"Compand two bedrooms ... ... ... modern Japanese style compand ... ... ... compand new. compand ... ... .. compand COMPAND !!!!".
"Compand: Who was he? "
There are now seven and a half, Silvia and I are exhausted from the afternoon relentlessly chase the Ginger & Fred estate agents in Shanghai, aka Jessica & Michael. Silvia and Nicola are looking for an apartment, Jessica & Michael have a duty to show as many apartments as possible to find a suitable one. To this end, let us consider it appropriate to move through the city like a pinball machine balls for an entire afternoon, on foot or by taxi (one of the drivers is probably a rally driver urban homicidal mania, ed), in pursuit of their flaming scooter . We move so compounds in compound (a compound, said compand by the locals, is a set of residential buildings surrounded by a high wall or railing and guarded by private security. Another term commonly used is the gated community, ed), from the vicinity of the Xintiandi French Concession, and from there back to the north by the parties in Piazza del Popolo.
The gated communities are a well established phenomenon in the world, and if the Chinese have talked about both journalists Italian (Federico Rampini in Collapse Urban : "In the urban middle class mountain intolerance, mistrust, or fear, to the hordes of immigrants who come from distant regions rude, barely speak the national language (the send-rino), are associated with the spread of diseases, drugs, prostitution. In turn, immigrants feel treated as second class citizens, exploited and blackmailed by employers who use them in building shipyards in road works, such as waiters or cleaners, laborers and maids. [...] In this climate of mistrust between the two Chinas that coexist in the same mega-cities, the residential high-rises built in Shanghai and Pe-bent to accommodate wealthy condominiums are served by high cir-security grilles, gates are guarded day and night by armed vigilantes. The Chinese authorities and the MIDD-wealthy class have the same nightmare: they see the symptoms acci-receptacles della nascita di favelas di immigranti poveri alle periferie delle grandi città, focolai di malattie, delinquenza, instabilità sociale.”) che studiosi di origine cinese, come Pu Miao nel suo paper Deserted Streets in a Jammed Town: The Gated Community in Chinese Cities and Its Solution (“While the densely placed mid- or high-rise apartment buildings along the street do not look very different, they all rise out of walls more than 2 metres high, and are further rimmed by immaculate hedges and tile-paved sidewalks. But you see few souls on most of these sidewalks! The entire urban space looks like a giant stage set without actors. The walls keep going on and on, sometimes as long as 500 metres, and are only occasionally punctured by a gaudy gate decorated with copies of Greek statues and private guards dressed like police officers. […] Between 1991 and 2000, 83% of the residential communities in Shanghai were gated in a variety of ways. […] The Chinese refer to their gated communities as ‘sealed residential quarters’. Akin to the ‘Neighbourhood’ concept originating in the 1920s’ US, the ‘residential quarter’, or xiaoqu , finds its direct lineage in the microrayon of Soviet Russian planning theory introduced into China in the 1950s. Sanctioned by national planning codes, the concept has since become the basic unit in planning and developing residential construction. All new master­-planned communities are designed as residential quarters. Similar to its US counterpart, a ‘sealed residential quarter’ is a walled compound with one or more guarded gates, sometimes supplemented by high-tech surveillance equipment such as closed-circuit cameras and infrared alarm systems at the borders. The new master-planned residential quarter has some semi-public amenities within the gate. Depending on the price range of the units, the amenities range from a mere concentrated green space as the mini­mum, to a variety of extras such as playgrounds, a clubhouse, and even stores and a swimming pool. Some kind of residents’ organization runs the community with its private security team.[…] However, a Chinese gated community tends to be much larger in population and land area, and more standardized in its layout than an American one. Based on the national model of the residential quarter, a Chinese walled development usually covers 12—20-plus hectares of land and holds 2000—3000 families (assuming 3.2—3.5 persons each family). The huge size is believed to create econom­ies of scale, but it also generates the monopoly of a single development model. […] One of the two differences between the US and the Chinese gated communities which is consequential to the later discussion involves the much higher density in the residential quarter; Chinese cities generally have densities about 5—10 times greater than those of US ones. […] Gating in the US serves different purposes in communities with different social and economic characteristics: to prevent outsiders from using privatized public amenities, to ensure prestige, or to increase protection. The primary reason for gating in China currently, however, is always security, with others existing merely as additional rewards.[…] The final feature unique to China explains the rapid spreading of gating. During the current transition from a planned economic system to a market-ori­ented one, the government sees maintaining social stability as its topmost political concern, and gating as a quick solution to crime control which directly contributes to stability. Therefore, governments of all levels have included gating residential areas as part of their programmes. Local governments specify in their working schedules the number of communities to be gated within certain periods of time. Gating is an important criterion in deciding if a community will be awarded the official title of ‘Civilized and Safe Residential Quarter’. All this is hard to imagine in the US, where gated communities are always initialized by the private sector, either the developers or the homeowners.).
