Chongqing
II (Chinese Cities)
Plunging chasms.
Calligraphy of street life.
The all-embracing window walls.
The near absence of solar heights (invisible from the streets
below).
Bits of ‘new-old’ Chong Qing are still on sight. The stone parts,
mainly on the upper levels - from before the war and after… Like Pipashan Houlu - now becoming
gentrified… A typical thriving, balcony-ridden, overladen, multi-faceted
mash-up of detail as life, as the inhabitants‘ goods and possessions, spread
out from the small rooms within and hang in the air, balanced high above the
passing traffic and pedestrians below… High, high, above the tumbling cliffs
and vertiginous drops that suddenly appear as the geography plunges towards
some forgotten black space, lightless and dank, perhaps once a passage to the
river below; the stairwells that were once the arteries of the old wood and
stone city. Such tenements (of which most have disappeared) usually comprise
from 2-5 floors; compared to the 15 floors of the new city (built in the
60/70s, and also disappearing fast); compared to the 50 or 150 of the ‘new new’ city - which now replaces even those structures which
were only built a few decades ago… From the city of wood, to the city of stone:
to the city of concrete and glass… All in the space of a generation. Chongqing
is a 21st century city.
The wooden city; the lower levels, the ‘old-old’ lower depths, near
water; now gone, demolished, flooded, or dismantled… What is there still to be
seen/ The last bits… Where? Around Pipashan; now fast
disappearing, in Matijie or Shancheng
Disan Budao, now preparing
for commercialization… (Gentrification might have been a better model of
development and preservation… there is some of this, and attractive too - but
let’s see how many of the original structures survive…). For then there is the
‘alternative’; ‘new old’, or old-like new… A reconstruction or theme-park. Hongyadong. All new. A ‘Disney-type’ food alley (a previous
genuinely old bit, ‘Shibati’, is now gone). The loss
of a world of wood-based improvisation. The improvisation of brute survival.
Wooden bricolage. Remnants of the ‘old, old’ city. Level on level; climbing up
the steep banks, stone path fringed by wooded dwellings. A grid based on
vertical rising passages, with horizontal side paths – the opposite of new
roads, an inversion based entirely on the horizontal as the main artery, with
the extended curves and tight bends to cater for the rising slope – the
verticals, designed for pedestrian use almost vanished (the new horizontal mode
designed primarily for cars – not particularly pedestrian-friendly, the
intuitive mode of up/down replaced by often massive detours…). Once the
world-over, it was wood that dominated or augmented stone. Class and status,
and role markers… all configured in the combinations of these two basic
materials, Some cities in South-east Asia are still
built this way: but they are also disappearing fast… Living with concrete is
more convenient…
The concrete heights, the city’s ‘solar portion’, the upper level
of the built environment, of city life, visible only from clear space (or
cleared space), through empty space (or emptied space), the unencumbered view
found from the banks of one the rivers that cross at Chong Qing, or from a
bridge (also numerous) or a hill top or (making use of those concrete heights
themselves) the top of the tallest skyscrapers (and some do offer the
possibility of a vista, of a top floor with views, but, of course, here, you
must,… ‘pay to view’…). Or from the empty space above a hole in the ground
where once a building stood, like a tooth removed, leaving a gap through which
a view may be glimpsed. But a gap, a hole, soon to be ‘filled’.
So few solar decors, so hard to see. Yet they must be there. The
skyline as seen from the ground or from a window is an experience of limited
extension, not normally an overall or broad view; windows offer the opposite
curtain wall and only rarely, usually requiring that one is very high up and
not hemmed in by yet taller buildings, to see at length, to see above, to see
architecture touch the sky, to see earth touch sky: the tops, the top level,
the solar portion of Chong Qing. Even the roads, as not built to a grid-design,
like most Chinese or most modern cities, curving (like Rome) around the
contours of the hills on which it is built, offer no extended vista, no
stretched-out vanishing points, no receding horizon. A short view along to the
next bend. But when you ascend, to one of the open heights, one of the
privileged places of extended vision… then more than a glimpse is caught of the
hitherto invisible heights… The concrete forest and its surrounding ‘valley’,
the sudden surprising absence of structures -with a glimpse of the shinning
river below- and, on the horizon, the encircling mountains. And from above it
is surprising to see how many of the tallest buildings have heliports, a
circular disk sitting on top of the building; but logical if you consider the
logistics of accidents and fires in a multi-storey
tower… but less decorated on top that one might expect; because unseen…
Buildings with a base that is the most decorated level… Places of shopping and
eating - and outside, the living, moving strip of everyday life…
Bridges and the openness of rivers and the nearby heights (‘mountains
and waters’) as ‘the space above water’, the place offering views of a
breathtaking openness, to completely contrast with the enclosedness
of the narrow streets and their towering wall-malls, the shopfronts and the
rising dwellings above them. So the bridges and hills
are making up for the lack of squares… (The pedestrianized centre
acts as a kind of open public space, but there are no views, life as lived
within the canyon, at the bottom of the valley, walled in… Otherwise there are
the parks (Pippashan, Erling)
and the open space between the modern forms of the Three Gorges Museum and the
traditional design of the Renmin Dalitang (but due to
its geography, a heat bowl…).
And the subway/light overland railway; one of the best places for a
view of the city’s valleys, the river far below and the human habitat that
sprouts like a multi-towered variegated concrete coral on its banks, towering
above. At night illuminated.
And in this lies the difference of Chong Qing: lying just beyond
the streets and shoppers, the fare of any modern city; the vertigo of vertical
ascent and descent, the opening up onto a sunlit, river-bottomed, chasm.
Copyright Peter Nesteruk, 2019