August 5, 2004

<< It's Raining Brains | And We're Off... >>

‘It Ate Its Children’ (or) I Love Blogs

More and more these days, I am enjoying the Web as a window into the passions and pursuits of smart professionals and scholars.

Via Space and Culture, I found this great post on a bumpin’ blog called City of Sound. It’s titled “Shanghai Diary #1,” and here’s the setup:

My friend and ex-boss at Manchester Metropolitan University, Dr. Justin O’Connor, is spending a very hot summer in Shanghai. I, like most of those obsessed with modern cities, am fascinated by Shanghai - the idea of Shanghai, for I’ve never witnessed the reality (whatever that is) - so I asked him whether he fancied writing some impressions of his visit there for this blog.

Turns out he did.

O’Connor sets the scene in Shanghai, and then ramps up to this:

I give a lecture on Manchester - shock city - trying to evoke the newness of the city, of its unprecedented growth, its raw energy, the brutal but exhilarating power of its modernisation. Because it ate its children, it sucked them into its furnace stomach from farther and farther afield. Shanghai is doing this now. The architects are exhilarated, but it’s fuelled by cheap migrant labour. Labour is cheap. […]

Here’s a city that everybody says is ‘exciting’ because it’s being built on a huge scale, aiming to become Asia’s (yes, including Japan) economic and financial capital. Already Hong Kong is feeling slightly less exciting. It is far more powerful financially – but it feels like a place that has had its time. But apart from the architects - always slaves to power and money - what’s exciting other than a vicarious reliving of the West’s own innocently brutal days of early industrialisation and modernisation. That’s a difficult one.

That’s the end of “Shanghai Diary #1,” but there are two more: #2 and #3. These both have less macro stuff and more street-level reportage — plus there’s some neat history notes and photos of the city.

Thanks to City of Sound’s Dan Hill for scoring these dispatches. Every blogger ought to get his or her smart friend to write in every once in a while.