Thames Town in Songjiang New City, Shanghai.
While creating a semblance of traditional European urbanism, Thames Town is only one enormous block of an entire new city of enormous developments, most in the Chinese style of giant aligned slabs. Far from creating a “new” urbanism, this development needs the enormous scale of modern Chinese urbanism to exist.
Down the canal from Thames Town’s lake, traditional Chinese organic urbanism persists, waiting to be rediscovered and adapted to the modern age and the enormous scale it requires.
Updated:
This great CBS News video report of the construction of Thames Town showed up in the WordPress automagically related links. (Thank you WordPress!) It shows the quality of the construction contrasted with the disappointment the Chinese feel about the social life of these environments. Sprawl alienation is truly a universal phenomenon.
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[...] Thames Town is part of Songjiang New City, in Shanghai, China. Modeled on traditional urbanism, it’s “only one enormous block of an entire new city of enormous developments, most in the Chinese style of giant aligned slabs…” [Link] [...]
[...] some sunshine. Scouser, that is brutally difficult… but thanks to my bionic eye, I found it here at Thames Town in Shanghai, [...]