Tag Archives: houhai

what is luxury living?

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I’ve been thinking about luxury because it permeates Shenzhen advertising, especially that for new housing estates. The definition of luxury that appears in these advertisements invariably links high-end consumption, images of happy elites, and the idea of homecoming. The strip of reclaimed land that stretches from Shekou Gongye 8 Road to Dongjiaotou, for example, is thick with malls and advertising, as well as littered with evidence that such lives don’t come cheap.

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The characters for luxury 奢侈 reveal the extent to which inequality threads through and often sustains our desire for these objects. 奢 deconstructs to the characters 大者, or “big one”. Likewise, 侈 becomes 人多, or many people. Thus, the literal definition of shechi is big one many people, leaving the question of the verb that links big ones and the many open to interpretation. Is a luxury item something that all want but belongs to the big one? Or perhaps, it takes many to produce a big one?  Continue reading →

cruising old shekou

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Yesterday, a member of Generation 80 took me to the beaches and mountains of Old Shekou, where he played as a child. He remembers swimming off small docks, crabbing on the dike that used separate the Naihai Hotel from the backwash of Delta waters, and biking safely along narrow, dirt roads. Little remains from his childhood. Even the broadcast tower from Broadcast Mountain has been razed and the remaining structures converted to an upscale Cantonese restaurant. Anyway, the area he used to bike, we cruised in his sports car. Impressions, below:

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nasa flicks, again

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Several years ago, I posted a link to the nasa animation of land reclamation in houhai, one of my obsessions. I repost because the flick rewards – in that i can’t stop watching – repeat viewings. I’m also hoping that at some point the movie will be updated to include the past ten years. Also of note, G Burak and Karen C Seto (2008) have analyzed the environmental effects of urbanization, using Shenzhen as their case study. All scary, but unfortunately not unique. Shenzhen is merely a useful baseline for evaluating urbanization as a geological process because thirty years ago the area had not been industrialized. To see how New York has remade the world, for example, we close our eyes and imagine Mannahatta.

imported greenspace, clear skies, and sun

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clear skies have returned and shenzhen shimmers, entices actually. when the horizon opens, walking settles the heart and has me thinking that we need sustainable worlds for no other reason than the joy they bring; smog discourages in all senses of the word.

yesterday, i wandered through some of the universiade greenspace/ coverage to prevent visitors from seeing nearby construction sites and noticed, once again, the extent to which the city and developers have taken to importing foliage to create beautiful spaces. the (malaysian, i believe – if you know please tell me) trees grow here. and yet. bringing this foliage requires uprooting other landscapes, burning fossil fuels, and (in houhai) filling in coastal waters with imported soil. moreover, these high end landscapes do not flourish without extensive care, so that this beauty remains entangled not only in unnecessary, but also unsustainable inequalities.

shenzhen is not the only city importing foliage in order to make a more perfect world. certainly los angeles and las vegas have set the global standard for transplanting eden. and perhaps that’s the point. in our rush to build a perfect world, we fail to realize we’re already there.

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Shenzhen Bay Park

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The rough edges of the Shenzhen Bay Western Area Landfill Zone, or Houhai (Backwaters) are being smoothed into upscale coastal parks. In fact, the construction is so fresh, seashells and oyster shells still surface in the sod. Yesterday, I walked to the Shenzhen Bay Park, which extends from the western edge of Mangrove Park and used to be a small harbor called Dongjiaotou, where goods and building materials were shipped to and from Baoan County and earlier incarnations of Shekou. Importantly, this upgraded coastline functions like so many parks in Shenzhen; the pleasantness of the park literally covers and symbolically blurs what it took to get here; and in this visceral sense, urban planning and landscaping are ideological practices. Impressions of Shenzhen Bay Park, below. Photos of Dongjiaotou Harbor Area and bluer skies from 2003.

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that was then

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Wandered over to the Shenzhen Bay sports stadium, where people took pictures of themselves in front of universiade installations and topiary. To give a sense of what is meant by “Shenzhen speed (深圳速度)”, I am posting pictures of that particular bit of earth, below.

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Importantly and often overlooked, hidden in plain sight behind painted walls and temporary green space, the bit of earth just south of the pageantry has gone to seed, awaiting post-universiade construction.

coastline developments

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Walked several of the new Houhai Land Reclamation Area (map – the big red area) developments this morning — each more luxurious than the last, each laying claim to the shifting coastline:  Golden Sea, Morning Sunlight, Shenzhen Bay #1. Nanshan District aims to build a new Central (中环), modeled on its Hong Kong namesake in the fill. I found a conch shell, two oyster shells, broken glass and a riverwalk that extended the Shahe River through the central area of reclaimed land, but never reached the sea. It’s all become marketable views. . .

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Roadside witness

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Mud-splattered irises, temporary shrines, cracked toilets, and tightly held rows of imported topiary churn up and turn over at constructions’ edge. At dusk, the laws of science and the mind loom inevitable, rather than take their place among other hypotheses about how and what a modern world might be. So yes. Entropy and Freud – we bury the rubble of once coherent stories to reclaim Houhai waters. And yet. Here was once a mangrove boundary. A path to the docks. A boat to the oyster beds. Another world.

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getting ready for the universiade

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Landscaping at the Spring Cocoon is moving forward as Shenzhen gears up to great the world. Today, I was given a neon green sticker that says “Start Here”, which Nanshan Second Foreign Language School students were distributing. I offer seven photos to give a sense of before and after changes at that particular corner, right in front of the Kempinski Hotel and next to the school. #1 The entrance to the stadium, that mascot string of bubbles, which sometimes have faces and speak in cartoons; #2 that corner in June 2003 and then #3 in April 2011; #4 the old coastline at that corner, June 2003 and then #5 in April 2011; #6 a picture of the area taken from Binhai road, looking northwest, and; #7 topiary details.

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behind the cocoon

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Went for a walk today in the reclaimed land behind the cocoon. Behind the construction walls and semi-tropical topiary, discarded objects, trashed seabed, and squatters constitute the anti-Shenzhen, which erupts and disappears with distressing frequency. Signs of life. Despite.

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