Toxico Cultura

“Paris”

“Germany”

“Holland”

“Sweden”

.

Everyone’s got a preconceived idea about what a country is like before actually going there. It is an imaginative structure conditioned by anything we have seen and or heard about the place we are about to visit for the first time. Such impressions acquire a different character when they come face to face with reality; sometimes they differ greatly from our preconceived notions and sometimes not.

Before heading to China I indulged in some spontaneous brainstorming and I came up with a number of concepts which juxtapose opposing ideologies, concepts and social constructs such as tradition/modernity, communism/capitalism, East/West, authentic/fake, poverty/wealth, repression/freedom, and so on. Surprisingly, I came across all of the concepts that I had imagined before getting to China, although the actual ones had the genuine taste of reality. What might strike westerners at first sight in Chinese cities are the ideas of development and expansion according to Chinese parameters. The basis for its rapid development is the enormous pool of labour that, when well organized, can reach such a speed that it seems sometimes impossible to sustain. There are many contrasts within the futuristic urban landscape of Shanghai. My first impressions found incongruity by looking up to the sky and down to the earth. By looking up I would see impersonality, a skyline overloaded with concrete and glass and an exaggerated downtown that I associated more with the American urban model. However when I would look down at street level, at the ins and outs of those towers, I would see, smell and feel the stereotypical China I was expecting to encounter.

Within this context of contrasts of Chinese identity and global trends I discovered an urban project called “One City, nine towns”. The goal of this project, launched in 2004, is to create nine suburbs around Shanghai imitating the architectural style of different countries of the world. The idea is to relieve the city’s problem of overpopulation by building these western-themed new towns with an estimated capacity of one million people by 2020 all together. Most of them are still under construction, but so far people can already live in a Shanghai suburb that looks like England, Sweden, Holland, Spain, Italy or Germany.

However the trend nowadays goes further than just spending a day off in an amusement park. It is about making a life in an artificial town. Wandering around “Paris” recently I met three eleven or twelve-year-olds skating in their neighbourhood. I asked them if they knew what Paris was. They said, “Paris? I don’t know.”

Pablo Conejo

More of his photographs here

(Gracias Tiranito)