Counterfeit Urbanism

When Thames Town, a new community for 10,000 residents outside of Shanghai, was inaugurated in 2006, foreign journalists took special notice. Thames Town, a place “in pursuit of a wonderful time in classic Europe,” was designed by a British architecture firm to replicate English town living in the suburbs of Shanghai. Thus the arrival of a Tudor town center, a gothic church on a village green, and even red phone booths amidst Songjiang’s high rises and as-yet undeveloped lots. Matters only got more interesting when the owner of a pub and fish and chips establishment in the English town of Lyme Regis came across photographs of the recently inaugurated Thames Town on the Internet and recognized her own establishments, their façades copied down to the last detail. A pirated city! In the land of bootleg DVDs and fake Rolexes, what more fitting form of urban growth than a counterfeit town? The proprietor sought legal recourse to no avail. The media, from the Guardian to NPR, latched on to the story as another parable of China’s idiosyncratic (and inauthentic) Westernization.