Shanghai — It is probably the world's biggest collection of post-modernist skyscrapers: Shanghai's vast skyline of more than 4,500 towers, built almost entirely during the economic boom of the past 15 years.
Soon, the skyline will be even more crowded. This week Shanghai launched construction of what will be the world's tallest building, a 492-metre, 101-storey tower with a bizarre "moon gate" hole in the middle.
But there are signs that Shanghai's love affair with the skyscraper is souring. The people of China's richest city are finally rebelling against years of profit-hungry development and heedless growth.
In what could be the cutting edge of an Asian urban trend, civic leaders are demanding more green space, more historical preservation, more human-scale buildings and fewer dense city blocks of sun-blocking monstrosities.
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Disenchantment with the edifice complex is mounting. "The skyline of the whole city is in confusion," said Zheng Shiling, an influential architect and planner who heads the urban space committee at Shanghai's planning commission.
"There are too many tall buildings. Profit-chasing by developers has destroyed the urban space. The competition for higher and higher buildings has created a dinosaur city, with more and more gigantic buildings, and it's not on a human scale. It's not good for the life of ordinary people."
Shanghai still harbours a driving ambition to become one of the world's leading financial centres, in the same league as New York and London. Already it is on the verge of eclipsing Hong Kong as China's most dynamic city. Its economy grew by 11 per cent last year.
Among the city's latest coups: capturing the World Expo for 2010 and the Special Olympics for 2007, winning a place on the Formula One auto-racing circuit next year, luring a Universal Studios theme park, which is slated to open in 2006, building the world's first high-speed magnetic-levitation train and the world's tallest hotel, and announcing plans for the world's tallest building, the biggest container port, the longest steel-arch bridge and even the biggest Ferris wheel.
In many ways, it is a revival of the boom of the early 20th century, when Shanghai, known as the Paris of the East, was one of the world's fastest-growing cities, filled with beautiful, new Art Deco hotels and banking towers along the Bund, the city's famed riverfront.
But the city's planners admit they made mistakes in the pell-mell construction boom that reinvigorated this city of 17 million people in the 1990s. In the space of just 10 years, more than 1.5 million low-income people were forced out of the city centre to make room for massive developments for the wealthy.
The result is sterile, oppressive and haphazard. Now the city is struggling to define its greatness in a kinder and gentler way.
There was virtually no urban planning in the country's biggest city during the past decade, even though China is ostensibly a centrally planned Communist country. People joked that the urban planning bureau was actually a "survey bureau" whose only task was to measure the newly completed towers.
Nobody seemed to care that Shanghai was blindly copying Western architectural trends, producing vast numbers of "landmark" skyscrapers with kitschy "hats" on top, leaving the city littered with financial districts that became dead zones at night.
"In the 1990s the whole country was keen to adopt something new, but it had no idea what, as long as it was new," Mr. Zheng said. "The city didn't pay much attention to planning. Now there is more thinking."
Shanghai's recently completed Xintiandi neighbourhood, a cluster of boutiques and restaurants built behind the preserved facades of beautiful brick buildings from the 1920s, has emerged as the symbol of the new philosophy of historical conservation and street-level development. It has garnered praise and profits for its developer, inspiring similar plans in many other Chinese cities.
In the city's planning museum, a huge room is filled with a gigantic model of what the city could look like in 2020. Even the model itself is touted as the world's biggest, and workers crawl across it every few days to add new towers to the skyline. But now, for the first time, vast swaths of green space and parks have been added to the model.
The museum promises that Shanghai will triple its public green space from 3.6 square metres per inhabitant today to a target of more than 10 square metres per resident by 2020. The city's new goal is to create "a harmonious ecological environment for human beings, to establish a 21st-century international metropolis," the museum declares.
While most residents are proud of the city's economic boom, they are worried by the traffic jams, the overcrowded streets and the lack of sunshine in their homes as new skyscrapers overshadow the older ones. "Even buildings that are only a few years old are now surrounded by taller buildings," complained Lin Yunzhu, a 38-year-old housewife.
The backlash against the skyscrapers is growing stronger. Chinese officials have warned that the towers are becoming an extravagant and faddish excess, diverting money from social needs. Western critics have described the skyscrapers as a cultural failure, an alien style imposed on a Chinese city.
To curb and soften the excess growth, Shanghai has introduced new rules to lower the height of new buildings and density of neighbourhoods, to expand the green space and to preserve historical buildings. Even this, however, has been flawed as developers are now evicting residents and demolishing historical buildings to make room for parkland.
"We've learned a lot from the past 10 years," Mr. Zheng said. "We want to be world-class in urban construction and design. But we still have a way to go."