That’s the question Karrie Jacobs asks after visiting the two cities (via Planetizen):
The question was harder to answer than it might seem. Clearly, she would hate much of the heedless tower mania. But the real answer would hinge on whether she regarded Dubai’s increasingly sophisticated approach to mixed-use place-making as an improvement over the sterile environments churned out by the urban planners of the 1960 …
After my return to New York, I received an e-mail about a new development called Jumeirah Gardens, a huge, upscale, master-planned community. Most of what I’d seen in Dubai had been built on open desert or land reclaimed from the sea, but this was a classic urban-renewal scheme, one calling for the demolition of Satwa. A number of accounts, none of them official, estimated that between 100,000 to 150,000 people would be displaced.
Time Out Dubai reported on the development in May: “‘These low-quality villas and the illegal inhabitants they house simply can not continue to exist so close to Trade Center, Sheikh Zayed Road and the heart of the city,’ our source confirms. ‘Not in such prime real estate.’” A more recent article in the Gulf News was accompanied by the kind of spectacular architectural renderings that are pro forma in Dubai, and it noted, “The development will redefine living in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Dubai, currently undergoing demolition to pave the way for the new project.” Redefine living in one of the most popular neighborhoods of Dubai? The plan for Jumeirah Gardens made me wish a Jane Jacobs could rise from Satwa.
And then there was Shanghai. In October I spent a few days in a hotel in Pudong, the district of jumbo office towers that began construction in the 1990s. I was taken on a whirlwind tour of the city’s architecture. One of the supposed highlights was Xintiandi, an enclave of preserved tenements converted to a shopping mall with the help of an American architect who drew his inspiration from Faneuil Hall. It struck me as strange that this was regarded as a premier example of preservation: it would be like taking a first-time visitor to New York to the South Street Seaport. But preservation of any sort, even the kind that turns authentic neighborhoods into malls, was the exception rather than the rule. Everywhere I went, new towers were rising and old low-rise neighborhoods were coming down. No sign of Jane here, either.
On the way to Shanghai, I stopped in Hong Kong, a city where real estate development is one of the main industries, and where the government derives much of its revenue from leasing property and selling development rights. There I caught up on the latest: another harbor scheme with more reclamation and a new waterfront highway, and still more massive luxury high-rises eating away at some of the city’s best-loved streetscapes …
Of course, what Dubai, Shanghai, and Hong Kong have in common is a top-down approach to development. Dubai has a hereditary ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum. The United Arab Emirates held its first ever elections in 2006, but they’re only open to a tiny fraction of the population. …In the West, we envy China’s ability to build on a monumental scale—the Beijing airport! The Bird’s Nest! A subway system quadrupled in size in five years!—and completely change the face of its cities, but residents don’t seem to have a role to play in how their cities are remade, aside from getting out of the way. In Hong Kong, public participation is carefully rationed, and recent protests over the demolition of beloved landmarks—such as the Central Star Ferry Pier and the Queen’s Pier—are a subset of a larger movement advocating open government.
[I]t’s revealing to see what happens in cities where there is no Jane. Because what these people are really talking about when they complain about the Jane Jacobs mentality is democracy, the inconvenient fact that we live in a society where ordinary people can have an impact on the political process.