Shanghai’s European Suburbs

Rachel — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 19:35:54 +0000

by Rachel Kaufman
published on SmithsonianMag.com

A decade ago, as Shanghai’s population approached 18 million and housing prices skyrocketed, the city decided to act. City planners developed an initiative called “One City, Nine Towns”—satellite suburbs would be built on farmland outside Shanghai to house one million people by 2020.

Each town would create an identity through its internationally inspired architecture and attractions. Outside the themed areas, which make up perhaps 5 percent of the new developments, construction proceeds at a breakneck pace.

Developers thought European themes would be attractive to Shanghai’s new rich, but ten years after launching the project, some themed towns remain empty. Others have barely broken ground; yet others have stalled, half-finished, victims of poor planning or political graft. (Another planned city, Dongtan, which is frequently included with the Nine Towns as the unofficial tenth town, has been delayed indefinitely after Shanghai Communist Party chief Chen Liangyu, who was supporting the effort, was arrested on corruption charges.) All of the towns, says French architect Rémi Ferrand, who studied them as part of a book about the region’s development fit into Shanghai’s landscape in different ways; the city, with its period of British and French occupation has always been regarded as a somewhat foreign place. Building these international “New Towns” is, in a way, “like the continuation of a story.”

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History and Mystery in Richmond’s Church Hill

Rachel — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 20:58:32 +0000

Rachel Kaufman
published in the Washington Post
Sunday, Dec 14 2008
Church Hill is changing. The historical Richmond neighborhood — site of old mansions, cast-iron work on porches, cobbled streets and the church where Patrick Henry made his impassioned cry for liberty or death — deteriorated rapidly in the mid-20th century. “Church Hill was the drug-infested shooting gallery” of Richmond, says John Johnson, president of the Church Hill Association. But in the past few decades, an aggressive historic preservation effort (and tempting tax breaks) have spurred revitalization and development.

A mile east of downtown, the mostly residential neighborhood now has a few cafes and coffee shops sprinkled among its brick Greek Revival, Federal and Italianate homes.

Much of the area’s history involves gruesome topics, such as Civil War medicine (never a pleasant subject) and a murderous grandnephew who offed Virginia’s first signer of the Declaration of Independence. Add to this Edgar Allan Poe’s association with the neighborhood (the writer spent much of his youth in Richmond and entertained a forbidden courtship with a Church Hill girl), and you have the makings of a creepily entertaining stroll.
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Rachel Kaufman, freelance writer » Places

Shanghai’s European Suburbs

History and Mystery in Richmond’s Church Hill