Edited from Ariyanti (2008): “Themed Town, Thames Town” an unpublished article for Campus of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University, Shanghai

It was a cloudy Saturday and our group of formerly 14 people has been reduced to 8 from the morning visit to Anting New Town. Exhausted, we found out that Thames Town is really far out from to the other direction, the only way to get there was with a cab, since our limited Chinese, we asked our friend to instruct the taxi driver how to get there. After another 40 minutes ride, we arrived at the compound, surrounded by fences, waterways and empty boulevards, the town was a place separated from its surrounding.

My first impression of the city was, how serene and quite it was. Then the architectural images sprang into my mind, the red brick Victorian style houses were aligned in rows and curved streets. We went into one of the fenced compound just on the out skirt of the “town”, and found out that those red brick used there were not actual red brick, they were tiles plastered on concrete wall. This had already brought realization into my mind. It was not what it seemed to be, this place was only a copy of an English styled town.

It was obvious that in the same moment, I remembered an excerpt from Sorkin,[1] he compared between cities that we have today with the EPCOT Disneyworld. The development is changing toward this new kind of ideal city, where you will have many kinds of differences tolerated and even accepted, less crime, hygienic life, and fantasy is received as a seed of future and not some crazy dream. Though he also mentioned that Disneyzone is not at all urban, it might invoke urbanism but it has not the real impact on the space created by the concept, it is in a sense just a conceptual place and not really a physical space. This place is exactly what Sorkin described and to be honest it is a nice place to live in. Of course it also lacked of authenticity, but it terms of ideal, I can assume that the place is safe and also clean.

Just as we moved though the space, there is something missing, there is no such thing as urban life happening on the street as what the usual town life has. Moreover, the fence around the compound gave us a surprise, since we cannot randomly go out of one compound to visit the next one; only one gate was open, which is the main one. At that time, it felt as if the town is a caged community, where you can see the view of the opponent neighbor, but cannot mingle with them straight away.

[1] Sorkin, Michael (1992):”See You in Disneyland” in Variations on a Theme Park: The New American City and the End of Public Space, New York: The Noonday Press.