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The Southern Square in the Baltic

Pearl: Chinese ambition and

European architecture in St.

Petersburg, RussiaMegan L. Dixon

a

aMath and Physical Sciences , The College of Idaho , Caldwell ,

USA

Published online: 11 Mar 2013.

To cite this article: Megan L. Dixon (2013) The Southern Square in the Baltic Pearl: Chinese

ambition and European architecture in St. Petersburg, Russia, Nationalities Papers: The Journal

of Nationalism and Ethnicity, 41:4, 552-569, DOI: 10.1080/00905992.2013.768218

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2013.768218

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The Southern Square in the Baltic Pearl: Chinese ambition and

European architecture in St. Petersburg, RussiaMegan L. Dixon

Math and Physical Sciences, The College of Idaho, Caldwell, USA

(Received 4 June 2011; final version received 26 January 2012)

The Baltic Pearl is a 205-hectare development project underway southwest ofSt. Petersburg, Russia, originally financed and designed by a consortium of firmsfrom Shanghai, China. This paper analyzes the discourse surrounding thedevelopment of one section of the Baltic Pearl, the commercial multiplex SouthernSquare, particularly the use of the term European as used to signal the projectsintended cultural orientation and to exert control over the interaction betweenRussian planners and Chinese developers. In the negotiation over the form of themultiplex, control over architectural style emerges as leverage for preservation ofcultural norms and local autonomy. In further analysis, the situation emerges as anexample of Sassens [(2008) Territory, Authority, Rights. From Medieval to Global

Assemblages. Princeton: Princeton University Press] shifting assemblages, that is, areassembling of global influences in a space invoked as national as well as local.

Keywords: national identity; urban change; post-socialist planning

In the small museum in the Xintiandi shopping and dining blocks in Shanghai, China, aplaque in the display celebrating the districts construction claims that Xintiandi

appears Chinese to foreigners and foreign to Chinese. This self-conscious statement

of multiply performed identities marks the urban landscapes of globalization. It underlines

the dependence of identity in urban space on ones position and viewpoint, and suggests

the possibility of benign hybridity.

Current discussions of identity in the Russian Federation emphasize the focus on deli-

neating a clear Russian identity; as Rivkin-Fish and Trubina demonstrate in their volume

(2010), only a subset of even scholarly debates attempts to understand how a new hybridity

might emerge. In the area of post-socialist and Russian urban studies, as Diener and Hagen

note in the introduction to this special issue, a common theme in scholarship is the resur-gence of nationalism in the post-socialist context as expressed in recovered landscapes and

heroes. In this context, the material contributions of non-Russian groups to the new land-

scapes are less discussed; far more frequent are studies of how migrants and other min-

orities navigate existing landscapes designed by the dominant culture (Dixon 2010c;

more generally, Gdaniec 2010). In the case study discussed here, drawn from

St. Petersburg, a Chinese architectural design firm has sought to participate actively in

creating updated urban space. This has entailed both adopting rhetorical devices invoking

St. Petersburgs European past and avoiding perceptions of Chinese designs as essen-

tially or nationally Chinese. Ultimately, the realization of an avowed hybridity, possibly

transferring some of the amenities-based success of Xintiandi, has seemed elusive.

# 2013 Association for the Study of Nationalities

Email: [email protected]

Nationalities Papers, 2013

Vol. 41, No. 4, 552 569, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00905992.2013.768218


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In a close examination of planning negotiations surrounding a project called the Baltic

Pearl currently underway outside St. Petersburg, Russias so-called second capital, the dif-

ficulty of achieving hybridity becomes evident. The investment firm behind the project,

also called the Baltic Pearl, is a development corporation that is also Chinese that wants

to create an innovative global space in a Russian city that wants to be global yet

each entity has strong beliefs about the identity of its nation-state as well as, in the case

of St. Petersburg, about the identity of the city. As a journalist stated in an article in Kom-

mersant news magazine in December 2008, the project is important . . . as a step in our

perception of China in the role of contemporary industrial and financial center of the

world.

