Night rides

When I was doing fieldwork on rock music in Beijing in 1997, I lived at the campus of Beijing University. The concerts often took place in either the center of the city, or in the eastern part. Aside from my vivid memories of these concerts, Beijing in those days was also marked by the night rides on the ring roads in the little yellow vans, or bread taxis as they were called, back from the rock venue to the campus. Not hindered by traffic, the city would pass by in a flash, a miracle of lights, big buildings, and some remaining signs of the old Beijing, such as the Lama temple located on the north side of the second ring road. This spectacle of driving full speed through a city continues to mesmerize me to today; how I love these nightly taxi rides over the ring roads of Beijing. Used as I am to the highways in Europe, that are almost always located outside of the city, the ring roads turn the city into a graspable entity, a backdrop that provides security about one's location—“Ah, we are now at the Bird's Nest,” “Ah, this is Beijing University,” “Now we are at the CCTV building,” and so on (see Figure 8.1). The rides sparked off an interest in the meaning of these ring roads, an interest that increased together with the number of ring roads over the past years—up to seven, if we wish to include the ship-shaped seventh ring of 940 kilometers (of which only 38 kilometers passes through Beijing).

The ring roads serve as an important marker of identity in Beijing—they not only have come to signify one's class background, they also help people to easily locate others. Living around the third and fourth East ring road counts as a sign of luxury and inclusion, unlike the poor people and migrants who are located mostly beyond the fifth ring road. The ring roads are crucial for the cognitive mapping of the city; for example, when one asks someone where she lives, the answer is likely to be “between the third and fourth ring road in the East.”

This gestures toward a more general concern regarding megacities: how to keep them livable, how to grasp them mentally, and how to avoid people feeling lost and alienated?