The Pudong and Potential

Across from the older part of Shanghai, on western side of the Huang Po River, lies the the new, highly hyped, ultra- or even post-modern Pudong section. It's the part of the city with the biggest concentration of the newest architecture, meant to steal thunder from Hong Kong and set up Shanghai as the forward looking future of China's new capitalist leanings. We headed over there today for lunch at the 54th floor cafe at the Grand Hyatt in the 88-story Jintao Tower. Thanks to the complexities of the city's Metro system, and, in no small part, to my distinct lackings in the local language department, it took us a bit longer than planned to get there from the Museum.

As a result, we only had a half hour left of the buffet offering, which deserved a much more leisurely approach and appreciation. (It was a choice of doing the subway, which stretched my usually good map-reading abilities or of doing the taxi thing, which we did to get to the Museum. Since the morning's taxi ride involved a distinct lack of communication capability on my part, I figured I didn't want to go through that embarrassment again.) The food was as innovative and interesting as the architecture, and the view overlooking the expanse of the western part of the city was more than impressive.

Looking down and out from our table, we were able to really appreciate the size and scope of the city that we could feel on the ground. Unlike our tour guides, who seemed to rattle off such statistics effortlessly, I'm not sure of the actual sizes involved, but what came to mind was an areas that could be the expanse of a Los Angeles or Tokyo, but as uniformly and densely built up as New York. It is a huge city (that wreaks havoc with my 4-class city description system). And while it does have some serious history behind it as a major player in the early part of the 20th century, seems to still be growing into what it can be, coping with the special circumstances associated with its size and population, and with a growing consumer class. It'll be interesting to see what happens when individual automobile ownership starts to work its way into the current bicycle-dependent classes.

Take the Pudong. While the architecture of this concentrated building boom is attention getting, and looks way cool from afar and in aggregate, once actually over in the area, I got the feeling not of a neighborhood with a character of its own, but of merely a high end office park. Admittedly, a real high end office park -- the individual structures were arresting and interesting individually, but to say that it created a cohesive whole as an area, and is more than just a skyline to be admired from across the river, would be stretching it a bit, in my opinion. That said, it's only a few years old, and still needs to grow into its promise.

In the early part of our visit a few days ago, Lois and I kept using the the phrase "rough around the edges" in describing the Shanghai experience (or the entire mainland China experience, for that matter). The chaotic traffic, the in-your-face hawkers, the toothless doorman in our "5-star" hotel, the 10-year old Metro that feels either unfinished or beat up beyond its age, and the too often ignored "please don't spit" signs around the city all added up to the feeling that it's a world-size city, but despite the hype and hoopla of recent years, it's still growing into its world-class potential.

To be fair, it was pretty isolated for most of the first 40 years of the Communist era in China, and was really only reopened, reborn, and re-missioned in the 80's, so it's not too much of a stretch to describe it as the gangly teenager of major world cities, dressing to get attention, testing out its new capitalist hormones, still in danger of growing out of its infrastructure, clearly no longer a child, but not yet quite mature by the standards of other cities.

Not quite mature, but full of energy and potential.