Consumption Landscapes - A Personal Perspective
From Urban Earth
Consumption Landscapes - A Personal Perspective
Essay by Jason Nu
My parents have recently bought a luxury condo unit in a high-rise building in a new suburban development outside of town. I have not personally been there yet, but I have seen the glossy sales booklet from the real estate developer, which takes pains to sell a luxury lifestyle as much as the bricks and mortar of the actual apartment. The condo sports fine hardwood floors, granite counter tops, marble accent walls, brass fixtures and all the mod cons: dishwasher, washer-dryer combo and perhaps most importantly, satellite television. Downstairs, a 24-hour security guard and concierge service ensure that the residents are kept safe and satisfied. The expansive view from the two spacious balconies reveals a recently constructed, ever evolving landscape of apartment blocks and office towers - a picture of unabashed affluence, progress and artificiality. Although nowhere near the Mediterranean, the apartment towers sport orange tile roofs and faux plaster walls in a piquant ochre hue. Facing the gated residential district is a newly built, 60-some odd story skyscraper, the focal point of a gargantuan industrial park that is home to branch offices of hundreds of the largest multinational corporations. On the shores of a nearby lake, developers have built an entertainment district, complete with restaurants serving French, German, Japanese and other cuisines from around the world. A newly built eight-lane highway passes by the lake, bringing traffic into the center of town in about fifteen minutes. Hearing my parents tell it, everything is new, clean, ultra-modern, and best of all, cheap. Their two bedroom, luxury condo unit cost under $200,000, and my mom never fails to mention the fact that she can get a two hour massage in town for under ten dollars.
By now you've probably guessed that my parents haven't bought their new place in New York, or Florida, or California. In fact, the development I've described is part of the China-Singapore Suzhou Industrial Park (CS-SIP), one of two new satellite cities outside of Suzhou, China, which is about an hour by car or rail from the metropolis of Shanghai. This development is a good example of many of the forces surrounding globalization, urban decentralization and the export of American style consumption patterns to the developing world, as discussed in the Solecki and Leichenko articles.
As suggested by the name, the CS-SIP was founded in the mid-1990s as a joint venture between government and business leaders in China and Singapore. The force of globalization can be seen everywhere in the park. Not only does the CS-SIP host Chinese and Singaporean businesses, but it also houses hundreds of companies from dozens of countries around the world. This foreign investment would not have been possible a mere 25 years ago, before China undertook the rapid liberalization of its economy. Although China is still under Communist authoritarian rule, its economic system and policies now much more resemble that of the developed, capitalist West. The government is now heavily encouraging foreign investment, and although it still technically owns all the land in the country, makes property available on the open, private real-estate market under long-term leases. Without globalization, economic liberalization and the emergence of a private real-estate market, the astonishing pace of growth in developments like the CS-SIP would not be possible.
The Solecki and Leichenko articles stress how new capital accumulation in developing nations like China have led to land use and consumption patterns that now more closely resemble those of developed Western nations. Some of these land use changes include growth in overall urban footprint, the decentralization, suburbanization and homogenization of metropolitan areas, as well as increasing physical separation of people from different socio-economic classes. Suzhou’s urban footprint has indeed been increasing dramatically. The faux Mediterranean villas in which my parents will be living are sitting on soil that was farmland fifteen years ago. This new development is situated at quite a distance from the traditional center of the ancient city of Suzhou. This is probably because it is easier and more cost effective to build a modern industrial park, and the infrastructure necessary to support it, on a clean slate of undeveloped land, rather than to have to work around the restrictions of an existing city center with narrow streets and older infrastructure. Furthermore, in Suzhou, there is a concern for the historical preservation of the old canals and classical scholars gardens that the city is famous for. An analogy can perhaps be drawn to cities like Paris and London, where the modern skyscraper office districts of La Defense and The Docklands, respectively, have been built away from the historic medieval cores of these cities. Furthermore, if one were to examine views of the skylines of CS-SIP, La Defense and The Docklands, one may have trouble telling them apart. Solecki and Leichenko note that urban form and architecture in cities in the rapidly developing world increasingly resemble that of cities in the developed west. Skyscrapers are synonymous with modernity and economic progress, and cities like Suzhou, Dubai or Kuala Lumpur are only too happy to adopt this architectural vocabulary from the West. In fact, these cities are mostly employing the services of western architectural firms like Skidmore Owings and Merrill, who find that their architectural expertise nowadays is much more in demand in developing Asia than in North American and Europe.
Not only are cities like Suzhou importing the American Dream in the form of decentralized cities and Western architectural styles, they are importing American people, and Canadians, Australians and Europeans as well. My parents tell me that more than half of their new neighbors in their development in Suzhou are foreigners: expats from developed nations, or members of the Chinese diaspora, coming mostly from North America and Southeast Asia. The developers of CS-SIP understand that they are not only importing foreign business, but foreign businesspeople as well. The Western architecture, restaurants, and lifestyle replicated by CS-SIP is meant to cater not only to aspiring local bourgeois Chinese, but also to actual Westerners as well, who may find the kind of lifestyle offered by these developments more palatable than the more modest housing found in the older parts of Suzhou. My parents certainly were drawn to a level of luxury that they couldn’t have imagined 20 years ago would become so commonplace in Chinese cities nowadays. When my parents first visited their ancestral villages in China in the late 1980s, after having not stepped foot in the country since they fled with their families as toddlers during the Revolution, they were appalled at the conditions they found there. Toilet paper with the consistency of sandpaper, restaurant tablecloths that hadn’t been changed for months, and service with no smile were the norm at the time. Nowadays, my parents talk about how cities like Shanghai and Qingdao are more modern and comfortable than New York. Shanghai has a maglev train that runs at more than two hundred miles an hour, covering the thirty kilometers to the airport in seven minutes. What does New York have? A slowpoke Airtrain and subway ride that takes more than an hour to get into Midtown. My parents aren’t alone in their appraisals of the New China. Most of their Chinese American friends and relatives in one way or another have invested in property in China in recent years.
There is a downside to all of this of course. China may have its lavish shopping and entertainment districts, high-tech rail lines, futuristic skyscrapers and entire showcase cities, but I wonder about the woman who gets paid less than ten dollars to give my mom a massage for two hours. My mom says that it’s good money for someone from the countryside. Good money or not, the income gap between the new elite capitalist class and the average working class person in China is widening. Economic disparities between the wealthier urban areas and poverty-stricken rural areas cause further worry. How socially sustainable is this road that China is going down? And what of the environmental consequences? Solecki and Leichenko note that there will be a heavy environmental price to pay for these new urbanization patterns in the developing world. Near Suzhou is Tai Lake, China’s third largest body of freshwater, well known for its beauty. The only problem is that in recent years, it has become heavily polluted due to development along its shores. An algal bloom in the summer of 2007 decimated the lake’s fish population and endangered the water supply of millions of people. A local environmental campaigner, who worked to publicize the story in the press, was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. If it intends to become a fully developed country, China will have to find a way to balance its economic aspirations with sound environmental protection policies, while avoiding sending its environmental activists to jail. After all, what good is it to live in a Mediterranean villa if the water’s no good to drink? Oh well, the villa dwellers can always afford Evian.
