Ling Benli of the East China Architecture Design & Research Institute (ECADI), Urban Planning Exhibition Center with "2020 Model," Shanghai, China, 2013
Deep within a canopied, quadripartite center for architecture and urbanism just off Shanghai's People's Square lies a scaled model replica of the city itself. However, unlike most models of cities in facilities such as this one, the model is continually updated and is a living, physical manifestation of the immediate future. This methodically and continuously-updated model is the oracle of Shanghai. Once the colored paper or precious metal sacrifice has been made, one can peregrinate inside to this veritable contemporary Delphi to consult the fate of a particular building, neighborhood, or district of the city. The model, a microcosm for contemporary China if not society as a whole, is unapologetic: what you see is what you will get. From there, one might wonder if within the Urban Planning Exhibition Center in the model there is another scale model of the city that itself, due to its relative size, could never be updated, or perhaps a tabula rasa of the native terrain before human habitation. Thus, that micro-microcosm functions as a physical manifestation of the immediate past, an exact dialectical opposite of that of the macro-microcosm model. As such, Shanghai encapsulates the realm of the meta-[made]-physical.