MONDAY NIGHT LECTURE SERIES

GRAND NARRATIVES/MODEST PROPOSALS

Catastrophes and the Centralization of Urban Planning in Modern China

April 9 @ 6 P.M. | Daniel Family Commons, Usdan University Center

Cities are accidental creations that emerged in response to military threats or commercial opportunities. This lecture explores how energy crises between 1882 and 1953 led to various attempts to centralize urban planning in Shanghai. Most notably, the air raid of February 1950 exposed the vulnerability of Shanghai and made the Communists reluctant to expand the city's generating capacity. This led to the implementation of “peak-load management.” The Shanghai Power Bureau ran its existing generators to full capacity round the clock, while the power bureau chief micro-managed the production schedules of hundreds of factories across the city to evenly spread out production activity over the twenty-four hour clock. The intensity of the micro-management brings to mind Georg Simmel's description of the mental life of the metropolis, in which “punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence.” This “calculability and exactness” laid the groundwork for high-density urban development unique to modern China.