The district in question, called the Baltic Pearl, is a development project on 205 hec-

tares, partially on reclaimed land, about 10 kilometers southwest of the historical center.1

As the companys own documentation asserts, The Baltic Pearl project is the largest stra-

tegic cooperation project between China and Russia to date, and is also Chinas largest

public investment project overseas (Conception). The master plan, as finally approved

in early 2007, promised to include more than one million square meters of housing, 400800 thousand square meters of retail and office space, parks, and schools. The lead inves-

tor is the Shanghai International Investment Company, or SIIC, a development firm with

close ties to the Shanghai municipal government. Initial assertions made by the firm

promised an investment of at least 1.25 billion dollars; projections since mid 2008

have suggested as much as 3 billion dollars. As of late 2011, the district boasts a luxurious

business center (complete with technology for videoconferencing with Chinese locations,

see Figure 1) and several completed multiunit residential buildings; units have been on

sale since fall 2008.

Figure 1. The Baltic Pearl business center in July 2008. Photograph by author.

Nationalities Papers 553


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Initial protest with some xenophobic overtones invoked the non-belonging of Chinese

bodies and Chinese influence in Russian/Soviet space, although this protest has mostly

faded in the face of other urgent conflicts over urban development in the city. The

Baltic Pearl firm has made efforts since its first activity in the city to present its project

as a neutral housing development, inspired by the best European traditions, merely

filling a market gap in St. Petersburg. Still, the Baltic Pearl involves new international par-

ticipants in the struggle to define the identity and symbolic landscape of modern

St. Petersburg.

One particular element of the project a planned commercial complex near the

entrance to the district called the Southern Square showed the interplay between coex-

isting tendencies to globalize and nationalize the design. First the space reflected high-

modern globalization in its iteration as a covered sport-shopping complex; then, at the

time of this authors fieldwork, it contained a prominent tower on an open plaza, heavy

with nationalized symbols; and finally, it became a gray block fronted by expansive

parking, a neutral economic space without the romance of outwardly global design or

national markers.Rather than presenting a simple case of a struggle to shore up Russianness and defend

against things perceived foreign (Rivkin-Fish and Trubina 2010, 17), the ultimate fate

of the Southern Square demonstrates the attrition of explicit ideals of hybridity and

suggests that their realization must remain more subtle and gradual, with less impact on

the public debate. One way of understanding the situation is that Chinese ambition to

create a space that would bring the elan of central Beijing to Russia became blunted by

the need to compromise with local realities and corruption. But between and beyond

the national or nation-state level pressure to accomplish the project as a proof of

Sino-Russian political and economic solidarity, a struggle ensued between the firm as a

global profit-seeker and local elements that sought (and seek) to retain what is perceivedas a proud local heritage of architectural excellence.

Literature review

At one level, St. Petersburgs welcoming of the Chinese investment in a large mega-

project reflects the desire of its top officials (and possibly of Vladimir Putin, a Petersburg

native) to enhance St. Petersburgs status as a world city. Arguably, if St. Petersburg wants

to be a world city not only financially but also in the cultural sense discussed by Hannerz

(1993), the city must find a way to integrate and accept new influences, such as Chinese

agency; Ruble (2005) discusses the idea of diversity capital or the ability to take advan-

tage of the new contributions and skills of immigrants, an ability which seems to have nar-

rowed in Russia in the post-Soviet period (Rivkin-Fish 2010, Gdaniec 2010).

The work of Doreen Massey (2005, 2007) has attempted to find a balance between the

imperative for cities to accept new inhabitants and the foundation for a steady social fabric

that inheres in notions of a native or traditional urban culture. Recent work by

Vendina (2005b) indicates that this is germane in the Russian context; her study of the

negative effect of depressed economic conditions on receptivity to Others (even in tra-

ditional Moscow enclaves) suggests that new patterns of housing and a tendency to sep-

arate oneself from the previously mixed Soviet housing blocks will reduce the

integration of new migrants to the city. Diatlov examines common prejudices against

migrants from the Caucasus, comparing their patterns with prejudices against increasing

numbers of Chinese migrants, newly provoked by a resurgence of Chinese out-migration

since the late 1980s (2000, 2004).

