8 Years

Jamie George

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It was an interesting start to an excursion - the taxi driver not knowing where to drop me. He hesitantly gesticulated towards a side road, as he picked up his next fare and drove away. The amusement park in Chongqing City, China, positioned between two recently built bridges on the banks of Changjiang River, presented itself - as a website tentatively suggested - as "closed…?" Venturing through the partially open gates, I strolled around the park. The park could be correctly described as disused with regard to its original remit. A scattering of people seeking shade, playing Majiang and sleeping on out-door furniture demonstrate its current alternate use. The rust on most of the rides indicates that their time of moving has passed. The rumour was that the now-defunct rollercoaster was active 8 years ago - yet no one really knows when it ceased to run.

With over thirty-one million inhabitants, one would think (if we use Thorpe Park or Alton Towers as a schematic British example) that Chongqing's people would request the provision of an amusement park's (operational) rides. Via this particular site, the city becomes an oneiric location, its unbelievable development statistics lose significance, in the same way as the landscape loses its clarity in the heat haze and smog. I am sure that in the UK a site such as this would have long been renovated, re-developed, re-staged or at least closed.

In stark contrast, the East Bank further down the Changjiang River has undergone significant development in recent years. I lose count of the high-rise tower blocks as I scan this insurgent colony. At a guess there are in excess of one hundred buildings in the first tier, situated along the water line - where, before the development eight years ago, mountains loomed. This is tough regeneration. In my head I named this the '8 year view'.

Apart from the occasional "clean-living" expat, many of the blocks of flats remain empty. Property investors who bought up the apartments wish to keep them 'as new'. When the time comes to sell them on it is believed they will fetch a higher price if they can be deemed unlived in. The irony, perhaps, is that the buildings are only intended to have a 30-year life span - the hasty concrete construction, inadequate cladding and plastic plumbing rapidly degrading under various environmental pressures. A local resident tells me that with this inbuilt ruination jobs will be created, materials purchased and designs outputted. A market will be kept afloat. Supported by the pride of national autonomy, it is a strange type of sustainability.

Comparisons to regeneration projects and housing developments in London and the UK are, on the surface, polarised. The accustomed model finds developers complicit in local government, pre-sales and cross-funding, with painfully slow relocation of incumbent residents. Throughout a generous stretch of the East End of London, now lavishly ornamented with Olympic sites, the urban landscape permanently includes the badly gloss-painted panelling of the developer's designated areas - usually in some variation of red, white and blue.

With the riverside view in mind, I am drawn to list what has happened to me in the last eight years. A UK-based generalized history might note the career of a girl-band, a financial crisis, the perceived growth of terrorism, smart phones, more new shopping malls and two wars.

This is in fact not a project of comparison but an inquiry into the monolith of 'progress'. China's notion of progress is not waiting to be supplanted by Western avariciousness. These two landscapes present a radically alternate yet corresponding, homologous mode. I wonder what 'progress' might mean - a movement (as toward a goal?), an advance? What may be egregious to a British building developer's heritage-bound model, functions fluidly in the un-historicised Chinese scheme.


E. M. Cioran's words come with his pre-fix of the 'over-civilisation of the west', and further he states; "Europe has passed to a provincial destiny" .⁽²⁾

If historic time is extraneous, spatial transformation (regardless of the model) becomes the agent of 'progress'. The transformation of a site becomes progress's visible location; a location of pardoned spatial complicity.

In Milan Kundera's terms the coercive properties of a social ideal of advance and no-return demonstrate the goading of Capitalism's permission; a cycle and not a vector.


These two locations present a unity of difference. With the social alliance to developing a landscape of 'no-return' what becomes distinct is 'progress' not as a historic concern but a spatial one.

As I sat below the inactive Ferris wheel, the main visible iconographic statement of Chongqing amusement park, I am intrigued by a newly and partially built structure, a concrete building with steps leading down the bank - a bunker. Through the incongruity of the building I am drawn to think what a city may look like after 8 years of 'un-use'- peaking oil production, or more war seem viable causes. A bunker maybe the most relevant structure for the next possible period: 8 more years of spatial 'progress'.




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