Did you know Shanghai wanted to be Singapore?

Juan Du, assistant professor, department of architecture at Hong Kong University, says the rate at which Asian cities are developing makes it difficult to judge what the best way forward is. Excerpts from an interview with DNA:

Mumbai is often compared to Shanghai. Do you find any similarities?
There is a coexistence of differences in cities like Mumbai and Shanghai — between rich and poor, new and old, efficient and totally inefficient, official and informal, business and feudal.

Asian cities are similar also because of the pace at which urbanisation is happening here. Industrialisation which happened in London or Paris brought about drastic change, but there was still some control over it. 

Moreover, Asia has a much older culture — that history and tradition is part of everything here. It may be overlooked or covered up, but that cultural aspect, for me, dictates how a city like Mumbai or Shanghai gets developed.
 
In Mumbai, there were second-hand bookshops on the pavements near Flora Fountain, which were very popular. The booksellers had to shut shop when the authorities passed no-hawking laws. This is efficient, but we also lost some local colour in the process. What approach can an urban developer take?
I think from an academic point of view, the whole concept of efficiency within modernity is misused, abused and over-rated. We have been led to think that the most efficient is the fastest, the biggest, the largest, the widest, and the newest.
But if you look at it from the economic point of view, streets where shops stand are most well-frequented. People walk, look and they buy. If you have a fast road, businesses just die out.

So you have your booksellers and book buyers who are affected. But don’t forget the newspaper stand, the restaurants, the bakery, and the coffee shop around the area who are serving people. If you look at all that as congesting the street, and ‘this not the image of modern Mumbai we want to project’, it is too simple a decision.

Turning Mumbai into Shanghai is the buzzword here. What aspects of Shanghai’s urban architecture and design can be replicated in a city like Mumbai?
To say that let’s make X city into Y city anywhere in the world, for me, is always problematic. Rather than looking within to see what is in the character and problems of the city, we are going to look somewhere else. Did you know that Shanghai was looking up to Singapore? There are at least 10 cities in China whose slogan is let’s make it into Singapore. And that’s not because of what Singapore looks like, but what it represents — a clean, modern city.

What lessons can Indian urban planners learn from the Chinese?
How a city develops has little to do with planning, and has more to do with political and economic power. It’s very difficult to identify what Indian planners can learn from this because the two countries are so different, especially with the difference in governance. Once the decision is made in China, all parties follow. There is very little room for argument, protest or second guessing. So in a sense it becomes more efficient.

I think what China has been able to do successfully, is to cultivate this almost blind faith, this enthusiasm for the future, this thinking that tomorrow will be better. This is endangered in the West now. There is so much worry and concern there about causes like [preserving] history, or things like democratic planning (before you do anything you have to get everyone to say yes).

In the 20 years of urbanisation, [China] has made mistakes — a lot of mistakes — but to its credit, [planners] have a fast learning curve there. Five years ago all cities were concerned with capital growth. But now major cities like Beijing, Shenzen and Shanghai have adopted a model of sustainable cities. 

Any major project generates a lot of debate here, which results in delays. Are such debates detrimental in the long run?
I think lack of debate is detrimental to the city’s development in the long run. Cities like Beijing are a thousand years old. I think the judgement on how best to develop a city should not be made lightly.  European cities took 100 years to modernise. American cities took 20-40 years. We are taking 5-10 years. I think this rate of
urbanisation is so unprecedented, that nobody can say what’s best.
r_krishna@dnaindia.net