Tag Archives: Shanghai

A fossilized Shanghai Tower

Posted on by

I have read numerous versions of how modern civilization might appear in the future archaeological record. However, I liked this particular exploration of what Shanghai Tower, a 2,000 foot structure, might become over millions of years.

Photo by Manuel Joseph on Pexels.com

Almost immediately, water making its way down to the lowest levels it will react with the calcareous material in concrete, to form cathelmites – stalactite- and stalagmite-like growths that form in human-made environments. These will continue to grow for thousands of years, transforming the shopping mall into something akin to a horror movie set. If humanity is still around, most things of value will have been stripped out before the Tower is completely abandoned, but perhaps not everything. Aluminium in the ventilation system, stainless steel in the food court – maybe even a few cars in the garage levels will be left to perform remarkable transformations…

The story continues even deeper underground. The entire Shanghai Tower sits on top of a concrete raft, one metre thick and covering nearly 9,000 sq m (97,000 sq ft). Beneath this are 955 concrete-and-steel piles, each a metre in diameter, driven up to 86m (282ft) deep into soft ground. After several million years, as the weight of the sea water and sediment warps the subterranean layers beyond recognition, some of the foundation piles will fracture, twisting within compacting mudrock formations like the fossil roots of an immense, long-vanished tree.

As millions of years stretch into tens of millions, the transformations come more slowly. Rare earth minerals, leached from discarded mobile phones and other electronic devices, may begin to form secondary mineral crystals. Glass from windshields and shop windows will devitrify, darkening just as obsidian does after long burial. By now, the entire city is compressed to a layer perhaps only a few metres thick in the strata. All that is left of Shanghai Tower is a geological anomaly studded with the fossil outlines of chopsticks, chairs, sim cards, and hair clips.

All of this will be deeply buried, in some cases thousands of metres down. But geology never stands still. After around one hundred million years, as new mountain ranges begin to form, the layer of compacted rubble that was once Shanghai Tower may be pushed upwards, and revealed. 

A tower is not just a modern landfill or a single-family home; it is a monument to modern society in a similar way to the massive temples of past civilizations.

The idea that the tower would emerge again as part of a new mountain range is an interesting one. The assumption in a lot of these modern fossil/future archeology writings is that modern civilization will mostly disappear from the Earth’s surface. Many science fiction writings have the same idea: all that modern humans prize in the Industrial Revolution and urbanization will fade away just as everything else has in the past. Certainly, modern structures and infrastructure will only last for so long. What exactly is the predicted lifespan of a major skyscraper, let alone a single-family home or a big box store? Or, all of it will go away due to disaster, war, or the accumulation of garbage and self-induced environmental catastrophe.

Given how we dig and reconstruct the past, I still find it interesting to ponder that someone might come along and dig down and discover a major city that looks abandoned. What was life like there? Why did the city disappear? This was a global city?

China defines “big city disease”

Posted on by

In announcing plans for Shanghai, China also defined “big city disease”:

China’s financial hub of Shanghai will limit its population to 25 million people by 2035 as part of a quest to manage “big city disease”, the cabinet has said…

State media has defined “big city disease” as arising when a megacity becomes plagued with environmental pollution, traffic congestion and a shortage of public services, including education and medical care.

Many of China’s biggest cities also face surging house prices, stirring fears of a property bubble.

This leads to two thoughts:

  1. If China, a country devoted to urbanization, thinks this is the population limit for big cities, does this mean other industrialized countries will follow suit?
  2. It would be interesting to hear urban experts weigh on regarding how big they think major cities can get. Twenty-five million people is quite a few but can some of the issues Chinese officials raise be ameliorated by good planning or technological advances?

Perhaps one of the key features of major global cities of the future will be a limited population size in order to have a certain quality of life. In contrast, major cities that are not as important may grow to unheard of sizes with all sorts of symptoms of “big city disease.”

In the movie Her, futuristic Los Angeles looks like Shanghai

Posted on by

In recently watching the movie Her, I was intrigued to see the futuristic Los Angeles. What exactly does it look like? Shanghai, as the film was filmed in LA and there. Here is what I noticed in the film:

1. There are a number of portrayals of Los Angeles. For example, the Walt Disney Concert Hall is featured in several scenes. One time the main character walks past the Hall and another scene takes places on an outside terrace with a lotus flower fountain on an upper level of the hall. Here is what the fountain looks like:

WaltDisneyConcertHallFountain

See an exterior shot of the building in an earlier post. This building fits well with a futuristic image with its metal panel exterior and unusual lines.

2. There are a number of shots of a city skyline, particularly from the main character’s apartment. However, this view usually has a lot more tall buildings than Los Angeles actually has. While Los Angeles has a downtown as well as an outcropping of taller buildings by Beverly Hills, there were clearly too many to be LA. At the same time, there were also shots featuring the One Wilshire building. So the film plays loose with the skyline shots but they are often Shanghai.

3. There are a number of scenes in public spaces, particularly nice plazas and walkways that connect large buildings. I haven’t explored all of LA but I know these are limited in the downtown so there seemed to be too many.

4. There is a scene early in the movie featuring a subway/train map in the background and while the base map is of Los Angeles, it clearly has too many mass transit routes to match today’s LA.

5. Others images of mass transit don’t look like LA including a bullet train and elevated mass transit lines.

6. Some of the shots from apartments or the tops of buildings show more boulevards than streets or highways.

7. Some of the outdoor scenes have street signs that look more Asian in design as well as more Asian pedestrians (though LA has a large Asian population).

Los Angeles was once viewed as the future of American cities: sprawling, encompassing a broad range of terrains from beaches to hills, and glamorous locations. However, American filmmakers may now be looking to rapidly growing Chinese cities for what the future holds.

Seeing China’s growth in two pictures of Shanghai

Posted on by

Urban growth and building can occur at a very quick pace. The population growth and building in Chicago in the late 1800s was tremendous. BusinessInsider has two pictures that show the rapid construction that took place in one part of Shanghai between 1990 and 2010.

The pictures are fascinating in themselves. But an explanation of exactly what happened and how it happened would be even better.

h/t The Infrastructurist