This is the promised (and hopefully much anticipated!) part 2 of my "Shades of Shanghai" post. Lengthy though they may be, I hope these posts provide a glimpse into my environment and some of the issues that have arisen in my study of sustainability in this fascinating and unique urban environment. Last time I talked about the older areas of Shanghai and the residential sector as it appears today. This time, I focus on the commercial side--the glitz and glamor of the gleaming glass goliaths of Shanghai. I said last time that I would also give some thoughts on Shanghai, but those will now wait until another post simply so as not to inundate you with too much to read. As I'm sure you know by now, once I start writing it is hard for me to stop--I enjoy writing about this stuff too much.
Even as you navigate the streets of old Shanghai, there is a presence of the new city beyond. Perhaps it is that in old town you can actually see the rooftops and sky without lolling your head back as far as you it can go, but more likely it is that even as you stand surrounded by sweeping tiled roofs, if you life your gaze a bit there stand the towers of Pudong and Nanjing Rd.
From old town wander north a few blocks and you find yourself suddenly immersed in a new world. But twenty years ago, none of this would have been here--you would have still been among old narrow housing. So what happened? How did the city of Shanghai turn low-rise, low-rent neighborhoods into tree-lined avenues aglow with neon at night welcoming shoppers into mall after mall filled with tuxedo-clad workers bowing you into Armani, Dolce and Gabbana, Louis Vuitton, and Rolex?
Well, in the late 1980s and early 1990s the government decided that the best way to bring China out of its "backward" Mao-era policies was to boost the economy rapidly through foreign investment. Within the one-party system, promotion and tenure for officials and leaders of state-owned enterprises was based almost solely on how much GDP was boosted during their 3-5 year appointed position. One way the government helped to encourage foreign investment was by creating "development zones" where economic regulations and land tenure agreements were different than the rest of the country specifically to attract foreign firms. These development zones were largely intended for mass production facilities and resulted in massive sprawl and construction of industrial spaces that largely remained empty. The devastation was so bad, that the government began forcing the closure of these zones and returning them to farmland and ecological zones when they came under fire for their environmental policies.
In Shanghai, however, the development zones that were created were not for manufacturing but for financial services. Shanghai has a long history with financial services--the historic Bund along the Huangpu River was the center of French, British, and American trading throughout the late 19th century and on into the 20th century until everyone was chased out by political turmoil.
Though billed in some 1980s era government signs as a sore spot on the city's history (it was the most visible part of the essential colonization of the city by Westerners), Shanghai embraced this past to create its future. But rather than build quick warehouses, Shanghai brought in Western architects to build modern, Western buildings as symbols of the new Shanghai. As I mentioned in my last post, following the cultural turmoil of the mid-century, the government and the people had cut ties with their past and wanted new buildings. Chinese firms knew only limited construction and design methods, mostly because steel was still not widely used as a building material. It was pouring concrete and laying brick almost exclusively. Well the problem is that you can't just bring in Western architects to design a building and have Chinese contractors build it without problems. The different styles of the groups led to problems with design documents, construction methods, and materials procurement and handling, and resulted in Chinese firms often "adapting" the Western designs to what they knew. This last practice resulted in poorer material application or changes that drastically affected the building's performance.
Now this all got better quickly, partly with help from technology allowing architects to be more involved with projects and partly with construction companies adapting to the new techniques. The result is that in Shanghai in the last 20 years there has been an explosion of construction that has transformed the city. At a mixer last night, an engineer I spoke with said when he arrived 15 years ago a taxi driver mentioned that the city was going to develop Pudong, then a marshland recently designated for a financial zone. He and his wife thought the city was crazy. Well, if you've seen an image of the "Shanghai skyline" recently, that's Pudong. If you haven't, here's what it looks like:
The skyscrapers that have gone up are among the highest in Asia, and even the world. First it was the Oriental Pearl Tower:
Then the Jin Mao Tower (the pagoda-like one), and finally the World Financial Center:
Pudong now sports the worlds highest bar and observation deck in the World Financial Center. And these two are set to be dwarfed in 2014 by the Shanghai Tower. But it wasn't just on this side of the river that development went on. Not to be outdone, Nanjing Rd., historically a commercial street (though previously with two and three story buildings) developed quickly with high rises of its own such as Plaza 66 and more malls per block than I thought were possible. But then again, with financial development comes disposable income, and though per capita disposable income is still lower than in America, when you put 23 million people together, there is a lot of purchasing power, and the younger generations (learning from the West) are happy to throw off the ways of frugality of their parents and spend on bags, watches, clothing, and cars (if you ever come to Shanghai, I can direct you to the Maserati, Bentley, Aston Martin, and Ferrari showrooms).