Durante i nostri febbrili spostamenti si è sempre più acuita un’impressione che ho avuto fin dai primi giorni a Shanghai: la sottile osservazione di Benjamin (“La città è uniforme soltanto in apparenza. Perfino il suo nome assume suoni differenti nei diversi quartieri. In nessun luogo – se non nei dreams - the phenomenon of the border may be exercised in the original form as well as in cities. Knowing means having a knowledge of those lines that function as boundary, running parallel to the bridge, through housing developments and parks, lapping the shores of rivers, is to know these boundaries of the territories and enclaves. ") Here is now outdated in everyday life , taken to its logical conclusion, the intangible boundaries were brutally materialized. The seemingly unstoppable and irreversible tissue replacement of the old building is taking away with them not only historic buildings, forms of settlement, lifestyles but also the opportunity to experience the phenomenon of threshold (Benjamin again: "The threshold should be distinguished very clearly from the border. The Schwelle (threshold) is a zone. The word schwellen (swell) contains the meanings of change, passage, overflow, meaning that the etymology should not be missed. "). Walking along the congested roads between the ruined buildings of the ancient Chinese city that is precisely what is felt: being in a zone, a place where daily activities, gestures, smells and sounds overflow and mingle, impetuous flowing against the passer.
Our continual coming and going in search dell'agognato apartment, including stairs, elevators, sidewalks, gardens, the wanderings and photos between rooms decorated in many different ways, often forced to wear threatening flap kindly supplied by the current owners, have an alienating effect: Jessica at times with his mellifluous and pressing gently seems transfigured into one of scary dwarves so dear to David Lynch. Beginning to realize what he alluded when he said that Mian Mian was going on a genetic mutation in the inhabitants of his city, I take the obvious difference in lifestyle between the inhabitants of the ruined neighborhoods and the new middle class eager to follow the syncopated rhythms of life Western (and here again Benjamin was the prophet: "... the desire to travel, which divides the life of the in many short periods, emphasizing the departures and arrivals. The time of modern life means not only the desire for a rapid change of the contents of life but also the power of the formal appeal of the border, the beginning and end. "). Already thirty years ago the brilliant intuition Cedric Price had it all: "The generators of tourism are the desire for pleasure, curiosity, and uniqueness of Achievement Difficulty. Thus this unpaid labor force of accepting millions Either Few limits on nationality, race or creed is Likely to pay attention to money and Areas, objects and methods for the passing of Time That are viewed in a very different light by Those in paid Employ. However, not only are the Same Both groups frequently people with only a time difference but the difference between validity of the place or process for these two groups is found in an increasingly small time span. Tourism is becoming a regular event for most in the developed and developing countries of the world - whether confined to the native country or not. In the same way activital patterning recognised as “work” can simultaneously be seen as “leisure” when observed., rather than indulged in, elsewhere. Thus tourism is no longer the rich looking in wonder at the poor, or the past, more a continuing appetite for the determining where, what and why is the difference in contemporary life patterning. This vast and stable industry, highly profitable to its host nation, requires more than well-maintained relics of the past: it Requires, in fact, pleasurable physical Means to Achieve recognition and understanding of the present and the future. "
There are endless food for thought in these sentences (the link between tourism and awareness of the past, present, plans, the city's image and future vision is of crucial importance in Shanghai, and will be one of the upcoming episodes ...) but one in particular seems important here: the continuing "appetite" (Price was a bon bon vivant , and culinary metaphors often appear in his writings) the tourists (which is now synonymous with the city, ed) to determine where, what and why this is the difference in the pattern of contemporary life. This
appetite often through unconscious and trivialized a great hunting: like a safari, many are now looking for the latest news as a trophy to show to friends, or local restaurant last cry of the place exclusive and known to a select and elite, quickly abandoned when it angrily in too frequent it ("The generators of tourism are the desire for pleasure, curiosity, and uniqueness of Achievement Difficulty"). The inhabitants of the compound are very often tourists in their infinite metropolis, depart and arrive continuously throughout the day, casually than a multitude of boundaries. Jessica itself, proudly listing the services enjoyed by the condominiums of a compound, it could well be the use of a travel agency that lists what we find in the holiday village we have chosen: large garden, indoor lap pool, fitness center, tennis tennis, and that's incredible, a free karaoke!
