If you’ve never been to Shanghai, one of the first things that will strike you is the unexpected and unassuming artistic lights adorning the elevated roadways that cut around and throughout the city. I wondered about it, so I did my research, and having lived in cities before, the answer came as a surprise; it’s all about the aesthetics.
When Shanghai boomed in the 1990s, car and taxi traffic became a problem overnight, but rather than hold hearings to assemble committees to consider the potentials of remedies, the local government just set out to fix the problem, and did so in short order.
The best and quickest remedy was to dramatically ramp up mass transit (which was seen in the creation of new subway lines and bus routes) and find a way to fit more cars on the same roads that were already struggling to handle what they had. On the automobile side came the creation of the elevated roadways.
It’s a good idea, really, and something that had already been proven successful in other big cities around the world. The only real problem was the cost of creating it, a problem the city embraced as the only way out. It would be nice if all cities took action on the day they know they need to, but that’s another debate for another day.
So the city created two rings of elevated roadway (the cleverly named inner ring and outer ring) that could facilitate traffic that doesn’t need to go down every street and every block, instead allowing it to work as a bypass. They designed them, built them, and recognized that they were at least a little bit ugly.
It’s hard to combine form and function. You can’t make downtown less popular and you can’t make people not want to go there, all you can do is build what you can to help them get there, even if it isn’t the prettiest solution in town.
And that’s where the blue lights came in. The second the switch was flipped, the ugly, utilitarian, elevated roadways instantly transformed from eyesore to artwork. One artist in Kirkland, Washington even held a featured artist showing based on the lights of the Shanghai byways.
So if you’re wondering why the overhead roadways look so striking, it’s only because the civic leaders can’t hide the roads, so instead hope you’ll see them as they do, as a beautiful, wonderful, unavoidable component of the city. As a thing that brings as much life as it does inspire photo shows around the world.
