place for locals and visitors alike, and has sparked the sudden rejuvenation of the surrounding area, including a number of very nice buildings and public domain upgrades.