Cole Roskam is not the first foreign observer to draw a direct link between architecture and political rule in China. Eighteenth-century Europeans explained Chinese imperial strength and stability with reference to its ordered and impressive architecture, while their successors linked Qing stasis and decay to an unchanging and flimsy building style. For Roskam, an architectural historian, late-Qing and republican Shanghai's civic architecture reflected the uncertainties and competing influences of extraterritorial municipal governance. In Improvised City he provides the first monograph – in a crowded field of studies devoted to the city – to interrogate the interplay of Shanghai's governance and architecture.
The scope of the book is impressive, covering the century from the opening of the original British settlement in 1843 to the eve of the Sino-Japanese War in 1937, and encompassing the separate foreign and Chinese jurisdictions that operated across the city. The introduction sets out Roskam's key claims: that “an extraterritorial spatial imagination” took root in Shanghai (p. 9) and that civic buildings and spaces “helped to establish and gradually render normative competing notions of authority and citizenship” (p. 10). Eight substantive chapters, ordered both chronologically and thematically, develop his themes.
The first chapter outlines the development of Shanghai's urban landscape before and immediately after the Opium War blasted it open to foreign trade. Usual British colonial practice – razing the pre-existing architecture to construct a grid of roads with green spaces and racially segregated residential neighbourhoods – was impossible with the continued existence of Qing sovereignty. Instead, merchants built their living environment in lightly regulated freedom. Godowns (warehouses), compounds and verandas dominated early foreign construction, bringing British imperial influences to render life in China more comfortable and familiar for the new settlers.
The second chapter focuses on the transformation wrought by the Small Swords and Taiping Rebellions and the refugees they sent fleeing to Shanghai. Dense lilong housing developed to accommodate large numbers of Chinese residents, whose presence was unanticipated when land was set aside for foreign occupation. New bridges connected the foreign settlements; new streetlamps cast light on their thoroughfares by night. After rebels destroyed the old customs inspectorate, the new Imperial Maritime Customs House combined the Chinese yamen-style courtyard compound design and tiled roofs with Western-influenced two-storey brick-built wings, shuttered windows and masonry chimneys. Here, the argument that the syncretic architecture reflected political reality, as foreign Customs inspectors operated within the Qing bureaucracy, is unanswerable.
Chapter three examines architectural projects of the 1860s that betray varying degrees of confidence in and discomfort with the new configuration of Shanghai. The Jiangnan Arsenal was built to manufacture the technologies in which war had revealed Qing China's comparative weakness. It evinced the only partially realized goal of learning from foreign technicians, employing foreigners but keeping them apart from the Chinese staff. Chinese and foreigners alike were suspicious that the Mixed Court, for legal cases involving Chinese and foreign parties, undermined their interests. The French Concession authorities sought to project equal status with the International Settlement through a grand municipal council hall and consular residence, but both were beset by structural weaknesses. Meanwhile, communities within the International Settlement asserted their importance with projects that bypassed municipal or national authority, like the grand Holy Trinity Church and Masonic Hall.
Chapter four shows how the professionalization of building inspection and architecture served to standardize and segregate the built environment. Taxation on houses and businesses in the International Settlement was determined by whether the architecture was deemed Chinese (supported by wooden columns) or foreign (with load-bearing masonry walls). Buildings had to meet requirements for fire safety, rat prevention and structural integrity. As real estate overtook opium as the main generator of wealth by the 1880s, foreigners became more anxious about living in close proximity with Chinese, in what Roskam vividly terms “viral cosmopolitanism” (p. 114).
Chapter five shows how foreigners and Chinese sought to preserve “face” through grand architectural designs. Following the erection of new French, Japanese and Russian consulates, the US finally secured its own permanent consular building at great expense. The Shanghai Municipal Council opened a new town hall over two square acres to accommodate its extensive activities. The French Concession built a state-of-the-art, but leaky, waterworks. Tearing down the walls around the original Chinese city opened it up to the changes taking place around it. Chapter six shows the next step, as Chinese architects emerged first in Shanghai and began to shape the city. Shenbao published a regular architectural column, and as nationalism grew in the 1920s and 1930s, architects were enjoined to develop a Chinese national style and to address poor Chinese housing for the health of the nation.
Chapter seven focuses on the Greater Shanghai Plan. Nationalist officials seeking to realize Sun Yat-sen's ambition for Shanghai to be the largest port in Asia adopted a blueprint for a radical re-ordering of the city into administrative, business, industrial and residential zones, ordered along a north–south and an east–west axis. A central open public space would boast a pagoda taller than any other building in the city. Between 1933 and 1936, the administration completed a mayor's building, a stadium, a gymnasium, new government departments, a museum and a library. Although foreigners criticized the use of poor building materials and the roads to nowhere, the foreign settlements responded to the developments of their neighbour. In reaction to the Chinese modernist style of the Plan, they pursued European modernist aesthetics in public works projects, with unadorned facades and clean lines projecting an air of efficiency. All believed that Shanghai's modernity encompassed “capable, stable governance” (p. 195).
The final chapter shows how Shanghai's architectural exhibition in 1936 sought to reconcile the internationalism of the modernist style with Chinese nationalism. Architects believed they could deliver modernity in China where the state could not. A short epilogue races through Shanghai's stalled post-war urban reconstruction, communist takeover and attempts to purge the city of its extraterritorial past, and the contemporary legacy of extraterritoriality.
Roskam has exploited a large number of archives in Shanghai, Hong Kong, the US, Britain and France to piece together Shanghai's urban development. The book is liberally illustrated and features pleasing turns of phrase, such as the “tartan-like” overlapping alleys and canals of the old Chinese city (p. 31). It will be of great interest to urban and architectural historians and to China studies specialists seeking a fresh look at Shanghai.
