In yesterday post, using as our text a New York Times article on the proposed comprehensive slum redevelopment of Kashgar, Xinjiang:

Kashgar, though, is not a typical Chinese city. Chinese security officials consider it a breeding ground for a small but resilient movement of Uighur separatists who Beijing claims have ties to international jihadis. So redevelopment of this ancient center of Islamic culture comes with a tinge of forced conformity.

As far as I can tell from my fractured central Asian history, the Uighurs belong to China for the same reason the Scots belong to England; isolated by geography (Scotland the Norwegian Sea, Xinjiang by the Tien Shan mountains) and dominated by a more fertile, and more populous, contiguous neighbor through whom they have to pass; plus they were a strategic way station on China’s Silk Road.

China supports an international plan to designate major Silk Road landmarks as United Nations World Heritage sites — a powerful draw for tourists, and a powerful incentive for governments to preserve historical areas.

What reasons do the Chinese give? Are they credible?

Chinese officials have offered somewhat befuddling explanations for their plans. Mr. Xu calls Kashgar “a prime example of rich cultural history and at the same time a major tourism city in China.” Yet the demolition plan would reduce to rubble Kashgar’s principal tourist attraction, a magnet for many of the million-plus people who visit each year.

Not much of tourist interest here: Kashgar, April, 2009

But Kashgar is missing from China’s list of proposed sites.

The dog that didn’t bark in the night?

“The Chinese government did nothing about Kashgar’s historic importance.”

“That was the curious incident,” remarked housing consultant Sherlock Holmes.

One foreign official who refused to be identified for fear of damaging relations with Beijing said the Old City project had unusually strong backing high in the government.

I’ve never yet encountered architects and historic preservationists high in government. The evidence is piling up.

Dust to dust? Redevelopment in Kashgar

The project, said to cost $440 million, began abruptly this year, soon after China’s central government said it would spend $584 billion on public works to combat the global financial crisis.

It would complete a piecemeal dismantling of old Kashgar that began decades ago. The city wall, a 25-foot-thick earthen berm nearly 35 feet high, has largely been torn down.

Mud but historic: Kashgar’s city wall

In the 1980s, the city paved the surrounding moat to create a ring highway. Then it opened a main street through the old town center.

As I wrote in cities’ cryptobiotica, I’m deeply suspicious of clear-cutting cities and slums in the name of traffic efficiency:

Those who uprooted whole communities, clear-cutting the neighborhood and redepositing it elsewhere in the city, overlooked the intangible, wetware community.  They saw the slum’s exterior manifestations – the dirt, the overcrowding, the ill health, the poverty – and that blinded them to its assets – the tightly knit community, the aggregated and distributed knowledge.  So Robert Moses could cut a swath through New York with his Cross-Bronx Expressway, oblivious that when he did so, he killed that chunk of Harlem for forty years.

Open-heart surgery on a neighborhood

Despite or because of China’s actions, Kashgar retains much of its uniqueness:

Still, much of the Old City remains as it was and has always been. From atop 40 vest-pocket mosques, muezzins still cast calls to prayer down the narrow lanes: no loudspeakers here.

A city and its mosques: Kashgar

Hundreds of artisans still hammer copper pots, carve wood, hone scimitars and hawk everything from fresh-baked flatbread to dried toads to Islamic prayer hats.

Shop in Kashgar Old Town

And tens of thousands of Uighurs still live here behind hand-carved poplar doors, many in tumbledown rentals, others in two-story homes that vault over the alleys and open on courtyards filled with roses and cloth banners.

Welcome in?

The city says the Uighur residents have been consulted at every step of planning. Residents mostly say they are summoned to meetings at which eviction timetables and compensation sums are announced.

Shades of Kelo v. New London, isn’t it?

“The house belongs to us,” said Hajji’s wife, who refused to give her name. “In this kind of house, many, many generations can live, one by one. But if we move to an apartment, every 50 or 70 years, that apartment is torn down again.”

If you’re thinking in terms of 50-70 year housing, you’ll be better served in a proper structure.

“This is the biggest problem in our lives. How can our children inherit an apartment?”

Building inspectors have deemed most of the oldest homes unsafe, including all mud-and-straw structures, the earliest form of construction. They will be leveled and, in many cases, rebuilt in an earthquake-resistant Uighur style, the city promises.

Promises, promises.

High-rise housing in Kashgar

But three of the Old City’s seven sectors are judged unfit for Uighur architecture and will be rebuilt with decidedly generic apartment buildings. Two thousand other homes will be razed to build public plazas and schools. Poor residents, who live in the smallest homes, already are being permanently moved to boxy, concrete public housing on Kashgar’s outskirts.

Shades of the slums inside, in Paris and around the world.

