One Sunday afternoon I decide, for no apparent reason, to get out of the vehicle. I do not know why I had never thought before about the possibility of leaving the road and set foot on the land of nobody. I am always in a rush, I guess. We usually go from point A to point B, by car or high speed train, from a departure time to an arrival time and with a speed limitation (or record, in the case of the speed train). But what's on the other side of the window, between A and B?
Towers of concrete and empty windows far away. Who lives there? It is a depressing landscape, at least as seen from the train's high speed. The railway and the highway seem to be the only reasons for these forest of progress to be there. I try to find a factory nearby, a task for the residents of this ghost town, but I see nothing. If only it were a self-sufficient community, but it is a drifting boat, pulled by the big infrastructures. The image of the boat brings to my mind Foucault's heterotopia, those Other Spaces:
"...after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place,that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over tothe infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates."
I imagine myself getting off that suburban train, as Francisco Umbral in A Mortal Spring and writing:
"A block of silence between you and me, a bar of silence around which the intermittent and pitted conversations of the Metro jumped, till to the final station, or that one where you were getting off, with a slight turn of the profile, that I do not know if it was an invitation or a farewell, but I was behind you and we exited to a place with retirees, to a large neighborhood populated with many trucks and many wine barrels scrapped in the middle of the street. It was your neighborhood, and how difficult breaking the steel of silence that had been forged between us, after seeing you climb the stairs of the Metro with gazelle's hurry, and your legs of walking and dancing, and a suburban paradise, with orchards and so on."
But I would not be possible for me to walk after her, the doors of the station doesn't open to a suburban paradise but to a moor. I'd have to go up to the floor X of the block X , connect to Tinder, and try to hunt in the cyberspace. It's said that people have less sex now than before, when we all seem to want it more (and more complexly), and with many more resources than before. It is as going to a war with drones, the epic is missing. Behind every window there is someone masturbating while thinking of the silhouette hiding behind one of the other distant windows. A ghost.
I would like to wander the invisible guts of those skeletons of concrete. Go up the fire stairs with no handrail or green emergency light, and hear the crackle of abandonment under my shoes. Peek into the abyss of the elevator shaft without elevator and the windows without glass, and shout at the absurdity that have created such an atrocity: the politician, the developer, the builder, the architects, me myself, the creator of AutoCAD, the owner of the concrete factory. China consumed over three years (2008-2011) almost twice as much concrete as United States consumed throughout the whole twentieth century, which was not a little deal.
I wouldn't shout at the neighbors though, mainly because there are none, and if any, I think they had no other choice left rather than feeding the ghost forest with their savings and their saving's savings. The buildings look like a bar graph, where all the figures are equal, all pretty high, everything is positive, all the same and the same color and with the only option of losing at some point. Fear.
Since when is this shipyard here? Workers are probably roaming in search of the replacement apartment they will get due to the expropriation of their land. And their children, white shirt and a larger phone than their heads, working in the multiple real estate offices that will try to sell the leaves of the ghost forest. Seem like vendors of fantastic things, like Melquiades. And what about the boat captains? Perhaps, they are now high-speed train machinists, or captains of the drifting boats that represent all those new condominiums, aiming the metropolis, the mainland that will absorb them. The new super metropolitan plan for Beijing is to collect ties with Tianjing and to reach 100 million inhabitants. Meanwhile, these boats await their launch in the middle of nowhere.
People call it the real estate bubble. But these bubbles do not explode, do not make any noise, their silent blast only insulates us more and more from each other. The financial crisis that hit, especially, the western economy in 2007, arose from a real estate crisis, a crisis that was spawned mainly in bank branches. The ripple effect of this crisis, made that China, having lost about 30 million jobs by the plummeting of their exports, began to build these concrete bubbles all over the country.
Recently, Olafur Eliasson exhibited at Shanghai Long Museum some of his works in a brilliant exhibition. One of the installations was made up of bubbles and its title was "Happiness". I would like to conclude this post with this view, that could be the landscape of a future city made of transparent bubbles.
*The main sources of information for this post are: the lecture of Michel Foucault Des Autres Spaces; multiple lectures of David Harvey about the crisis of capitalist urban planning; the book A Mortal Spring of Francisco Umbral; Olafur Eliasson's website; and my own experience while visiting Tangu's suburbs.