The degree, speed and intensity of this mutation seem almost unreal and impossible in such a short time, and it is suspected that not all the influences come from the west. The suspicion is confirmed by the careful research done Pu Miao: "According to newspapers and other official reports, Governments Encourage gating Because it without Further Reduces crime burdening the police force. A majority of residents like the gate, for it not only increases the sense of security but also eliminates pedlars, noise of through traffic, unwanted salesper­sons and flyers slipped under doors. […] On the other hand, grass-roots reports revealed that residents of Chinese gated communities privately complained that the walls only provided the image of a safe environment. They offered no guarantee to real safety itself.[…] Therefore, although today’s China has maintained a lower crime rate when compared internationality in absolute numbers, Chinese residents increasingly feel insecure as they compare their life with that of yesterday. In the current trying time, it is no wonder gating has been welcomed as an easy solution. But gating also has a deeper root in Chinese culture and urban history, which explains why both residents and the government accept it more quickly than they do other Western ideas. Historically, the Chinese city existed mainly as the outpost of the empire to serve the latter’s taxation and military needs. As Max Weber pointed out, “In contrast to the Occident, the cities in China and throughout the Orient lacked political autonomy”. Since the Chinese city was not fundamentally a community or association of its average residents, “the prosperity of the Chinese city did not primarily depend upon the citizens’ enterprising spirit in economic and political ventures but rather upon the imperial administration”. Such a peculiar nature produced two profound results in China’s urban culture. First, the average Chinese urbanite generally lacked participation and even interest in the public affairs of their city. Second, since there was no incentive and funding for the city government to concern itself too much with municipal functions, road building, fire fighting and other items had to rely on the fund-raising and co-ordination of a small number of local gentry, and such efforts were never institutionalized. In general, the Chinese city was ‘thrifty’ with its civic services. Urban residents had to take care of themselves for a variety of matters, including their own safety.These cultural traits manifested themselves in physical forms as the inward-­oriented private spaces (the courtyard houses), the weak interaction between the private and the public (the solid walls flanking a street), and the lack of public spaces (such as parks and plazas in a Western city) other than the street. Governmental buildings like the yamen and barracks often took the form of large walled compounds located in the middle of a city, bluntly interrupting local circulation. This tradition appears to have worked well with a variety of political ideologies in Chinese modem history, having been continued from the Imperial period, through the Republican era (1912—1949), to the Maoist period of the Communist rule (1949—1976). Before the 1978 reform, the Communist government treated the city in a way not fundamentally different from its predecessors. Based on national strategic plans, the government built factories, universities and other institutions in the city as large, self-sufficient and walled compounds, disregarding their interac­tions with local urban contexts. […] If gating is criticized by the liberal tradition within Western societies, no such balancing force exists in China. Without the Westem tradition of urban associ­ation and sufficient policing, average residents’ sense of self-protection easily outweighs the value of social interaction. Compartmentalized urban space has quickly reappeared in the form of the gated community. Its current popularity in the US only adds a halo of ‘modernization’ around this selective learning from the West. Even the migrant population formed Have Their Own gated communi-ties. "
In the most significant and accomplished, leaving judgments of aesthetic and easy and obvious mockery of kitsch, the gated communities in Shanghai have a high affinity for Höfe the Red Vienna of the twenties: an enormous impact on the physical and symbolic, monumental, homogeneous presence in all areas of the city, the myth of self-polished and deliberate support of the type of residential development from the public, proud and sometimes bold statement of defiance by a civil society (the working class in Vienna, the class Average rampant in Shanghai), conscious of their strength and determined to impose their way of life in a disoriented society, changing and identity crisis. Even today, even after being bombed by the Austrian army in 1933, the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna says very clearly what was at stake in Europe in the First World War.
Then, sitting in a café in Shanghai, happens to turn the pages of magazines and publications dedicated to the forthcoming Expo 2010, which has as its stated objective and ambition to indicate "the way" for the development of cities in the XXI century and you come across phrases, slogans and statements like: "This is the synthesis of 25 years of general reflection [...] The aim is to move towards an Harmonious Society: to the outside, it's an Harmony with the World, to the inside, it's an Harmony within society. From "faster and better" we are moving to "better and faster", and the approach to it is sustainable development.", “The Expo proposes an idea of "Harmony City", which comes from the essence of the Chinese culture - Harmony. Harmony is the base for peace and an harmonious world is the development of world peace", "Sustainable development is compatible with the rules of historical development, so we definitely support it", o ancora “Future of the city: Humanity - Harmony among human beings; Ecology - Harmony between Men and Nature; City Renaissance - Harmony Between history and future. "
" Green "," Recyclable "and" Sustainable "seems to be the magic formula with which to solve all problems. At the moment I have my doubts ...
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