What will remain of old Kashgar is unclear. Mr. Xu said that “important buildings and areas of the Old City have already been included in the country’s special preservation list” and would not be disturbed.

No archaeologists monitor the razings, he said, because the government already knows everything about old Kashgar.

Nice to be omniscient.

Trust me, I have your best interests at heart

Some residents say they also prefer a more modern environment.

The thousand-year-old design that gives the Old City its charm often precludes basics like garbage pickup, sewers and fire hydrants.

Charming if only visiting: donkey cart and alley rubble

Rusticity is attractive when you can go home to your gleaming downtown hotel, your ceramic bathroom, and your piping hot shower.

In Mr. Xu’s view, demolition will give the Uighurs a better life and spare them from disaster in one fell swoop.

All that said, there is a certain aura of forcible eviction about the demolition, an urgency that fear of earthquakes does not completely explain. The city is offering cash bonuses to residents who move out early — about $30 for those who vacate within 20 days; $15 if they move in a month.

By itself, that’s not so terrible, even if it smacks of the self-fulfilling blight creation of which the developer of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards property has been accused.

[Editorial note for Atlantic Yard junkies: Mr. Oder continues to be on a roll. Check out these posts. – Ed.]

Homes are razed as soon as they become empty, giving some alleys a gap-tooth look.

We’ve seen before that Chinese developers have what we would consider a cavalier attitude to property rights, changing facts on the ground to erode the political and topographic support for the status quo.

From sixteenth to twenty-first century: Kashgar at twilight

On Kashgar television, a nightly 15-minute infomercial hawks the project like ginsu knives, mixing dire statistics on seismic activity with scenes of happy Uighurs dancing in front of their new concrete apartments.

“Never has such a great event, such a major event happened to Kashgar,” the announcer intones. He boasts that the new buildings “will be difficult to match in the world” and that citizens will “completely experience the care and warmth of the party” toward the Uighur ethnic minority.

Spare me the care and warmth of the Communist Party, as evidenced by Russia’s public housing, which in my view contributed to Communism’s collapse.

The infomercial also notes that Communist Party officials from Kashgar to Beijing are so edgy over the prospect of an earthquake “that it is disturbing their rest.”

What does the government have in mind for the Uighurs?

Yes, slums can be breeding grounds for terrorism, but they are also breeding grounds for democracy, even in Zimbabwe, and even in China. China has a history of authoritarian government trampling property and human rights in the name of development.

We all remember the lone figure and the tank, but we forget this: Tienanmen Square’s aftermath

When, in 1523, Alfonso X of Spain demolished a chunk of Islam’s largest mosque, the Mezquita in Cordoba, to build within it the Villaviciosa and Royal Chapels his emperor, Carlos V, upon seeing the result, is said to have remarked, “You have destroyed something unique in the world and built something that can be found anywhere.”

“Something unique in the world”

While I am among those who fear infatuation with preservation leads to struldbrug buildings, neighborhoods, and even cities, we have had enough of public housing high-rises.

If it were up to me, earthquake risk notwithstanding, I’d say:

Let ancient Kashgar live.

Keep your old way of life

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Guilty or innocent?

If you are Robert Mugabe, the answer is clear: it’s slow genocide by bulldozer. 

If you’re the City of Boston in the 1950’s, the answer is likewise clear: your motives were good even if your outcomes were bad.

If you’re the City of New London in 2005, the answer is a Supreme Court landmark eminent-domain decision that ended in farce.

I’ll just take my house and walk

If you’re Mumbai in 2009, the answer is murky, where redevelopment could destroy the community like Dharavi  … and unresolved.

What about Kashgar, in Xinjiang, China, whose downtown is to be largely demolished in favor of resettlement.  Is this:

• Benevolent.  Altruistically protecting a precious microcosm from earthquake and calamity?
• Malevolent.  Cynically using the language of urban redevelopment to wipe out culture and political opposition?

Reader, it’s up to you to form your own view. 

The evidence is divided, as revealed in this New York Times article:

To Protect an Ancient City, China Moves to Raze It

Of course the Times, while pretending to dispassion, makes little secret of its sympathies, starting with its headline echoing the infamous Vietnam-Era apocryphal quote: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.”

The town of Kashgar is unquestionably a historic treasure:

KASHGAR, China — A thousand years ago, the northern and southern branches of the Silk Road converged at this oasis town near the western edge of the Taklamakan Desert. Traders from Delhi and Samarkand, wearied by frigid treks through the world’s most daunting mountain ranges, unloaded their pack horses here and sold saffron and lutes along the city’s cramped streets. Chinese traders, their camels laden with silk and porcelain, did the same.

On the Asian side of the vast mountains dividing the formerly-Soviet stans from western China, Kashgar evokes a forgotten time.

