1997 Urban Design
Civic Commercialism: Singapore, Hong Kong, Shanghai

The universal need to exchange, acquire, and sell is one of the foundations of any urban environment. Commercial activity demands an interaction between parties, and it is this coming together that makes commerce, and the architecture that supports it, by definition urban. Some markets, like Les Halles in Paris or the Beverly Center in Los Angeles, are architectural monuments that take on a symbolic role within the city. Others, like Ralph’s supermarket or the Bedok Centre Wet Market in Singapore, are innocuous, generic structures that are repeated throughout the landscape with cookie-cutter-like regularity. Both types are of interest, though, because of the role they play in the lives of people who use these buildings. As sites of daily activity frequented by people of all social classes and every ethnic group, coming together and interacting, commercial buildings play a more significant role in people’s daily lives than those of the government.

I propose investigating a city’s commercial structures as a particularly valuable way of understanding that city. While there is certainly significance to the residential and industrial architecture of a city and the distribution of and relationships between these zones, I feel that the commercial sphere is at the heart of a city’s urban nature, particularly in an analysis of specific architectures. Furthermore, commercial architecture is more universal and less subject to culturally specific types than, say, domestic architecture. So as part of any cross-cultural investigation, the commercial architecture should be more easily understood, and can serve as an entrance to understanding more complicated and culturally inflected conditions.

With the current economic crisis, there is something of a lull in the incredibly dynamic urban laboratories of Southeast Asia. Cities in almost all Asian countries have been developing at an incredible pace in recent years, and only now is the building frenzy beginning to slow down in some, but by no means all cases. But regardless of rising and falling economic indicators, Southeast Asia is still at the forefront of urban development. I chose to visit Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, seeing them as representative cities at three distinct points in their urban development. Singapore has basically concluded its first massive binge of urbanization, and is searching for an identity upon which to base further development. Hong Kong is the most established global metropolis of the three, but is in the throes of dealing with the debilitating one-two punch of economic recession and the return of political power from the colonial British government back to the People’s Republic of China. Shanghai, once “the Pearl of the Orient” or “the Whore of Asia” depending on your source and point of view, has fallen from cosmopolitan preeminence since the People’s Revolution of 1949, and is just starting a gargantuan building and infrastructure construction program in an attempt to reassert its urban prowess.

At the present moment, architectural discourse is expanding the direction of its critical scrutiny to include the quotidian as well as the monumental—not just high architecture, but also everyday buildings. This perspective seems of particular value in examining current urban development in Southeast Asia because so much of the architectural press concerning this development has been concerned exclusively with covering the tallest building, the longest bridge, the biggest new city, etc. I am more interested at looking at some of the in-between conditions—the conditions that have been left out of the discussion thus far—as opposed to the extreme instances which make the headlines. If the key to commercial architecture’s civic role lies in its everyday connection with different people and their interpersonal exchanges, then it would make sense to look at the more commonplace buildings rather than the exceptional. To be sure, exceptional conditions can crystallize latent tendencies into something more legible, revealing what might have gone unnoticed, but it is important to understand the normative condition from which the exceptional stands out.

Conclusion

For the American visiting Singapore, Hong Kong, and Shanghai, there are many specific lessons to be learned. How to develop spaces at any scale, from the tiny transparent stores in Hong Kong’s Trendy Zone and Beverly Center, to the radical scope of an entire district in Pudong. How to distill the bland and ordinary into the fantastic, as in the Central–Mid-Levels, indistinguishable from any escalator in any building, except there’s no building and it is half a mile long. How to transform necessary urban infrastructures into spectacular monuments, such as the pedestrian overpasses in Shanghai.

None of these cities have much in the way of contemporary high architecture. Looking only at buildings of recent construction and disregarding historical landmarks, these three cities are distinctly lacking, in spite of the billions of dollars spent on construction. To be sure, there are exceptions—the Hong Kong and Shanghai Bank, the Jin Mao Tower, the Hong Kong Convention Center, but by and large, the quality of architecture is in a sorry state of affairs in terms of both design and construction. And yet these cities are all clearly dynamic and exciting urban places. There is nowhere on earth that has more of the bustling activity both at cross-purposes and to mutual advantage that characterizes the urban sphere. This demonstrates the civic value of these seemingly unimportant buildings that I have been examining. While most of them may not have much in the way of architectural pedigree, the role they each play within their cities is vital. I have been looking for buildings that make good cities, buildings that make their cities better, thinking that that is the real lesson to be learned.