History repeating itself.

BUILDING SHANGHAI: THE STORY OF CHINA'S GATEWAY

By Edward Denison, Guang Yu Ren. Chichester: Wiley-Academy. 2006. [pounds sterling]39.99

Shanghai is rightly known as China's Gateway, but for whom, the non-Chinese entrepreneurs, or the Chinese exporters? The city's history of attrition with foreign colonisers, migrant workers and refugees, began in 1842 when Shanghai was chosen as one of the first five Treaty Ports in which foreigners would be allowed to trade, but not reside. Exploitation, dirty dealings, gambling, prostitution, workers uprisings, union disputes, civil war, occupation, world wars and revolutions, you name it Shanghai experienced it. These are the foundations for the city's 4000 mega-towers constructed since the mid-1980s, and the seeds of present day business run by a multi-national and economically stratified population of over 18 million. Shanghai was always at the front of modernism and mechanisation, from the first cable communications and cotton mills, to cars and trams.

This work, thick with historical detail, shows Shanghai is not so much an admirable pattern for the future but a fascinating roll back in time. As Edward Denison and Guang Yu Ren rightly say; Shanghai's history is not in the making but being repeated. Over 300 historical and present day illustrations offer examples of the similarities and disparities in skyline, scale, building types, and technologies since the eighteenth century. However much the present Beijing government would like to keep a tight rein on developments, and blend the best of community planning with market forces, today's reality is more like the free-for-all 'Manchester capitalism' which Friedrich Engels described at the beginning of Britain's industrial revolution. Beijing has recently officially admitted that environmental pollution, the unacceptable side of market developments, is out of control. Chinese architecture cannot claim an unbroken aesthetic culture, traceable back to the continent's forefathers, in the way in which Europe likes to mythologise its own urban history, and there's been no time for environmental planning standards to take root in the public consciousness. Shanghai's economic success is clothed in adopted architectures, wrested in victory from the city's former conquerors, who are now supplicants queuing at China's gateway.