It seems though the design has some kind of a regular guide, pavement, reinstallment of railings, dike and of course urban furniture, such as lighting and bench. A pattern is seemed to be obvious as well, that the concern is no longer just to beautify the space, but also to function as an urban space. This attitude is really good, as a riverside or lake-side or beach, usually take up really long walkways and this means that the addition to city’s urban space is abundant along the water.

What should be considered is that the design should support facilities for the ‘diffables’; people with different abilities, especially the needs for standard dimensions. It is not a merely the design that will attract people to use this kind of space, most importantly is the’soul’, which will be added to the space by the activities that the user is doing. So, each city’s waterfront will have their specific ‘trademark’ according to their costum, culture and life.

Edited from Ariyanti (2008): “Themed Town, Thames Town” an unpublished article for Campus of Architecture and Urban Planning at Tongji University, Shanghai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

Even for non-architecture viewers, this area gives a feast to the eyes. The contradiction between old and new superimposed on each side of the Huang Pu River. Although both sides have their own beauty, but of course each with their own different time line, now being exposed at the same time. It shows just how two major economic developments have put on the weight of growth and capitals in the city of Shanghai in two different eras yet, it resulted almost the same effect even if it is in a different scale.

The old buildings mostly were built in the 1920s in the west, while the east side (Pu Dong) is still until now being developed. More of the architectural styles though unfortunately were adopted from foreign architects, thus leaving the Jin Mao tower as the only office tower adopting the Chinese essential architecture. And it also resulted in the alienation of the east side to the heritage buildings on the east.

It is fantastic to witness this fact, that both can co-exist in the same time frame. A slight criticism will be saying that the reason those old buildings are around is because it is quite expensive to tear them down and built something new on the whole site, but some facts also concluded that it is in the trend in China in the last decade to preserve these beautiful artifacts. They are considered as a generator for the area as well, when put in the right redevelopment project, most of them turned out to be profitable for the developer and business.