How does one measure and observe urban renewal? To be sure, lots of measures exist. Tracking the amount of spending on infrastructure. Totaling the number of residential developments constructed. Measuring the phsyical expansion of a city in terms of area. Tracking the number of subway lines, elevated highways, etc. that are built over the years. These are all reasonble means of tracking urban renewal. However, I think they really fail to convey what the transformation of a cityscape FEELS like. What it LOOKS like. Sure, you may get the macro-level, big picture view of the process, but I think it misses the very human impact these changes carry. I have my own metrics, devised mostly as a joke (e.g., tracking a city's urban redevelopment progress by monitoring the number of Starbucks Coffee shops the city has. Jinan, by the way, has gone from 0 to 7 or 8 by my count since 2009), but these measures are simply proxies. They don't really convey how world altering or disorienting the transformation of city spaces may seem in person.
So, what about tracking this process qualitatively? How could a dedicated social scientist like your faithful author do this? It's a difficult task, in part because cities in China change so quickly that tracking all the changes may prove difficult to the observer. Especially when taken as a whole, these changes may seem too numerous to count. Instead of trying to present a totalistic picture of Jinan's changes since I first arrived in 2009, I thought a narrow focus might help. An old adage says that a picture is worth a thousand words, and so what better way to track the changes in the Spring City than visually? Let's take a look, shall we?
A good place to start might be the view of the city from atop the Liberation Tower Monument on HeiHuQuan Road. The view looks straight ath the heart of Jinan's downtown, and the changes in the past five years are evident.
We begin in 2009:
And in 2013:
And finally in 2015:
The rapid expansion of a shopping district to the North of the road (the right side of these photos) is really jarring. The empty lot that stood behind a corrugated barrier in 2009 is filled with new "old" builings (the kind that I referred to as shanzhai antiquity in an earlier post).
So what exactly is this new development? Here's a look at the Kuan Hou Li pedestrian shopping street that has sprung up seemingly out of nowhere in the last 2 years.
As in many of China's large cities, the area creates a fascimile of traditional Chinese culture. The new buildings that spring up are meant to evoke an earlier time: the Ming Dynasty, perhaps. Or maybe it's the late Qing Dynasty? Or possibly the Repulican Period? The date is never certain (though lots of Jinan's truly old structures date to the early 1900s when the Germans administered a large chunk of the city as a concession for the Boxer Rebellion). Adding to this feeling of a miscellaneous past, pictures of models in an idealized old-timey setting cover over the windows still unoccupied storefronts (of which there are a few), and here and there, photos of the real, historical Jinan from the '20s and '30s appear on the walls.
Though it's not just neo-antiquity that's sprung up here. There's nothing old about the glittering Shimao Plaza that also inhabits this space. It's one of at least 4 or 5 enormous shopping malls that have emerged in the city over the last five years. Western mulitnational corporate brands have become more prevasive here over the last five years. Since 2009 (when KFC, McDonald's and WalMart were pretty much the only American corporations in town) Jinan has welcomed a host of foreign companies: Burger King, GAP, Papa John's, Dairy Queen, Starbucks, Costa Coffee, Pizza Hut, Hagen Daas, and many others. This is to say nothing of luxury brands: Gucci, Cartier, Longines, etc. They're all here.
The space isn't filled yet. Lots of open storefronts invite would-be tennants. While the develoment is new, and still mostly unfinished, it shows no sign of slowing. Work continues on dozens more structures like these, and cranes still loom over the whole neighborhood.
But as I've discussed before, urban renewal often involves more than merely building up new spaces. It also means retrofitting or renovating and repurposing old ones. The narrow alleyways of "Old Jinan" exhibit this change quite clearly. The city preserved the neigbhorhood's core of old houses with a good deal of success. But, here, too, transformations occur. Here's a look at the changes to one small stretch of the area where a stream runs forth from one of the city's famous natural artesian springs.
Here's Old Jinan in early 2010, when the street was lined with small, outdoor barbecue stands and restaurants serving cheap draft beer, and homestlye dishes (jiachang cai, 家常菜):
The area was primarily a residential neighborhood, and it remains so. People still wash their clothes in the springs here.
Here's the neighborhood in 2013, looking a little less cluttered, and a little more tidy:
And, finally, we arrive in 2015 where the low tables of local restaurants that sold barbecue and cheap beer have been swapped for the more gentile, en plein air cafe style seating for a number of little coffee shops and boutique cafes:
Throughout Old Jinan, the buildings are being transformed, though not structurally. These former residences or local family run restaurants are now becoming boutique stores, tea shops, coffee houses, or places to buy vintage clothes, like the store pictured below. In the back alleys of Old Jinan, several former courtyards now function as high end courtyard restaurants, advertising themselves as private kitchens specializing in traditional Shandong Cuisine.
