Face-lift for World Expo transforms our fair city
By Jacob von Bisterfeld |
April 23, 2010, Friday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
IN the past half decennium, the face of Shanghai has been transformed beyond imagination. The phoenix, indeed, has arisen from its ashes.
Tens of thousands of dreary 1960s and 1970s six-story flat-roofed apartment blocklets have been adorned with quaint-looking gable roofs and ditto dormers.
Impenetrable and equally forbidding brick-and-stucco walls, capped with embedded anti-burglar broken glass shards, have been replaced with beautifully designed, elegant wrought-iron fences or were lowered and provided with inverted niches, filled in with attractive relief sculptures, clad with decorative brick veneer or painted in soft and pleasing pastel colors.
The ubiquitous hotchpotch of external air-conditioners has been aligned and individually housed in a uniformly dimensioned cages, thus accomplishing a pleasantly uniform and symmetrical exterior.
Potholes have been filled and hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks have had their surface replaced with attractive decorative anti-slip paving slabs, replete with guiding strips for the blind, and most apartment blocks have been outfitted with gently sloping wheelchair ramps.
Outside clotheslines facing public roads, with their variegated and multicolor undergarments on display, have been removed and the residents in situ have been taught that pajamas are, well, nightwear that is used by most civilized people for sleeping in and not for running around in the street.
Roads have been widened and resurfaced, edged with trees and flowering shrubs.
Problems remain, though. Many shop buildings, but especially gleaming gold and marble office buildings, still have no numbers that can been seen easily from the carriage way. Exasperated visitors can be observed every day, driven nearly insane by the lack of street address numbers.
Cyclists and motorists riding or driving on the wrong side of the road should be punished on sight by specially trained vigilantes. People have near accidents almost every day on Shanghai roads, severely over-pressurizing their blood vessel system and likely shortening their life spans.
Honking car horns within the city should be a severely punishable offence. Flashing headlights should be the only warning sign allowed. Police and ambulances should not use sirens within city limits. They are useless and only add to city stress.
By and large, Shanghai has done a splendid job in sprucing up the city. Let the whole world now marvel at the transformation and experience the best world Expo in living memory.
(The author is a freelancer. Shanghai Daily condensed his article.)
Tens of thousands of dreary 1960s and 1970s six-story flat-roofed apartment blocklets have been adorned with quaint-looking gable roofs and ditto dormers.
Impenetrable and equally forbidding brick-and-stucco walls, capped with embedded anti-burglar broken glass shards, have been replaced with beautifully designed, elegant wrought-iron fences or were lowered and provided with inverted niches, filled in with attractive relief sculptures, clad with decorative brick veneer or painted in soft and pleasing pastel colors.
The ubiquitous hotchpotch of external air-conditioners has been aligned and individually housed in a uniformly dimensioned cages, thus accomplishing a pleasantly uniform and symmetrical exterior.
Potholes have been filled and hundreds of kilometers of sidewalks have had their surface replaced with attractive decorative anti-slip paving slabs, replete with guiding strips for the blind, and most apartment blocks have been outfitted with gently sloping wheelchair ramps.
Outside clotheslines facing public roads, with their variegated and multicolor undergarments on display, have been removed and the residents in situ have been taught that pajamas are, well, nightwear that is used by most civilized people for sleeping in and not for running around in the street.
Roads have been widened and resurfaced, edged with trees and flowering shrubs.
Problems remain, though. Many shop buildings, but especially gleaming gold and marble office buildings, still have no numbers that can been seen easily from the carriage way. Exasperated visitors can be observed every day, driven nearly insane by the lack of street address numbers.
Cyclists and motorists riding or driving on the wrong side of the road should be punished on sight by specially trained vigilantes. People have near accidents almost every day on Shanghai roads, severely over-pressurizing their blood vessel system and likely shortening their life spans.
Honking car horns within the city should be a severely punishable offence. Flashing headlights should be the only warning sign allowed. Police and ambulances should not use sirens within city limits. They are useless and only add to city stress.
By and large, Shanghai has done a splendid job in sprucing up the city. Let the whole world now marvel at the transformation and experience the best world Expo in living memory.
(The author is a freelancer. Shanghai Daily condensed his article.)
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