Cheng see its more as an attitude about how locals want to live as a city and what's important to them. "Part of that is a pedestrian route. Right at the heart of Vancouverism is about people walking the streets and being able to be entertained, and have eye-contact with people living in the buildings, and so on. That was Shanghai in spades in the old days. They have lost that in the new city."

He expressed his admiration for Shanghai's preservation of the Bund, the French Concession and a whole raft of Shikumen (tenement- style brick housing from the early 1900s unique to the city), the "character of the city," for future generations to enjoy.

But he added that not every shikumen needs to be preserved, just enough to make the character stand out and then densify around them and use it as open space.

"What we have been trying to tell the city of Vancouver is the value of the historic structures, not just memory of past or cultural, but that they are the sunlight access. Because they are low scale it actually preserves certain segments of the city. If all of Shanghai is built up like Pudong there will be no air movement through the city. All the towers will jam everything up. By preserving certain districts you have hop-scotch green air pockets and then high-density pockets and so on.

"Those green pockets, just like we are telling city council here, the single-family neighborhoods, are our green lungs," he said.

Cheng suggested Shanghai planners rethink the streets; not all of them need to be grand boulevards or the same size, some should be narrow, intimate and with certain character, the kind of thing that made the city what it was. "They have to recapture some of that magic."

In addition, people shouldn't rely on government to create parks, but more so developers should include public spaces into their various projects to heighten livability.

Calling China a "passage that all developing countries will have to go through," Cheng added that the country no longer needed to build spectacular buildings such as Beijing's CCTV headquarters or the "Bird's Nest" Olympic Stadium as they had proved to the world that they could.

Instead, how buildings come to the ground and how the ground plane and the public realm are developed, that's going to be the key to the future of Shanghai.

"They now need to focus on actually building real cities for real people, not show-off pieces.

"They (Shanghai) have done a lot of things right. Look at the Bund. They are only beginning and they have only done the first row of refurbishing the old buildings. There is a whole pile of them. Those are the most sustainable buildings because they will last several hundred years and can sustain many, many social changes and cultural changes.

"The most important thing for Shanghai, and for all of China, is to build quality. In the past, they just built quantity, the latest glitz, the latest thing. But to me, for a city or country to mature is to go beyond that and starting to build an environment with integrity," he said.

He added that Shanghai has just the opportunity to do that with what can be created at the Expo site.

(Xinhua News Agency April 27, 2010)