SIP Past Present Future

On the second floor of the Cultural Arts Center there is an exhibition by the Suzhou Industrial Park Urban Planning Commission.  It's part museum and part advertising.  The museum part to educate the citizens and tourists.  The advertising part is to lure the odd tourist that might also own a multinational corporation.

2011 is the 17th year for the SIP.  The project broke ground in 1994 as a partnership between the governments of China and Singapore.  Singapore brought the money and their winning formula for state-run capitalism.  China provided the land and the tax breaks and promise of a bottomless labor pool.

In 1994, the Suzhou Industrial Park was nothing but a belt of rice farms, villages, and swampland on the outskirts of old Suzhou City.  Then the deal with Singapore was sealed.  And then the bulldozers came in and wiped the ground clean.  (If you don't believe me,  then watch the first 30 seconds of this video.)   It was truly a planned city from the very beginning.  Anyone and anything in the way was moved.  Then the earth was wiped clean, as if rebooting to start fresh game of SimCity.

The first three photos are photographs of the photographs on display in the SIP Urban Planning exhibition.  The top one, I believe, are homes that used to be along the shores of JinJi lake.  The next one shows the canal that runs just behind our apartment. (Today that canal is confined by concrete embankments and surrounded by 30 story apartment buildings.)  The photo directly above shows a rice field that could have been anywhere in flat-lands of SIP.  (There are no rice fields here today.  All have surrendered to development...just like the cornfields that used to be inside the I-465 loop of Indianapolis.)

The photos above and below both show the LiGongDi causeway on the South end of JinJi Lake.  In the old days, above, it looks that the causeway was stradled by water houses.  I assume people lived in those houses and lived off the lake, much like they did in other parts of Suzhou.  Today, below, LiGongDi has been redeveloped as commercial strip of shopping and restaurants.  A very well-lighted commercial strip.

If the first three were "before" photos,  then the one below is the ultimate "after" photo.  That circular thing is a scale model of Suzhou Industrial Park as it is planned for 2020.  (For the guys out there, North is to the left.) You can see the blue of JinJi Lake dominating the upper-center of the model.  The top of DuShu Lake is at the extreme right.   LiGongDi causeway is the white-yellow band just right-of-center.  The cauuseway crosses a cove that feeds into a canal that connects JinJi and DuShu lakes. 

By the way...the model below is focused on the residential and commercial sections of SIP.  The industrial parcels extend well to the East (top of photo) and North (left of photo).

Back down at ground level, the model shows the buildings that are supposed to make up the skyline of SIP.  In previous posts, we've discussed the new 90-story building that is going up near our apartment..lovingly known as the pair-of-pants.  This photo below shows a finished pair-of-pants on the SIP skyline.  Behind are even taller skyscrapers - rising what must be 130 stories or more.  There are skyscrapers nearly as tall planned on the other side of the lake.  Crazy stuff.

These days, the pair-of-pants continues to go higher with each day of construction.  They've opened a real estate office near the construction site.  The office is surrounded by signs which try to seduce prospective tennants.  They promise prime office space with a killer lake view and with easy access by the two subway lines which will stop in the building's lower levels.  It pays to advertise.  One of their advertisements, shown below, includes an artist's rendition of the finished towers.  (Without, of course, the competing taller towers that are planned for the neighborhood.)

So if the first photos were the past, the next few were the future, and the one below is the present.  Looking across the lake from the Cultural Center you can see the pair-of-pants - at 45 stories or so - starting to dominate the skyline.  There are still a few taller buildings on that side of the lake.  Perspective makes the pair-of-pants look more dominant than it really is at the moment.

The thing that amazes me about the SIP - and it truly amazes me - is that all this rose from bulldozed earth in the span of 17 years. 

For all the grand statements of public good and Asian cooperation, it was the prospect of making a buck that brought Singapore and China here in 1994.  It's worked out marvelously for China.  The SIP is making money pretty much hand-over-fist now.  It worked out less well for Singapore.  They threw up their hands and sold their majority interest back to China about 10 years ago.  Maybe there's a moral to that story and maybe not.