2 SHANGHAI VILLAGES: How to create a symbiotic rural-urban
No sooner had I spotted a giant dog in a bamboo grove than it pulled on the leash and leapt at me. Despite shrieks from its surprised master, the canine closed in fast. In just a few seconds, it stood on its hind legs and pawed my chest and knees with such a strong force that I almost lost my balance on the side of a newly paved rural path.
“Oh I’m sorry, did it hurt you?” the middle-aged woman who was walking the dog on a long leash asked me in earnest as we met during a country walk last week.
“Not all all,” I said, collecting myself and looking at the sturdy dog still sniffing around me while waving its tail.
“I think it likes me a lot,” I said, laughing. “By the way, what breed is your dog? I’ve never seen such a heavy one before.”
“German Shepherd,” she replied with an apologetic smile. “It’s big and we’ve put a muzzle on it, but still I’m afraid it may frighten or hurt people unawares.”
In our casual talk that ensued, she told me that it was the first time she had brought her German Shepherd for a field exercise along the newly neatened lane in Fangxia Village in Shanghai’s western suburbs.
Her daughter, who joined us a few minutes later, said they hadn’t heard of the bucolic scene of the ancient village until one of their acquaintances uploaded its latest pictures online a few days before.
Fangxia is home to an archeological site where artifacts like bronze knives and pottery jars dating back to the Eastern Zhou Dynasty (770-256 BC) were excavated in 1976 when a canal was being built.
The village is only about 15 minutes’ walk from the Jade Laguna neighborhood where the mother and daughter live. “It’s really a nice landscape at our doorstep,” the daughter said. “It’s a great place for our German Shepherd as well.”
Such a big dog usually finds little room for its much-coveted outdoor exercises in a residential neighborhood, even in a villa community like Jade Laguna in the southern part of Zhaoxiang Town, Qingpu District.
The giant dog then pulled its master into a nearby farm field, wallowing on the soil ground like an excited child, while keeping an eye on me with an apparent grin, as if to suggest I should go and play with it as well.
“Where are you from? And why are you here?” the daughter asked me, seeing that I carried a water bottle slingbag like a traveler from afar would do.
I told her that I came from the northern part of Zhaoxiang Town, about 8 kilometers away, and that I came for the same reason as hers: to roam in the newly revamped village.
And, like her, I learned about Fangxia’s latest transformation from a secluded village to an idyllic periurban belt from a friend who had taken some photos of its improved landscape and shared them online.
Unlike her, however, I had visited the village many times before to conduct interviews with local farmers on a wide range of topics from rural income to agricultural infrastructure. One of my earlier reports on how local ditches worked during days of typhoon had even been reprinted by an international news portal headquartered in Africa.
The old Fangxia Village as I knew before had a pristine landscape featuring dense forests and vast rice and vegetable fields, but for a long time it was largely inaccessible to urban dwellers keen on outdoor exercises or a leisurely walk there.
Even local farmers had to share narrow muddy roads with motor vehicles as there were few pedestrian paths. Also, there was no way to walk through the thick forests comprising panicled golden rain trees, dawn redwoods (metasequoia trees) and camphor trees, among others.
In a sense, the 7-square-kilometer village remained virtually a secluded place for a long time as it hadn’t translated its natural resources into something accessible for nearby urban dwellers. As a journalist, I had to clean my muddy shoes each time I emerged from a field interview in the village, and when I tried to find a streetside chair or bench to take some rest, I could find none.
A significant change came around the end of last year, when a 1.3-kilometer main road in the village was refurbished to create more space for pedestrians to walk or rest in the forests or on the farm fields. A farmers’ bazaar was also being built by the main road to sell local farm produce to urban visitors.
Some staff members of the bazaar told me that it was expected to open at the end of this month, shortly before the Chinese Lunar New Year, a typical time for people to gather, hang out and shop around.
As I chatted with the staff, a group of urban visitors came and chipped in with one question after another about what they could buy from the future farmers’ fair. Their enthusiasm about an excursion into Fangxia’s accessible rural landscape was written on their faces, and I volunteered as a temporary guide as they filed out of the bazaar premises and looked for the famed archeological site.
Such a dynamic scene of rural-urban socioeconomic exchanges — at a farmers’ fair or along a rural lane — would have been unimaginable a few years back, when the village was only part of a lackluster rural-urban fringe, unattractive to urbanites near and far.
Fangxia’s recent efforts to spruce up its forest and farm landscape finally paid off. At the end of last year, it was elected as one of Shanghai’s first batch of 47 “forest villages” — an honor for villages which create a superb ecological environment for sustainable human settlements.
In particular, according to a document released by Shanghai’s forestry authority last month, a “forest village” must have, among other things, wellpreserved and accessible forests that comprise a variety of trees, including old ones. Such forests naturally lend themselves to a cleaner air in their vicinity.
The Paper, a leading news portal based in Shanghai, reported last month that part of Fangxia’s 230 hectares of forests had already been opened.
The now-accessible part of the village’s dense forests features rows of tall camphor trees that sit between town neighborhoods on one end and the rural hinterland on the other.
In other words, the formerly inaccessible urban-rural fringe has now become a rural-urban continuum defined by the World Bank as “a place of exchange and socioeconomic interaction” between rural and urban areas.
It’s really a nice landscape at our doorstep. It’s a great place for our German Shepherd as well.
A woman living in the Jade Laguna Villas, Qingpu District