Reimagining Zhang Yuan
Challenging the newfound banality of urban regeneration
Urban regeneration programs are common currency in a city’s planning life. As our lives change, so do the cities that serve as our habitats. Whether prompted by city authorities or initiated from the grassroots, cities constantly regenerate in a tightrope-like exercise that implies swapping old for new without losing an area’s essence.
The scale and speed at which urban regeneration projects are happening in China is second to none. In Shanghai alone there are 44 cultural and historical districts to be preserved and renovated according to the city’s 2035 plan. While China has been swapping old neighborhoods for modern infrastructure for the past three decades, there is one factor that makes things different today. We now have an unprecedented wealth of geo-tagged data telling us how citizens move and use the cities they live in. Collected by the apps we use to share rides, order food and shop online, these new data inputs give urban planners the privilege — and responsibility — to think about regeneration projects in a different — and hopefully more citizen-centered — way.
Zhang Yuan: a (very) brief introduction
Located in heart of Shanghai and in one of the city’s most vibrant neighborhoods, Zhang Yuan has been an urban landmark for decades. In the 1900s it was a convening place for the latest fashion gurus, bustling with exciting magic shows, amusement activities and the newest restaurants appealing to locals and tourists alike. It was a place for gathering, discovery and amusement.
There are only a few historical sites like this one left in Shanghai. The buildings and alleys in Zhang Yuan have been completely preserved, and the numerous juxtaposed houses boast 28 different styles of Shikumen facades. Zhang Yuan is the largest and most complete example of this type of architecture in the city.
In 2009 the JingAn district announced for the first time that Zhang Yuan—that had since become home to over a thousand families — was going to undergo urban regeneration. 10 years later, in May 2019, the area was finally evacuated and the complex banned to visitors and residents.
Zhang Yuan, like the few remaining Shikumen in the city, has its own unique demeanor. Add to that its unpaired location — between Nanjing West Road and Huaihai Middle Road and at the confluence of three metro lines — and you will understand why the city is holding its breath between excitement and anxiety to see how this all unfolds. What will the future hold for this landmark? Will it be yet another shallow and manufactured celebration of heritage like Xintiandi? Or can we expect developers and district authorities to reimagine Zhang Yuan with creativity and good sense?
Is urban regeneration serving our cities?
According to the official plan released in 2018, Zhang Yuan will be renewed to become a “landmark cultural center, combining commercial, tourism, and cultural programs”. The proportion of residential land will be significantly reduced and replaced by commercial real-estate and offices. By the sound of it, Zhang Yuan has a bright future ahead of itself, but the reality is likely to be different.
Past examples of urban regeneration have made the city homogeneous because most developers simply ignore contextual programing. Instead of considering the location’s history and its singular urban and human context, most developers are satisfied with reproducing models that have ‘already worked’, thus punishing residents and visitors with the same brands, the same restaurants and the same activities available everywhere.
Urban regeneration is also making the city more shallow. It is common to hear detractors of these type of projects calling out how they diminish the city’s cultural heritage in the name of consumerism. They are right, but there is more to it. The type of urban renewal we’ve seen over the last two decades in Shanghai has made the city more shallow because it lacks urban logic. What end up happening is traditional forms of life are indirectly expelled by the replacement of first-necessity amenities — think grocery shops, beauty salons, affordable eateries — for entertainment nodes — think fancy cocktail bars, western restaurants and hype nightclubs. The result is disconnected from the city’s real life, and thus shallow.
In the specific case of Zhang Yuan there are additional tensions that need to be sorted out to ensure that the project does indeed serve the city. How to revitalize the old community while retaining the original site characteristics? How to ensure livability while introducing a new lifestyle? How to preserve the Shikumen style to the greatest extent while not excluding commercialization?
Do we need more of the same experiences?
Regardless of a site’s unique history, social fabric or building aesthetic, once an old district is ‘renovated’ it becomes very much the same as a conventional shopping mall. The similarities among major commercial districts in Shanghai are threatening the diversity that makes the city special. To illustrate how homogeneous the city is becoming, we chose to analyze 4 major commercial developments: IAPM, IFC Mall Pudong, Xintiandi and Feng Shen Li. Xintiandi and Feng Shen Li are urban renewal projects that kept their original architectural style. IAPM and IFC are multi-story modern mix-use developments. All of them have been build in the last 15 years and are located in Shanghai’s city center.
We started by analyzing online reviews from users about these four sites.
We looked into social comments on Dianping, the largest restaurant rating platform in China. We sieved through thousands of user generated reviews, and processed the data to highlight the most recurring sentiments for each commercial development.