554 M.L. Dixon


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The Baltic Pearl engages this last cluster of problems in an interesting way, because

while the project represents the arrival of Chinese immigrants into the city, it is simul-

taneously an embodiment of Chinese elite ambition to shape world city landscapes. While

Moscow reportedly hosts about 20 to 40 thousand Chinese residents with their own banks

and newspapers (Gelbras 2004), Petersburg does not yet have such a large Chinese popu-

lation (partly due to immigration and residency restrictions). There are several thousand

Chinese students enrolled in Petersburg institutes of higher education; there are about a

thousand businessmen and their families, who run everything from centers for importing

construction materials and textiles to restaurants (Interview); and there are at least some

unskilled labor migrants (at least a few thousand brought by the Baltic Pearl firm itself,

who are housed on or near the project site). But the Baltic Pearl, in spite of early blog pro-

tests, is not a typical Chinatown; it is not a housing area designed to attract and house

Chinese specialists as a way of bolstering the local economy. The Baltic Pearl in fact aims

to present a new model of affluent housing for St. Petersburg. While the economic viability

of the project remains in question due to the impact of the global financial crisis on local

demand for new housing, the projects possible success would herald the participation ofnon-Russian (also notably non-European) actors in redefining the quality of urban life in

St. Petersburg.

The question of public space provides a crossroads for several of these questions. The

imperative to provide public space clearly resonates with developers in Russia. The highly

controversial (and now canceled) Okhta-Center, for example, was intended to provide

office space to several thousand employees of Gazprom Corporation subsidiaries; like

the Baltic Pearl, it espoused a distinctly global esthetic. In an apparent effort to soften

the feared threat to the Petersburg skyline from its 300 meter height, the corporation

emphasized the provision of public or semi-public space in its advertisements: a full-

page ad in the June 2008 issue of the tourist/expat glossy Pulse assured readers that theproposed skyscraper would include a generally accessible observation platform at 300

meters, cafes and restaurants for city residents, a year-round ice rink, the largest European

museum of contemporary art, and linear parks in the tradition of Petersburg architecture

(Pulse June 2008: 19). Even though this project was proposed by a Russian corporation,

with the resulting ability to claim a distinctly Russian role in globalizing St. Petersburg,

the conflict with architectural markers of local identity galvanized sustained opposition

(Yurchak 2011; Dixon 2010b). The promise of an amenities-based public space faded

in the shadow of overwhelming objections.

When the Shanghai investment consortium came to St. Petersburg with the intention of

building a multi-use residential-retail-recreational district, they wanted their project both

to communicate understandably to the Petersburg administration and its population and

also to express a vision of Chinese participation in shaping new global culture. Thus,

there were elements in the design of the Baltic Pearl that expressed negotiation with the

spatial-formal language of local Petersburg tradition and also elements that seemed to

express concepts of urban space employed in Shanghai and Beijing.

While cities are often the focus of projections of national power (e.g. Sidorov 2000;

Pagonis and Thornley 2000), they are also the landscape where new sub-national forces

attempt changes that do not fit easy categories. This is not to assert that such forces will

render analysis of national categories obsolete, but that they demand more careful analysis

if we are to understand what current developments on the urban landscape mean for

nation-states as a whole.

In discussing the need to expand an analysis of globalization beyond the self-evidently

global, Sassen draws attention to a set of processes that does not necessarily scale at the



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global level as such; these processes take place deep inside territories and institutional

domains that have largely been constructed in national terms in much of the world (2008,

3). Sassens examples of these multisited, transboundary networks (2008) focus on pol-

itical activism and monetary and fiscal policies. The following case study suggests that

certain nationally-based firms engaged in new attempts to operate in other nation-states

(that is, globally, although Sassens discussion interrogates that very adverb) also

qualify as agents of these processes.

Methods and methodology

The authors study of the Baltic Pearl project began in early 2005, not long after its public

announcement in St. Petersburg in late 2004. Online newspaper sites and their comment

blogs as well as the citys official website and the firms official site provided a rich

source for visual and textual analysis of the development of the projects design. Field-

work in St. Petersburg in fall 2006, spring 2007, and summer 2008 allowed for multiple

expert interviews and site visits; several design books produced for sponsoring officialsand investors in both Russia and China were made available to the author for analysis.

