Yet Another Suzhou Creek Makeover – Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid… The Suhe Bay Area is the last gasp of a once great Creek

Yet another plan to muck about with Suzhou Creek – and, as usual, much of the plan is based on rather spurious information. Anyone reading an article (such as this in the every loyal Shanghai Daily) about redevelopment in Shanghai that suggests there will be a people-centred or heritage preservation element knows that as soon as the phrase “upmarket riverside community” is invoked we’re in for trouble. Since the 1990s great swathes of the banks of both the northern and southern side of the Creek have been redeveloped. This has involved 1) mass clearances of shikumen (invariably described as sub-standard or slums by the media) and 2) anonymous new gated tower block compounds that restrict access to the bankside. it is perhaps worse upstream, particularly when you get up around the old Jessfield area and what is now Zhongshan Park and beyond, but has been creeping ever eastwards over the years.

Worrying of course is that, for some unknown reason, the project keeps talking about the Suhe “Bay Area. Shanghai has rivers, creeks, brooks (mostly covered over now), lakes (mostly manmade), docks (mostly defunct), wharves (mostly unused) and docks. It does not have a bay (that would be Manila, or San Francisco you’re thinking of). And if it does have a bay that I don’t know about then it’s not halfway up Suzhou Creek!! The article refers to the “shantytown” of the area, another trigger to get you to think it’s all just slum fit for demolition.

In fact the area now being described as Suhe Bay Area comprises about 500,000 square meters of residential area. Actually already a bit less than 500,000 because they included the Sinza area, which is in the process of being pulled down with all its historic past ignored completely (see my post on that here). Consider that number – 500,000sqm. Sounds like a lot? Well consider that just in the last couple of years 920,000 square meters of residential – mostly shikumen from the 1920s – have been destroyed from the Creek as far north as Beijing Lu  and an equal distance inland on the northern side of the river. 300,000 families have already been moved; a further 5,000 families will be moved by summer’s end – presumably their faces don’t fit the planned “upmarket riverside community”?

Of course a few large and stand out buildings will remain – the Embankment Building, former International Post Office, the Sihang Warehouse (now a museum) but the shikumen will probably all go. This of course leaves a totally unbalanced neighbourhood and architectural legacy. The new bridges over the Creek – 18 planned of which at least ten will be for traffic – are a disaster for anyone with plans to limit traffic in central Shanghai – more pollution, more accidents, more gridlock. The Creek doesn’t need anymore bridges.

Over the last quarter century (and a bit more) the banks of Suzhou Creek have been pecked away at and nibbled by property developers. Nothing of any architectural merit has been built along the Creek since the late 1930s. If this nonsense about the Suhe Bay Area is followed through (and nothing in Shanghai’s disastrous legacy of heritage abuse indicates it won’t) that will be the end of Suzhou Creek both as a vibrant central artery of the city and a community. It will become a vast gated community for the wealthy to closet themselves in surrounded by gridlocked traffic.

A sad end to  once great waterway. Now stand back as the European and American architectural firms scramble unseemly for a contract and ignore all of the above….