Sequestered Simulacra

The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth--it is the truth which conceals that there is none.
The simulacrum is true.

-Jean Baudrillard

Xintiandi is yet another simulacrum in the city of simulacra that is Shanghai. Shanghai itself is an attempt to create the ultimate simulation- the notion of the free city, a democratic metropolis. Everything, the pudong area , the bund, are carefully crafted and managed simulations based on the greatest of cities as we know them.

Xintiandi, or the french quarter, was a derelict colonial part of the old Shanghai. The shikumen houses and their alleyways were carefully restored and converted into the vibrant shopping and recreation district that it is today, by a single architectural firm ( Wood +Zapata) commisioned by a single developer. It was so successful, that the architectural firm has become synonymous with the project in China, and is inundated with projects to 'xintiandi' entire city districts. 'To Xintiandi' is now a verb in china.

Xintiandi is an image of multiplicity, a multiplicity of spaces, of temporalities and histories, yet everything about it is singular. It is a public space, carefully designed to mimic the organic form of European cityscapes, recreated in the heart of the orient.

In a world where public space is highly mediated and controlled, and consumed on a large scale, it increasingly becomes a simulacrum, referring to a reality that never was. An entire spatial history and heritage is fabricated by singular architectural gestures.

As urban lifestyles are homogenised, public spaces in countries like China or India become caricatures of Western city squares and streets, or even American Malls.

But surprisingly, even this appropriation of western concepts of space and place happens differently in Totallitarian China and Independent India.

Ironically, In Communist China, where a freedom of indiscriminate consumption seeks to compenseate for a lack of freedom for democratic expression, the distinction between the city and the simulacrum is blurred.

In a free country like India, these spaces tend to be more controlled, more distinct from the city with its lack of order and a plethora of democratic expressions in the form of protests and riots.

The UB City Mall in Bangalore, abruptly demarcates a highly sanitised zone within which it re-creates, among other things, a Venetian Pallazo, a urbane food court and an amphitheater. A sequestered Island of metropolitan urbanity in the land of the free...

The Police state and the moral policing state seem to generate two very different types of contemporary urban space

In China, these spaces seek to become the city, sometimes successfully, the city becomes a simulacrum, whereas in India, these spaces are escapes from the city, physically distinct from their surroundings. Thus, an unlikely but influential architectural parameter for the design of public spaces is the repressive nature of state power, or the lack of it.

The totalitarian regime in china stifles any protests and dissent, and allows for an incongruously democratic public space to proliferate in the sea of economic and social inequalities that it actually is. Here, on the other hand, the transparency of the democracy doesnt allow for such purely visual blurs and the harsh reality of the divided social space is brought home by a fragmented physical reality. Urban space in our country will become blurred only as a more inclusive growth takes place and that is a more viable though difficult model in the long run than the cheap chinese import version.