Additional fieldwork in Beijing and Shanghai, China, in January 2008, allowed for

further interviews as well as observation of urban sites completed by the same firm that

is building the Baltic Pearl.

Rather than testing a particular hypothesis, the aim was to discern the enactment of

responses to the urban landscape that did not fit established categories and thus suggested

possible new daily practices (Piirainen 1997; Alasuutari 1995). The attempt of Chinese

members of the initial Baltic Pearl design team to create in the Baltic Pearl a global

urban model that would disarm Russian suspicions of a nationalist-based takeover is

just such an enactment; the desire of Russian planners to hold the Chinese to a promiseof innovative city planning for which they themselves yearned is another. Ultimately

the established categories reasserted themselves, but the documentation of attempts to

avoid them is an important element in understanding post-socialist cities.

Euro-Chinese: a new hybridity?

Notably, both sides used the term European throughout the process of negotiation over

the form of the district. The ambition to globalize Chinese influence used the term as a way

to describe the planned district in the culturally safe mode (also generally palatable to

nationalism) of identifying St. Petersburg as Russias most European city. Local

Russian desires to control and benefit from urban development projects deployed the

term to regain control of the signification and quality of local urban landscapes.

Some observers within Russia have recently seen the country as under siege by

low-wage labor migration from China (particularly in the Far East, but increasingly in

European Russia as well; e.g. A.G. Larin 2003). Scholars have countered with statistics

and discussions of actual case studies (Zaionchkovskaia 2005; Gelbras 2004). Observers

familiar with the overall quality of Chinese migration to Russia note new developments in

Chinese migration to Russia which relate directly to the Baltic Pearl.

First, the frequent narrative of advanced Russia besieged by peasant China misses new

realities. In May 2008, interviewed as part of a project by Russian website Polit.ru and the

Freedom Institute, expert Bobo Lo emphasized that Chinese entrepreneurs increasingly

want to invest in higher-profile projects such as the Baltic Pearl in western Russia

rather than become mere traders or get involved in resource extraction in the Far East

556 M.L. Dixon


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(Lo 2008). Polit.ru commentator Boris Dolgin, in response to commentary by Japan-based

Swiss journalist Christoph Neihardt about Russias relationship to China, also notes that

many young Chinese of his acquaintance see Russia as an alternative field for self-realiz-

ation after leaving Chinas crowded industrial regions. That is, a population of worldly

educated young Chinese may not only shape and guide the presence of Chinese labor,

but bring a level of intellectual and cultural engagement that Russians tend to assume

as their own prerogative (Neihardt 2008).

Second, such developments reposition Russia in the broader political economic frame-

work. Essentially suggesting Russia as the terrain for a spatial fix for excess Chinese

capital (cf. Harvey 2001), several different professors of planning interviewed in Shanghai

in January 2008 described the potential goals of the SIIC in building the Baltic Pearl in

terms of expansion out from China a China reimagined as the center of the very latest in

architectural developments and a major pole of economic development into an arena

with a low degree of economic competition from Western firms and investors in order to

develop its strength before trying to compete in Europe itself. The representative of the

SIIC himself suggested (repeating language used by other representatives and on the com-panys Baltic Pearl website) that Russia was a place in need of new, good housing product

of European standards that is, imagining Russia as a backward space lagging behind

both Europe and China and requiring Chinese help to catch up (Li 2008). Emphasizing

Russia as a field for Chinese growth, the representative of SIIC added, After the end of

the USSR, Russia goes down, but now it develops fast. The level is still not so high. There

is a good chance [for our company] (Li 2008). Several interviewees characterized

Chinese activity in Russia as a good fit for both parties. Speaking of SIIC, a professor of plan-

ning from Shanghais Fudan University suggested that [this] developer has to find other

opportunities to build, outside the country.. . . [and] maybe the Baltic Pearl offers an oppor-

tunity to make a base for selling Chinese products in Russia and Northern Europe (Zhuo2008). This impression was confirmed by another colleague from East China Normal Univer-

sity, who pointed out the additional attraction of St. Petersburg: St. Petersburg is not like

Moscow; theres a different atmosphere, few tall buildings, less developed. So this project

is an opportunity to cooperate, work together, and in the future to sell more Chinese pro-

ducts. . . . Russia is a new market. The US is a major market, where the competition is

keen. In Russia, it is easier for Chinese businessmen there is less competition (Ning

2008). As some have noted, important players in Chinas (at the time) overheated

economy were looking for places to spend excess capital. To some Chinese investors, who

see themselves as more able to withstand the pressures and complications of Russian corrup-

tion and cronyism than Western counterparts, Russia seems like a logical place to vent this

financial steam (Interviews). But what is the content of this Chinese entry, and what does

it mean for a local landscape in St. Petersburg?