See how the word-cloud visualization indicated that although Xintiandi and FenShenLi kept their traditional Shikumen aesthetic, they don’t stand out from other shopping malls. ‘Popular’, ‘convenient’, ‘high-class’, ‘luxurious’ , ‘big brands’ are repetitive comments among the four: if one only looks at the word-cloud, it is virtually impossible to tell which comments correspond to which site. This is telling of how merely preserving the original aesthetics is not enough to significantly alter visitor perception.
Do we need more of the same brands?
When further examining the compositions of their tenant mix, the similarities are even more striking.
On Exhibit 2 we used the type and number of restaurants as a proxy to understand the programming diversity of the four sites.
Observe that regardless if the development is new or a renovated historical site, food offerings are very much the same: Coffee & Dessert (41~55%) and Western Dining (23~34%). These two categories alone comprised more than two-third of the entire offering, possibly explaining why people perceive these places as high-end and homogenous.
Do we need more of the same price points?
Besides diverse programming, being price-accessible to a wide audience is also important. We used price-point, meaning how affordable activities are, as a way to examine the four sites. We looked at the average price-per-meal of restaurants in the area, as reported by users online.
On the graph, each dot represents the average price-point of a given restaurant, and the ‘box plot’ indicates the distribution of the data. Notice that, aside from the upper quartile of IAPM, all four sites have very similar median and lower quartile price-points. In other words, aside from IAPM’s fancier restaurants being relatively cheaper, the four sites have very similar price structures.
The system of homogenization created by current urban regeneration practices is self-reinforcing. Homogeneous programming leads to homogeneous price structures, which in turn leads to a predominantly homogeneous demographic visiting city-center commercial developments. In simple words: same shops, same prices, same people, same perception.
What if small brands were the answer?
With similar retail mixes and price structures, how can a commercial district stand out? Independent restaurant owners or retail operators can testify of the difficulty of securing a location in a city-center development. It is common practice for leasing teams to privilege established brands with solid track records. After all, landlords are not incentivized to take the risk of placing bets on younger brands. Turns out that might well be the root cause of the urban homogenization problem.
Leasing teams in city-center developments would do better to think twice before granting a location to a well established and widely available brand. Supporting small businesses is likely to lead to more exposure for their site. To support this argument Exhibit 4 shows all catering businesses in the four commercial districts studied. The horizontal axis shows the count of stores a given brand in Shanghai, this tells us how common the brand is. The vertical axis shows the number of reviews the brand has on Dianping, which tells us how much social-chatter the brand generates online. See how store counts are negatively correlated with the amount of online chatter. In other words, the more commonly available a brand is, the least discussion-worthy it becomes.
It is worth noting that the number of online reviews does not equate to the number of actual visitors. For example, Starbucks, which has many stores but little online discussion, still attracts a considerable amount of visitors. Nevertheless, for a new commercial district that urgently needs to stand out in a cluttered market, the online virality that independent brands generate is not less important than the footfall recognized chain-stores guarantee.
In addition, as shown in the figure above, among highly discussed brands, price-tiers are diverse. If leasing teams were encouraged to select smaller independent businesses as their tenants, they would increase online social-chatter about their property, while at the same time making their site accessible to a wider demographic.
Back to Zhang Yuan. Isn’t this organically scattered, small and compact maze of houses ideal to emphasize individual creativity and exploration? In a context where cultural confidence is driving a newfound Chinese identity, is this historical plot of land a perfect experimental ground for incubating young local brands? 100 years after its most glorious times, can Zhang Yuan become Shanghai’s latest and boldest public space again?
Conclusion
As long as cities continue to be around, the need for urban regeneration will prevail. Urban planners, developers and retailers will continue to share the responsibility of injecting new vitality while preserving cultural and urban heritage. Local authorities will need to continue to protect legacy without being anachronic; to build for the future without hindering our collective past.
In Shanghai, the first wave of urban renewals for commercial use gave birth to the Xintiandi model, successfully creating a framework for the regenerating old residential lanes. However, more than a decade later, the framework remains unchanged. One after another, old alleys are transformed into commercial streets. Leases are granted to the same brands that attract the same type of visitors, making it hard to tell one development from another. Project after project, commercial real estate developers have made Shanghai more homogeneous and shallow than ever before.
Reimagining Zhang Yuan is meant as a discussion starter for developers, planners, retailers and citizens, with the hope that it nudges all of us towards challenging the newfound banality of urban regeneration.
This case study was produced by CVI, a data analytics company with a mission to help retail businesses make better decisions. At CVI, we take a citizen-centered and data-driven approach to build technology tools and to formulate strategies that empower city-shapers. If you are a food service operator, a retailer, a city planner or an urban design enthusiast and are interested in harnessing the power of location intelligence, give us a holler at info@cvi-tech.com.