Further, developers are turning an eye to this area, as well. In the recently restored Confucian temple at the heart of the neighborhood, a model lays out a plan for a newly reconstructed Old Jinan.
Elsewhere in the city, the transformation of cityscapes unfolds in a much less glamorous, much less commercial way. To the west of the city square, near the train station, the change in cityscape doesn't bring high-end tourist districts or shopping malls. Instead, the city's more dilpidated warrens of single story homes gives way to new high-rise apartments. Take, for example, the criss-crossing alleys behind my old neighborhood on Dikou Lu.
In early 2010, run-down houses lined the narrow alleys, as did small convenience stores, repair shops, and start-up factories (outside my neighborhood gates, one family mass-produced metal window grating in a space no bigger than a garage). The area looked like this:
By the time of my first return to Jinan in 2013, I found the entry-way to these narrow alleys blocked off by high walls a sure sign of coming changes.
Upon my return in 2015, the process of remaking the neighborhood appears well underway. The streets are wider, straighter. The houses are gone.
In their place, rubble.
And a forest of high-rises.
In places like these, the transformation of cities may be the most disorienting. Unlike some of the developments elsewhere in the city, the construction adjacent to DiKou Lu essentially wipes the slate clean and redraws the entire landscape from scratch. Wandering amongst the towers, scampering over the piles of dirt that sometimes blocked the way forward, I felt completely lost. None of the coordinates in my mental map of this place that I used to live just next door to matched anything I saw in reality. The maze of a neighborhood that I once memorized and meandered through entirey dissappared. And in its place a maze of a different kind: row after row of identicial high-rise buildings.
Even the most inconic of spaces sometimes goes through transformation as well. Take, for instance QuanCheng Square, at the heart of Jinan, home to the city's weird, wonderful monument to the springs, known to Jinan's expats as "The Blue Thing." The Blue Thing is such a strange and central part of Jinan that it was featured on the custom mugs that Starbucks produced for its grand opening in the city in the fall of 2010. It's easily the most recognizable landmark in the city.
Here is The Blue Thing in the midst of Jinan's modest skyline in the fall of 2009:
By 2013, construction began on Jinan's first supertall skyscraper, the Puli Greenland Tower.
Now, in 2015, it makes an unmistakable impression:
At the base of this enormous new building, the Greenland Group (who are responsible for all this construction) hope to host more luxury retail outlets and nice restaurants.
A scale model inside the development's HQ lays out the plan clearly. Familiar names appear on the signs of the stores in the model: Lanvin, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Versace.
And, of course, some tenants have already moved in.
The Greenland Center sits directly across the street from Jinan's Hui Quarter. More than once, I've heard residents remark that, soon, the neighborhood would also be cleared away for a similar development. Nothing concrete that I've found lends any proof to these rumblings, but it's not difficult to see why the claims are believable. With all of the construction happening nearby at Kuan Hou Li on one end, and the Greenland Center on the other, it feels like only a matter of time until construction begins in the Hui Quarter as well. Some empty lots adjacent to the mosque are already cleared. Whether or not they become development sites is anyone's guess.
So, what to make of all this change? Over the last five years urban renewal developed Jinan in a way that made it more cosmopolitan, and revitalized the city's infrastructure and aging residential core. In interviews, residents seem to both appreciate and lament this fact. One friend, a lifelong Jinanese resident expressed pleasure in the city's economic growth, but also bemoaned the city's lack of character.
"Yes, we built a lot of new shopping malls, like Parc 66," she said, " but every big city in China has those. What does Jinan have that's really unique?"
She went on to add "I travel a lot, and I always look for new landmarks to visit. But when I try to convince friends to come to Jinan, I have trouble of thinking up things for them to do here. Besides the springs, what does Jinan really have that's special? Not much."
Another friend in her late 20s, who grew up in west Jinan, in what was at the time a farm community expressed a real sense of nostalgia for the community of her youth. "A lot of people my age really miss that era," she remarked. " Now things may be more convenient, but we just don't have the same sense of community as we used to."
Jinan's situation isn't unique. In fact, lots of cities in China currently find themselves in similar spots. How does the city grow and develop while still preserving a sense of itself? Like Jinanese residents, the people living throughout urban China must grapple with this question. This, to me, is the most important aspect of urban renewal to observe, and like all incremental change, it must be noted slowly, piece by piece until the whole puzzle starts to come together.