Heterogeneity to hybridity: a theoretical bridge

Over a decade after the appearance of Appadurais Modernity at Large, there is still a need

to complicate discussions of globalization as the tension between cultural homogeniz-

ation and cultural heterogenization (1996, 32). Particularly in the case of Russia

caught between East and West, this may not be the main challenge; Russia has long

promoted certain kinds of homogenization across its space, first through imperial Russifi-

cation and then through Sovietization. In the early 2000s, an intoxication lingered in post-

socialist studies with the new, contrasting possibilities of regional autonomy that seemed

to grow throughout the 1990s; numerous articles suggested that Russia was decentralizing



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politically and socially (Lapidus 1999; Melvin 1995; Stoner-Weiss 1999; Valuev 2000).

In 2005 Vendina suggested that Russian cities, which had so long suffered from the

Soviet orientation to the Moscow-based hierarchy, could escape this centralization,

called verticality, through horizontal connections with other cities, both within the

Russian Federation and beyond its borders (2005a). Yet ongoing even then was a well-

known recentralization a renewal of the vertical. Thus, somewhat paradoxically

according to the usual dichotomy that Appadurai (1996) discussed, some elements in

Russia would welcome the homogenization brought by globalization if it would dilute

the homogenization of the power vertical (Gelman 2007); indeed, in Vendinas discus-

sion, globalization would arguably allow greater heterogenization in Russia (2005a).

Appadurais suggestion that even globally shaped tendencies are appropriated and

played out at different scales in states and subregions (1996, 32) recalls Sassens exhorta-

tion (2008) to analyze phenomena that are not explicitly global as part of an effort to

understand how globalization works.

The operation of the kind of globalization represented by the arrival of the Baltic Pearl

firm in St. Petersburg also promised a productive kind of heterogeneity. In spite of theheavy favor from top officials in both nation-states hanging over both sides suggesting

the inevitability of the project and a lack of possibility to shape or influence it at the scale

of the Baltic Pearl, a new horizontality had seemed possible as Chinese designers and

Russian planners discussed the role of the new district in revitalization of the southwest

side of St. Petersburg. Russian planners, enamored with the idea of finally finding a

major investor who could pay for the kind of design they could never afford under the

Soviet regime, hoped for new architectural models and new inspiration.2 The assertion

of a local urban identity sought to shape the project to certain norms and standards of

quality; St. Petersburg architecture specialists have continually sought to force the district

to embody authentic architectural innovation and not just profit on square meters.To understand the Baltic Pearl as a Chinese phenomenon entering Russian space, we

must ask first how the Chinese have adopted in China certain globally common versions of

constructing space, and especially Europeanized space, as a precursor to a move to invest

in Russia. Then we can examine how these efforts resonate in St. Petersburg, a city with a

complex Euro-Russian identity that is currently struggling with attacks on its identity from

the federal Moscow scale (see e.g. Dixon 2010b) as well as trying to absorb the reality of

increasing ethnic presence among its residents and work force.3 Examining the Baltic

Pearl in some detail will allow us to see that western, European Russia is fast becoming

a space of contention for forces that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing

center-periphery models (Appadurai 1996, 32) and suggest a series of imagined worlds

that coexist, overlap, and possibly suggest a very different future landscape for a part of

Russia that has envisioned itself chiefly as European. Actors such as the Baltic Pearl

might be playing an important role in mediating this new future landscape.

