Julia Ruff | Screen Integration in Shanghai: The effect of screens on the landscape

 
Shanghai has a unique relationship with using media facades to stay futuristic and modern. However, through the development of this relationship and integration of screens into the city’s urban landscape, Shanghai’s urban landscape has started to shift towards Rem Koolhaas’s prediction of a Generic City. The project is an extension and exploration of looking into how an increase in the integration of screens into Shanghai’s urban landscape over the past two decades will shape the future urban landscape. Focusing on the hyper-reality future of what Shanghai would look like as it continuously shifts towards a Generic City. The project home page is an interactive map of Shanghai with two specific locations within Shanghai. These two locations are two of the most well-known city landmarks, with high levels of screen integration. By clicking into one of the two locations would bring a user into the main focus of this project of an interactive 360-degree photo in which users have the ability to move around and explore the image. The image had been edited to explore what the location may look like as a developing hyper-reality. The home page also connects to an informational page that gives the users a brief overview of the topic and project, with instructional information on how to interact with the project. Developing what a generic city may look like in the future raises the question of what other larger metropolises urban landscapes would start to look like and in which aspects would these metropolises become either similar or entirely the same. It also brings forth the question of distinctive famous landmarks within these large metropolises bring enough identity into a city to help hinder the city from becoming a generic city, or would the famous landmarks simply start to blend into hyper-reality with screens and advertisement overrun the city? An expansion of this project would be an exploration into how the integration of screens into other major metropolises such as New York, London, Paris, and so on, would affect the urban landscape of these cities. The exploration of these cities should focus on at what point of screen integration into the urban landscape would turn these metropolises to look the same or very eerily similar.