Office of Impression Management¹

(Voice: satirical tour guide)

Hello, China watchers. In an effort to raise your consciousness of China's urban transition, our short tour today will show you some of the ways historical geographies of the present are projected in visions of the future under the supervision of SUPEH. What is SUPEH, you ask? A state-funded, privately managed world-class attraction and global city showcase. SUPEH — the Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall — will be the visual device of our Shanghai tour today, performing China's spectacularly curated instructions for twenty-first-century urban modernity.

In the spirit of intellectual edutainment, we will carry out three critical objectives: to inspire the image-making medium in you by increasing your visual vocabulary at a gross rate of 12 – 15 percent per minute, raise your China-watching attention span to ten minutes, and instruct your eyes in the proper ways to see Shanghai. To optimize the visual distribution of Shanghai's spectacular transformations, we ask that you not waste a minute and allow SUPEH's vision statements to instantly liberate you like a camera FLASH!

The Global City

(Voice: sports broadcaster, fast-paced)

Lights! Camera! Pudong! In a grand tour of southern China, Deng Xiaoping, architect of China's reform, gave his blessing to the special economic zoning of a new Shanghai across the river from the old. From flagging rural hinterland to muscled global city, Pudong would over the span of just one decade leave behind its country life to become a working model of advanced socialist architecture, one that would put Shanghai back on track in world-competitive circles. Global city reports from the Academy and the Businessworld confirm that Shanghai has indeed made the great leap forward, consistently ranking in the top ten cities as a global urban giant and center of superlatives (world's fastest train, world's highest hotel, etc.). As professional China watchers are ready to point out, Shanghai is moving in on Hong Kong's prowess and performing feats of economic athleticism unparalleled by the four Asian Tigers.2 In the cultural arena, Shanghai hopes that by importing design consultants from Paris, it will not only grab media attention and brand its infrastructure projects with the signatures of French cosmopolitanism, but also place-market its colonial-era Parisian cultural legacy, thereby outmaneuvering Paris's monopoly on the historical high-art-and-fashion world-city title.3

The ultimate goal is to beat New York City with an even more highly concentrated financescape and memorable panorama. With the help of international superstar architects and global planning expertise from Singapore to London, Shanghai is giving global city champions a run for their money with a municipal urban planning publicity show of international design standards and architectural models. The city's robust building stats indicate this future. The World Financial Center, designed by famous foreign architects, virtually clung to its first-place world's-tallest-building position for over a decade, flexibly extending its height every time another skyscraper challenged its top notch.⁴ After completion, however, the building will no longer top off at first place. It is a difficult lesson of deadline urbanism: the future arrives too late.⁵ There are reported plans for an even bigger skyscraper to be built near the World Financial Center and Jinmao Tower in Pudong that will sink the competition.⁶

At SUPEH, you can travel "Shanghai within pictures." The whole city is designed for your camera: digital postcards of dazzling destinations, mythic skylines, and duty-free territoriality. Step inside the global city panorama and get your picture taken. Let the visual technology inhabit you, projecting a virtual world of unlimited evidence for global city "presence." Shanghai's surface extends to incorporate unbuilt architectural models, virtual tours, holographic city scenes, and other visual-technological bravado.

Explore the city's future infrastructure. Shanghai has modernized under the "three-port plan," which envisions a holy trinity of ports (airport, seaport, and infoport) as the key to world status, miraculously accessing modernity through the invisible workings of fiber-optic networking. Enter the promotional city scenes and cultivate a sense of cosmopolitan touristic mobility. Televisually travel to the Shanghai 2010 World Expo and visit exotic world cities and tourist venues: San Francisco, Venice, New York, Rome, Paris. Witness dynamic documentations of the future at SUPEH's observation deck, which provides the most flexible and reliably up-to-the-minute future city images. Visit the vast conceptual spaces and experimental urbanisms documented in SUPEH's elaborate guidebook. This novelty installation space commemorates SUPEH's architectural publicity show and features aesthetically pleasing verbal-visual collages of datascapes, diagrams, maps, and performative graphical methods for materializing the model city.

Focus your viewfinders on SUPEH's monumental urban planning miniature, a winning effort to make the global city scene. The spectacular and highly speculative model of a planned twenty-first-century urban modernity presents a collective vision of the future: "Shanghai 2020." Walk the elevated road around the exemplary city for an uplifting experience. Peer in and look for your home or hotel in this abstract spatial laboratory. Or simply stand still and let its insistent call hail you, convince you: "Look at me! Shanghai will be a global city!"