Shanghai Old Town: Topography of a Phantom City – Shanghai 13/9/11
Posted: September 12th, 2011 | No Comments »The Royal Asiatic Society in Shanghai has what looks to be a very interesting event this Tuesday (13th). Sorry I didn’t post earlier on this but travel down under and book events means I’m a bit behind. Anyway….Katya Knyazeva is a journalist and photographer based in Shanghai and her work around the juxtapositions of the old town of Shanghai, heritage, preservation and the bulldoze all, wreck all mentality of the local planners is one of THE major issues for Shanghai as it develops.
RAS LECTURE
Tuesday 13th September, 2011 at 7:00 p.m.
Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road,Shanghai
兴国宾馆 上海市兴国路78å·
Katya Knyazeva
Shanghai Old Town: Topography of a Phantom City
The Chinese City is a compact low-rise slum downtown. It is poor and very small, occupying 0.03% of metropolitan Shanghai. Most lanes are too narrow for cars and much of the housing stock is overcrowded and dilapidated. It’s an embarrassment for locals and a little baffling for visitors. But for seven hundred years this was all of Shanghai, a prestigious merchant city, a colony of leisure gardens and a multicultural hub. Long before the era of the concessions, Shanghai was a magnet for sea merchants, agribusiness and gentry from all eastern China.
The opening of the treaty port in 1843 revolutionized Shanghai. As the urban core moved north and inland, the old city became insignificant. The surrounding wall and separate status alienated it from the rising colonial metropolis, and this segregation led to its economic decline.
But cohesion and isolation preserved the old town. Artifacts and architectural styles from two dynasties are still embedded in the fabric of the alleys. Despite the march of calamities in the last century, one can still find living remnants from every facet of Shanghai’s long history, from the Revolution to Qing ruins to thousand-year-old streets.
Today, as the antique lanes are steadily liquidated, the question of city identity brings us back to a ‘Shanghai’ that’s far older than the French Concession or the Bund. The old town is a cluster of organic, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods that developers are keen to demolish and historians are struggling to preserve. The old city is authentically mixed-use and polymorphous: generations of residents, artisans, tiny businesses and antiquities are enfolded within the membrane of its lanes.
The old town’s rustic character is unique for being so central, but its location is hazardous. The government has a financial stake in evicting the poor and integrating the old town into the traffic flow of the surrounding city. Success for the planners will be the death of the old town. But for the present, old Shanghai is an urban zone unlike any in China, vibrant yet clandestine, a living intersection of eras.
Katya Knyazeva is a journalist and photographer born in Siberia. After two years as interpreter and event coordinator in Russia’s largest ballet theater, she moved to South Korea to pursue a master’s degree in design. This led to working as a fine arts book illustrator in Seoul, the United States and then Shanghai, where an interest in transitional neighborhoods led Katya into urban studies and photojournalism. Since moving to China in 2006 she has published articles on Chinese cuisine, theater, fine arts and history.
For the last two years Katya has been working on a photographic atlas of Shanghai’s old town. This book is a comprehensive street guide and oral history of the oldest and most obscure quarter in Shanghai.
Entrance: RMB 30.00 (RAS members) and RMB 80.00 (non-members) those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Lecture. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at these events.
RSVP: to RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
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