The traders are now joined by tourists exploring the donkey-cart alleys and mud-and-straw buildings once window-shopped, then sacked, by Tamerlane and Genghis Khan.

Alley in kashgar Old Town

Now, Kashgar is about to be sacked again.

Sacking sounds the same theme of violent ravaging.

Portrait of Genghis Khan, 1226

Kashgar Uighur, 2009

Nine hundred families already have been moved from Kashgar’s Old City, “the best-preserved example of a traditional Islamic city to be found anywhere in central Asia,” as the architect and historian George Michell wrote in the 2008 book “Kashgar: Oasis City on China’s Old Silk Road.”

Sweeping the streets of Kashgar

Over the next few years, city officials say, they will demolish at least 85% of this warren of picturesque, if run-down homes and shops.

The Old Town of Kashgar

Demolition is deemed an urgent necessity because an earthquake could strike at any time, collapsing centuries-old buildings and killing thousands. “The entire Kashgar area is in a special area in danger of earthquakes,” Mr. Xu said. “I ask you: What country’s government would not protect its citizens from the dangers of natural disaster?”

A quake could well be devastating:

Kashgar officials do have good reason to worry about earthquakes. Last October, a 6.8 magnitude quake struck barely 100 miles away.

A Richter 6.8 quake could do enormous damage, as proven by the one that struck L’Aquila, Italy earlier this year, which was only a 6.3, a third as powerful:

A gentler earthquake and better buildings, but still devastating

In 1902, an 8.0-magnitude quake, one of the 20th century’s biggest, killed 667 residents.

Undoubtedly it would kill many more today, with the cities more dense.

Urban reconstruction during China’s long boom has razed many old city centers, including most of the ancient alleyways and courtyard homes of the capital, Beijing.

When their homes are destroyed, the local community will have to be relocated:

Many of its 13,000 families, Muslims from a Turkic ethnic group called the Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gurs), will be moved.

Would you live there?  Kashgar’s new high-rises

Aside from the loss of a unique historical legacy, the focus of a group calling itself Protect Kashgar old town, there’s the potential destruction of a whole community, a fragile yet sophisticated web of people that I have called, after the hardy desert plant life, cities’ cryptobiotica:

Slums are economically rational, they serve a natural market purpose within cities.  To see them as the byproducts of evil landlords or shiftless residents is to miss the point.  Slums will disappear only when the conditions that make them sensible disappear, and that is a function of government plus time.

And they serve a purpose, most particularly the purpose of forming urban society.

How?  By harnessing the wetware credit bureau, the slum community’s distributed intelligence and knowledge.

The ladies of savings co-operative Mahila Milan (Women Together)

Slums, whatever else they may be, elevate the human element above all other considerations.  Slums are people living together in unbelievable proximity, knowing about each other and holding that knowledge inside themselves.

Slum dwellers, Dublin, 1901

Urban renewal, if done badly – and it was mostly done badly – destroys that knowledge.  The community is blasted, and the results echo those in desert areas, as described by the U. S. Geological Survey:

Loss of soil also means loss of site fertility through loss of organic matter, fine soil particles, nutrients, and microbial populations in soils (Harper and Marble, 1988; Schimel et al., 1985). Moving sediments further destabilize adjoining areas by burying adjacent crusts, leading to their death, or by providing material for “sandblasting” nearby surfaces, thus increasing wind erosion rates (Belnap, 1995; McKenna-Neumann et al., 1996).

In other words, if you trample it, it dissolves into nothingness in an instant, and you cannot put it back together again.

Cobblers in Kashgar: can they ply their trade in high-rises?

Desert cryptobiotica gets crushed because it cannot speak. 

Beware the wrecking ball, my son.

Unlike cryptobiotica, people can speak. 

Mumbai: they’re against displacement

Slumdwellers can speak; in the voting booth wealth disappears.  People who live in slums are just as smart as any of us.  Even though individual slumdwellers are as nothing politically, when they join together and take control of their vote bank potential, they become a force that the highest officials respond to.

Sometimes the voice is anger and destruction. 

Watts, 1965

Just as government is a factory that produces two products (money and laws), politics is a game with two counters, money and votes.  Individually, slumdwellers can be ignored; they are effective only when collective.

The Chinese government envisions a shining new city on the hill:

In its place will rise a new Old City, a mix of midrise apartments, plazas, alleys widened into avenues and reproductions of ancient Islamic architecture “to preserve the Uighur culture,” Kashgar’s vice mayor, Xu Jianrong, said in a phone interview.

Will the new city be as compatible a home as the old?

Critics fret about a different disaster.

“From a cultural and historical perspective, this plan of theirs is stupid,” said Wu Lili, the managing director of the Beijing Cultural Protection Center, a nongovernmental group devoted to historic preservation. “From the perspective of the locals, it’s cruel.”

What will rise in its place, and why?

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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