Today it has a population estimated at 13 million — nearly two Londons. Nowhere else has ever achieved the pace of this urban up-rush. But the merciless tempo of Chinese urbanisation is old news, the subject of excited broadsheet features and nervous conference papers for years now. From agricultural landscape to industrial powerhouse to post-industrial city forging a culture and knowledge economy, Shenzhen took 28 years to evolve through a series of transitions that took many European cities This is a metropolis with a human lifespan, maturing at the same pace as its citizens.
And those citizens are young — like the city itself, the average age here is under In the commercial hive of Dongmen, the streets teem with urbane, Converse-wearing teenagers. In a sense, Shenzhen is a hormonal teen, changing in real time. Parts of the city are already into their fourth generation of buildings. They were built in the Bauhaus style — but in the s, not the s. Today, though, the workers have gone and their machinery has been replaced by architectural models and info-graphics from Los Angeles, London, Copenhagen, Rotterdam and, of course, Shenzhen.
The fact that the biennial is here is significant, as Shenzhen says more about urbanisation in China than Beijing or Shanghai. Much more interesting is the city itself. The Shenzhen experiment is not just urban but socio-economic. Shenzhen is a border town — Tijuana on steroids. Clinging to the Shenzhen River that separates it from Hong Kong, it is a parasite city, feeding off the capitalist wealth of its neighbour. The Shenzhen-Hong Kong border is the busiest in the world, with half a million people crossing daily.
The cities exist in a slightly tense symbiosis: the money on one side and the cheap labour on the other. In fact, everything in Shenzhen is cheaper, so the Hong Kongese cross in droves, stocking up with the vim of ferryborne Brits raiding Calais for wine.
The Shenzhen side of the border at Luohu is a classic grey market of cheap cigarettes and prostitution. Rich Hong Kong businessmen keep their mistresses in Shenzhen. In fact, Shenzhen is effectively sandwiched between two borders. It is maintained as a kind of buffer zone between outward-looking Hong Kong and the introspective and still dogmatic Maotherland.
