OffCite Goes to China: High-Speed Hub
In this series, Christof Spieler gives a daily report on his trip to China for a special issue of Cite. Read more about RDA’s China initiative here, which includes a knockout lecture series in the Fall.
Beijing South is an immaculate and well-organized high speed rail station as you’ll ever see. This is the Beijing hub for high speed rail, including the new line to Shanghai. It’s a shiny new building, completed in 2008. It’s a perfect oval in plan, though that’s best appreciated in satellite photos, not in person. Two concourses — one below the rail tracks and one above them — connect to bus terminals, taxi lanes, underground parking and a subway station. Inside, there are ticket offices, waiting areas decorated with palms, and retail — food, books, gifts — catering to travelers.
But while Beijing South is a transit hub, it is not an urban hub. The station is surrounded by roadway ramps and fenced off plazas. Walk out of the north entrance and you’ll see none of the development you might expect to see around a railroad station — no hotels, no retail. Instead, you walk down an isolated sidewalk past lawns and roadways, and emerge 300 yards later into a typical Beijing neighborhood. That’s an odd choice for some of the best connected land in Beijing. In Tokyo, every station is literally a shopping mall, serving not only travelers but residents. In fact, several railroad companies also own department stores. In Hong Kong, stations are marked with clusters of office towers. In New York, the tracks of Grand Central are decked over with office towers. Why not here?
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Peter Wang writes:
07.18.11
10:29 am
Maybe they don’t want gathering places for people coming in from widely separated part of the country to be seamlessly integrated with the surrounding city. Maybe they want to be able to put a security perimeter around transportation hubs. It’s not a democracy, you know. Peter Wang
Raj Mankad writes:
08.02.11
12:17 pm
It fits the pattern of self-contained islands that you have found throughout your visit. I suppose, though, that the lack of major development right around the station forces travelers to go deeper into the city instead of shoot in and out of an endless interior of train networks with hotels, shopping, offices, and conference spaces.
Steve Lewis writes:
08.05.11
9:57 am
The isolated islands might also have to do with the persistence of the traditional work unit mentality — the “danwei” — that says that each agency, company, production brigade, school or organization needs to be separated from the rest of society, usually by a wall. Many attribute this to socialist planning, but as Xiaobu Lu and Elizabeth Perry show in their book on Danwei, it goes back to the Republican period some 80 or 90 years ago, when companies and organizations sought to insulate themselves from the Civil War and social revolution. Companies and government agencies then also sought to use architecture to break up the traditional Chinese family — in which four generations under one roof is considered the ideal — and put young professional families in to apartments where older relatives had no place to stay. This predated the creation of unisex dormitories in work units in the 1950s, but in either case the idea was to separate a group from society with the help of architecture.