i have been reading about ideas and efforts to renovate shenzhen, and have discovered an intense interest in historic preservation. there are several obvious examples--the chiwan tianhou temple (museum), the renovated dongmen commercial area (west of dongmen road), nantou old city, the hakka compounds in longgang, pengcheng garrison--and several more recent "discoveries"--any of the early 1980s light industry parks, remnants of older villages, a ming dynasty temple in baoan, older ancestral halls, dongmen commerce before historic renovation (east of dongmen road), 4 and 5 star hotels from the late 80s and early 90s, including the eastern pearl luxury cruise ship landlocked behind a golf practice range in seaworld. in various ways and with various degrees of success, all of these areas have been integrated into the new shenzhen.
of course, at stake is the question: what counts as history? the current effort to renovate inner city villages acknowledges that shenzhen's only living cradles of pre-urban history are the villages, but on the other hand, what makes shenzhen "special" has been its urbanization. this contradiction means that even when village histories are chronicled and preserved, they do not resonate with shenzhen's migrant communities. nor have i heard (note: what follows is highly anecdotal) that historic preservation in one village means anything to folks from other villages, except to encourage them to write their own histories. these histories re-write village history in terms of urbanization and what shenzhen has done for them.
so one telos, with history becoming the search for one origin. perhaps this is where the difficulty lies in writing shenzhen history. there isn't one origin, nor one telos for that matter. even bracketing multiple development trajectories at any one time, there is still the fact that shenzhen's official goals for urbanization have changed with every urban plan. this means that the editorial choice for one origin becomes deng xiaoping's decision to establish sezs, and the telos becomes whatever has been built to date. so writing shenzhen's history becomes tracking the history of changing teloses...and this is invisible. we lurch from one state of being to another, but can't remember what was here before, or are compelled to forget what was here, even yesterday... we are busy explaining the link between deng xiaoping and shenzhen today.
the difficulty of trying to make shenzhen's multiple teloses visible became clear to me several weeks ago. i met with a friend to show him several years of pictures of houhai and he said, "i thought the change would be more obvious. i can't tell which pictures were taken first." image quality told part of the story--i've used better cameras over time, so the better the resolution, the more recent the picture. its true. houhai has changed, but the way its changed--reclaim land, build tall buildings--hasn't. so signs of change include building style, height, materials, distance from original coastline, which is marked by the oldest buildings, green space (as shenzhen has become richer, landscaping has increasing relied on imported, rather than local plants). but who has this kind of knowledge, which might form the basis of some kind of historic recognition? this knowledge is excruciatingly site specific. and people like my friend who haven't repeatedly walked the coastline, don't see the change. they see, instead, more of the same and when i visit places in shenzhen, i often find myself relying on knowledge of other places to read the extent of urbanization...
i am tempted to compare this feeling of eternally recreated present to the scene in the matrix, where the keanu reeves character (who's name i've confused with nemo the fish) figures out he's in a computer program because of a glitch; the same woman in the same dress walks by the same building twice, and only that experience, that moment of awareness reveals change. so history writing becomes looking for these glitches that otherwise go unnoticed.
of course, at stake is the question: what counts as history? the current effort to renovate inner city villages acknowledges that shenzhen's only living cradles of pre-urban history are the villages, but on the other hand, what makes shenzhen "special" has been its urbanization. this contradiction means that even when village histories are chronicled and preserved, they do not resonate with shenzhen's migrant communities. nor have i heard (note: what follows is highly anecdotal) that historic preservation in one village means anything to folks from other villages, except to encourage them to write their own histories. these histories re-write village history in terms of urbanization and what shenzhen has done for them.
so one telos, with history becoming the search for one origin. perhaps this is where the difficulty lies in writing shenzhen history. there isn't one origin, nor one telos for that matter. even bracketing multiple development trajectories at any one time, there is still the fact that shenzhen's official goals for urbanization have changed with every urban plan. this means that the editorial choice for one origin becomes deng xiaoping's decision to establish sezs, and the telos becomes whatever has been built to date. so writing shenzhen's history becomes tracking the history of changing teloses...and this is invisible. we lurch from one state of being to another, but can't remember what was here before, or are compelled to forget what was here, even yesterday... we are busy explaining the link between deng xiaoping and shenzhen today.
the difficulty of trying to make shenzhen's multiple teloses visible became clear to me several weeks ago. i met with a friend to show him several years of pictures of houhai and he said, "i thought the change would be more obvious. i can't tell which pictures were taken first." image quality told part of the story--i've used better cameras over time, so the better the resolution, the more recent the picture. its true. houhai has changed, but the way its changed--reclaim land, build tall buildings--hasn't. so signs of change include building style, height, materials, distance from original coastline, which is marked by the oldest buildings, green space (as shenzhen has become richer, landscaping has increasing relied on imported, rather than local plants). but who has this kind of knowledge, which might form the basis of some kind of historic recognition? this knowledge is excruciatingly site specific. and people like my friend who haven't repeatedly walked the coastline, don't see the change. they see, instead, more of the same and when i visit places in shenzhen, i often find myself relying on knowledge of other places to read the extent of urbanization...
i am tempted to compare this feeling of eternally recreated present to the scene in the matrix, where the keanu reeves character (who's name i've confused with nemo the fish) figures out he's in a computer program because of a glitch; the same woman in the same dress walks by the same building twice, and only that experience, that moment of awareness reveals change. so history writing becomes looking for these glitches that otherwise go unnoticed.