The Mutations of TOD: The study of Xujiahui, Shanghai as a typical Transit-Oriented Development city

This project mainly analyses a typical TOD (Transit-Oriented Development) city named Xujiahui in Shanghai, China. Transit-Oriented Development is an urban planning concept proposed by Peter Calthorpe in 1993. The original concept promoted a altered version of an American town, which is a town with a public transport station in its center, and adapting mixed-use development within the walking distance. Since entering China around the year 2000, the concept of Transit-Oriented Development (TOD) has undergone significant changes during its localization process. Take Xujiahui as an example: high-density skyscrapers have replaced low-rise town buildings, the commercial component in mixed-use developments has been infinitely expanded, and bus stops have turned into transportation hubs. Large-scale artificial spaces have isolated the city from nature. As a result, people can easily feel confined, exhausted, and unfree in this space. Consequently, the commercial activities that Xujiahui prides itself on have faced severe challenges. Since the inception of the TOD concept, sustainability has been its most important goal. However, TOD cities represented by Xujiahui now face severe challenges in both ecological and social sustainability.

Xujiahui is one of the earliest and largest TOD cities in China. As early as 1993, a subway station with an underground commercial street was opened here, forming the prototype of a TOD city. Now, Xujiahui subway station has 19 active exits leading to more than a dozen large shopping malls. This paper divides the Xujiahui TOD city into five parts: the subway station, shopping malls, Xujiahui Footpath, the Zikawei Library, and the ground level. I will assess the development history of these spaces and, based on my own experiences and observations, point out the current status and future development trends of the Xujiahui TOD city.

On a theoretical level, this paper first cites Tafuri's theory, pointing out that when Peter Calthorpe proposed the TOD concept, architecture was already dominated by capitalism, losing its ideological significance and turning purely functional. In this context, Calthorpe did not discuss much the relationship between TOD and capital, which indirectly led to his American small-town-style TOD not being widely implemented in the United States. However, in Asian cities, especially large cities in China, the enormous flow of people has activated the potential commercial attributes of TOD cities, making them quickly popular. Currently, Xujiahui is transforming towards a more humanized direction. This change has multiple layers of significance. First, the update of Xujiahui's building types is to meet new consumer demands, thereby maintaining the consumer market. This fact overturns Tafuri's conclusion that architecture can never truly change within the capitalist framework. Secondly, the current transformation of Xujiahui shows a trend towards ecological regression. Calthorpe emphasized the important role of ecology in the TOD concept from the beginning, and now the shift from commercialization to ecological regression also proves the integrity of the original TOD concept. However, according to Guattari’s theory of three ecologies, Calthorpe's idea of returning to the original local ecological environment is unrealistic. Only by producing new ecological solutions that are more suitable for the current situation from different perspectives based on the existing urban environment can be a reasonable future development approach.