Megacity X

Reflecting on my time in Shen Zhen and Hong Kong, I can only say that it's beyond expanded my mind. The rate at which China is modernising and capitalising is frankly unprecedented. I'm a kid of the concrete jungle, and as I said in my emails to my buddies back home in the UK: "This makes London look like Venice." And I couldn't be more frank. I ain't seen nothing compared to what China is buiding right now. I'm very worried about what will happen. Sure, urban life is an upgrade from the rigours and harshness of subsistence. They're enthralled, and grateful. They live in warm new homes, wonderfully convenient. But beware of those tower blocks and factories, they're uncontrollable. They decay and morph into new things over decades. They form their own culture over time, the migrants children are natives. These behemoths are set on a course. In their shadows breed High rise Hi Fi ghostly ninjas. Anarchists. I know this world, I'm from this world. I'm streetwise & fearless. They are a dense landscape which can home the most cut-throat strains of humanity. The hood-rats of London, the ghettos of NY, the banlieux, seriously, this is complex. This is real. And it happens 30 to 40 years after their construction, and it grows in native urban kids. They form clans and gangs. They deal in that which is prohibited. Anarchy. Money makes the world go round in the city, and there's different ways to get it. Cities go poorer and darker than any peasant. A city is naturally famine conditions: no crops grow there. It's a desert of termite mounds. New lives are reared starved of beauty, and starved of identity. Knowing nothing but faceless millions, concrete more concrete, car after lethal car and the TV. Successful kids take to the streets, and set about owning them. The government cannot touch them, they are shadows. The sight of uniform or 'reform' makes them evaporate, only to return tomorrow in greater number. They can move faceless amongst the crowds. It's blade runner, it's judge dredd, it's urban. I've grown up around the dystopia, and I'm schooled on it. Neuromancer is a book I recommend. Come to Daddy doesn't scare me:             Judge Dredd is a story of the Mega Cities, cities which have become so big and so dense and so uncontrollable that the government has resorted to doing away with the legal system, and instead has super soldiers dispense justice directly in the field. The fictional world drawn on the pages of this little indie comic are amplifications of what we see today. Control is only barely achieved, drugs, insanity and 1000 forms of black market thrive in the dense environment. Dropping gum is a prisonable offense. Sugar is a controlled substance. Illegal ring fights of "fatties" with chainsaws draw black market audiences in the hundreds of thousands. And the simple little people hide in their apartments with every mod con they can buy. The super rich live on the top under sunlight, and go hunting celebrities for sport with high power weapons, happily above the law. The media is an entertainment circus, neon cartoon clowning with zero serious content. The population eat munce, a bacterial sludge flavoured in millions of ways to be mock turtle soup, or a hotdog. These comics kept me in stitches for years. The artwork in places defies belief. They got 15 years of mileage out of the world, and wouldn't have stopped if it wasn't for Warner Bros. buying them out and firing the artists for having integrity. They turned it from a thinly disguised adult art form right back into sanitised pacifiers for the kiddies, complete with McDonalds ads on every other page. ______________________________________________________________________        Curiously, the finest art & expression also grows like an orchid in these strange forests of concrete and commerce. It feeds upon the anarchy & discontent. It feeds upon the underground, the invisible, the scrawly graffiti, and the concrete nightmare. Forging new understandings, and new visions. This new world will not be ignored, brushed under the carpet. We must learn to deal with it, to recognise the subtle nuances, to extract difficult morals from difficult stories. ______________________________________________________________________        And Nowhere is this growing more than in China. Shen Zhen is bigger than London. It's new. 17 years or so. The underground is not yet grown. The population is not native urban, you can see it in their eyes. They're wandering wide eyed and blissful amongst these hulking high rise giants. They see nothing but progress in this modernity. They're curious where this leads. ______________________________________________________________________        And more strangely, the philosophies that I use to keep me sane and peaceful in my metropolis are Chinese derived. There's a culture there which offers an attitude which is compatible with my condition. I thought that I might learn more in China. I discovered that I've been privileged to experience that which was hidden away from the Chinese: Lao Tzu, Confucius. You just couldn't get the books in the 70s. In some ways, I'm more educated than many Chinese in that culture which I approach as a disciple, as a foreigner. Curiouser and curiouser. ______________________________________________________________________        What makes me think that China's metropolitan worlds will turn out different to the western ones? Well, this is no experiment. It's been done before. There is the benefit of second sight, of Take 2 version 2.0. Worryingly, the design of these cities is, well, exactly the same brutalist concrete nightmare that bred the ghettos. Maybe cutting a few more corners than before. It's like nothing has been learned. It's the job of us westerners to take the now 50 year old stories over. It's noticeable how keen HK'ers are on absorbing all that Hip Hop has to offer, albeit in a cursory and slightly laughably insincere and fashion victim manner.  But I respect the drive, to get ahead of the game, to know urbanity in both its dark and lightness. ______________________________________________________________________        But the people who will live in these, will they renounce their heritage as those in the west did? I don't know. I think they might resurrect it. I hope that there will be an urban counter revolution of Daoism, not hip-hop, drugs and guns. Of kung fu kiddies practising buddha nature, fearless and safe, dressed in 21st century re-workings of Han priests' uniforms. ______________________________________________________________________        Because that's what the creatures and souls of the urban jungle desire most. A sense of belonging and fearlessness in this inhuman concrete jungle. A sense of place, a sense of identity. To be respected not as a cog in the great machine, but as individuals. What better way than by stealing back their own culture? Authentically, from the underground. ______________________________________________________________________        Will I be wiling or inclined to help with that? Hell yeah. Show me the Tao. I come carrying stories. I'm pretty sure that few of the street DVD sellers, those anarchist pirates, will be able to give you a copy of La Haine.

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