These past few months, right under the window of the room I rent, it has been making a noise so unbearable that one can hardly tolerate it—from a little after 6 in the morning until well past 12:30 at night, there has been a continuous, irregular clanging of metal and electric-welding sounds all day long. Recently I learned that it seems this district is going to have its heating pipes or natural-gas pipes or something replaced; they’ve been digging everywhere to lay pipes, and the area right beneath my window seems to be, on the one hand, the place where a boiler room or something of the sort is to be built, and on the other hand also the place where the pipes are being welded.
Although I proclaim that I “love all ugliness,” that is after all only a way of expressing an attitude, not a fact……In truth, I really have absolutely no way of deriving any aesthetic pleasure from the racket downstairs……Too abominable……
For a while I could only sleep with rubber earplugs stuffed in my ears, but even with such highly effective anti-noise earplugs, I would occasionally still be awakened while wearing them! Let alone trying to read in my room during the day—though turning on the MP3 does help a bit.
From Shanghai to Beijing, it seems construction is everywhere. Recently there has also been nonstop day-and-night construction outside the dormitory window; the liberal arts building on campus is under tense construction as well, along with the rather controversial five-star hotel, and countless other projects of all sizes around the area. And right in front of my home in Shanghai, ever since I moved in there has been nonstop construction: first the metro interchange station was built (an interchange station for three subway lines! It has already been completed, but I still haven’t gone to see it), and then the Century Lianhua supermarket was torn down and construction began on a building invested in by Li Ka-shing.
In short, construction is everywhere—that is one of the most annoying aspects of a big city. And yet precisely because of this, cities like Shanghai, especially the Lujiazui area of Pudong, could be transformed beyond recognition in just twenty years and become something like Manhattan.
This scene in which one cannot escape construction sites anywhere is probably not common in the West. Moreover, thanks to the protection of property rights in the West, demolition and redevelopment are not such easy matters (which is why no Western country can build a highway network as straight-and-direct as China’s). Now that China’s Property Law has been enacted, perhaps it will also bring some resistance to demolition and redevelopment—about time too, since the tearing down really has been far too fast! Still, judging from the current situation in Shanghai, resistance to demolition may not be very great, especially for old houses in the city center; demolition can, on the one hand, improve living conditions, and on the other hand bring enormous subsidies, so many people are even hoping to be next in line for demolition.
But all the same, I keep feeling that there is something truly troubling about the way cities are developing like this—I seem to sense that this endless tearing down and building up, this construction everywhere, is not some short-term abnormal state at all, but rather the norm of the city. I have heard that the design lifespan of a typical modern building is usually around 60 to 70 years; although in practice many buildings are used for far longer, the design lifespan does after all reflect the character of modern architecture—in short, it certainly is not built for generations to come, because at most it will not even last one or two generations, or else, within the builder’s own lifetime, the whole world will already have been turned upside down, and this building will have fulfilled its historical mission and become obsolete.
Yet within a single person’s lifetime, the city’s entire existing building stock will become “outdated”—or to put it simply and directly: a building’s lifespan is shorter than a human being’s. Since the city has such a rapid rate of metabolism, it is hardly surprising that I am almost always beside a “construction site” wherever and whenever I am……
Although I always emphasize: do not avoid it, but go embrace it. Still, if I have the ability, in the future I’ll still want to run off to some quieter place and stay there……
May 27, 2007, 6:30 p.m.
Latest comments
- Yiwu
2007-05-27 22:04:30
Uh, deep sympathy; there’s also renovation going on upstairs in our place.
But however you put it, Urumqi’s metabolic rate is nowhere near this fast……Compared with Shanghai and Beijing, it’s still in the early stage of growth……
What can I say?
1. The workers have worked hard……
2. Building, repairing, tearing down like this is just too wasteful! With all that stuff, it would be much better to build some rural schools……
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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