So this all sounds great on paper--more income for the city, more companies doing business, and top tier office space presumable built to international standards. Well the problem is that some of those early buildings were not necessarily built as efficiently as possible, but worse, many of the trends we saw back then about challenges of East-West construction knowledge transfer are still present with respect to sustainable offices now. The difference is that back then, the government was willing to step in and offer subsidies to encourage foreign businesses to develop in Shanghai thus overcoming the higher cost associated with teaching new construction methods to a Chinese company. Now, though such funds are proclaimed in the laws coming out of Beijing, designers on the ground are not seeing them. In these top tier spaces, LEED and "green features" are seen predominantly as a marketing tool. Developers ask for LEED after a project has already been designed in many cases which either adds a lot of cost in redesign or means that the LEED documents have to be...creatively produced. Yet developers aren't willing to cross the threshold of increased upfront cost. They want LEED for less or the same price and in China, where most contractors are still unfamiliar with "green" design and materials, that last part can turn a building from green to brown. This is why a designer at Arup told me that the biggest challenge to green building in Shanghai is overcome when you have a client who says up front that he wants to do sustainable design and is willing to pay a little more for quality space.
Now I'm not insinuating that every LEED project here is corrupt, and there are a number of people, including Alex Bisagni at BEE, Inc. working to bridge this gap and bring LEED properly to new buildings in China. However, among my interviews I have met a number of professionals who are skeptical about the green features of many of these certified and top-tier projects. One window manufacturer said flatly that the average window in office buildings in Shanghai doesn't even come close to meeting the code. That means much higher energy use and cost associated with air conditioning and heating. And that's not something that can be easily retrofitted--in other words, if he's right, then Shanghai is locked in already to dealing with the high energy and environmental costs resulting from the East-West construction challenges in the past two decades. Furthermore in the 1990s and 2000s one of the predominant architectural trends was all glass facades on buildings. That means if he's right, it's a lot of surface area through which we're losing energy.
And the problem only gets worse from there. The increasing consumerism on Nanjing Rd. is a symptom of an overall desire for "Westernization" among Shanghai's youth. Just as Jaime and Hannes pointed out that the young aren't tied to historic architecture, they also aren't tied to their parents' frugal ways of shutting off lights and using natural ventilation. Every store advertises A/C by leaving their doors open and trying to cool the city with their 1 kW wall unit. And in office spaces, workers are becoming more accustomed to having temperatures set. Talk to Albert Wong of Envision Wall and he'll happily point out that ambient temperature is only about 50% of our perception of comfort--relative humidity (15%) and natural ventilation (35%) make up the rest. But buildings in Shanghai are often operated as if temperature is the only measurement that matters. Now to make this worse, the number of air conditioners in the city is increasing roughly 20% per year. That's a lot of energy that's needed unless something is done.
But the buildings do look very nice, and it is easy to get lost and disoriented (for me at least happily lost) among the glistening towers of glass. Just don't think about the energy being wasted, and you'll enjoy the experience. And when the sun goes down, I recommend from experience sitting atop the Jin Mao Tower at the second highest bar in Shanghai, Cloud 9, and watching all the lights come on across the city.
As the last rays of the sun flicker across the city, if there's not too much haze, the gleam off the buildings below you signals the end of a long work week in a bustling city. Next thing you know, the gleam of the glass gives way to the glow of neon atop the short and tall buildings alike. For some reason, as Shanghai developed it patterned its night scene after Las Vegas so that every new building must have its gimmicky lights. Some I find classy and excellent accents to the form of the building, and others are merely to attract attention. Either way, this is another energy drain that I don't quite understand.
I hope that gives a bit of insight into what I've come to know of this city and its energy challenges. There are two parts to it--the old and the new--and there is not yet a comprehensive solution to tackle both. I believe that we can draw some lessons from the revolutionizing of the construction industry with the introduction of Western architects 20 years ago. Today, there is easy cooperation between West and East in creating Grade A buildings. The question is how to incentivize the transfer of knowledge of green technology to Grade A buildings and below. As I mentioned in a previous post, I think part of what would help is if the gap between costs and income would be used not just for absorbing the risk of the futuristic designs of the Pearl Tower and others but for addressing the energy challenges facing new buildings here. Only time will tell though how the solutions work out, and likely it will be a combination of political, economic, and social actions.
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