In an article about the refraction of international architecture into Chinese space, Dirlik

suggests a productive alternative to the center-periphery or global-local dichotomy: in

the articles conclusion he uses a phrase about the needs and prerogatives of everyday exist-

ence (2005, 50) which stand against off-ground conceptions and goals of spatial utility

(2005, 49). Clearly, the needs and prerogatives of everyday existence shift pragmatically

depending on the shifting makeup of what constitutes a locations native population;

even as certain groups advocate for an unchanging vision of national purity, other agents

are engaged in negotiation over a transformation of what everyday existence requires.

As was clear from coverage of the Beijing Olympics, and as the cited article by Dirlik

(2005) discusses, China has become the arena for some of the most extravagant

558 M.L. Dixon


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experiments in high modern architecture, by the likes of Herzog and de Meuron and Rem

Koolhaas. In fact it is more precise in terms of scale to claim that such tendencies have

been metropolized, or adopted in some large cities, rather than adopted as a regional

architecture typical of all of China. Arguably, such projects as the Birds Nest stadium

and the new CCTV headquarters stand far from the needs and prerogatives of everyday

existence. As Dirlik also reminds us, they partake in a dialogue that is not between the

global and the local but between the global and the global talking about the local (2005,

37); there is little visible interaction between local spatial culture and the architectural

results. Will the same thing be true in St. Petersburg?

The Baltic Pearl as European

Since the SIIC reportedly could not afford a charismatic architect to design the entire project,

the Baltic Pearl falls somewhat outside the magnetic field of high modern architecture and

into a nexus of negotiation between local planners, individual agents inside the Chinese

design process, and the desires of Chinese investors. The Chinese agents in the negotiationhad to reckon with fairly stubborn local conceptions of the city and the spaces that it requires.

In this process, the Baltic Pearls promotional literature shows that designs related to the

Baltic Pearl were presented, not as Chinese, but as international and modern.

Among the local conceptions is the idea that St. Petersburg is European; in fact, in the

late 1990s, when the St. Petersburg Leontief Centre produced a conceptual outline for the

citys latest master plan (adopted in 2005), open European city was the dominant motto

of the document. This context clearly influenced the language used by Chinese investors in

their presentation of the project from the very beginning as something European:

We have attempted to create a contemporary urban district of European type. To offer a trans-

portation system corresponding to this level and commercial services of European class.(Conception for Habitation)

However, other language suggests that the Chinese investors and designers were not

merely using the trope of Europeanness as a mask to appease the locals. First, the language

indicates that the Chinese investors see St. Petersburg as in some way inadequately Euro-

pean, needing to attain European standards; this repeats the rhetoric of City Governor

Valentina Matvienko in her annual speeches to the City Legislative Assembly, calling

for European standards in city services (Matvienko 20042008). Second, the rhetoric indi-

cates that the Chinese had something specific and additional in mind besides using Europe

as a diversionary tactic. Other language used earlier on the firms website asserted that

We want not merely to build a universal district of European type with developed infrastruc-ture and services of European quality, but also to create a new way of life. (Residential realestate; emphasis added)

The conception of the quarter described on the website invoked a new way of thinking:

the concept of development of an international enterprise of an integrational type

(Conception for Habitation). The project was disavowing traditional Chineseness

but also asserting a uniquely Chinese innovativeness.

Intentions for Chineseness in the Southern Square

The Southern Square in the plan was for four years (20062010) dominated by a tower

(see Figure 2) surrounded by a broad plaza with four petals or wings that were slated to

house four different types of post-industrial functions: leisure, shopping, fitness, and hotel.



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The text on the projects official website had this to say in January of 2009 (my trans-

lation from the Russian):

In the first building series in the southern section of the district, construction has begun on anarchitecturally unusual multiuse commercial center. . . . In the vertical view the building willrepresent the two-headed eagle with outspread wings the sign of Russia; in the horizontalview the bloom of a clover, a legendary flower that brings luck. However, the petals ofthis commercial complex do not only symbolize love, prosperity, happiness and health, theyalso have completely defined functional aims: in the flower there will be a hotel complexwhich will joyfully welcome guests of the Northern capital. Also, on the area of the SouthernSquare it is planned to open a trade gallery with stores and boutiques for every taste, a store forelectronics and appliances, a grocery store, cozy cafes and restaurants, a modern cinema, and a

large fitness center. (The commercial complex Southern Square; emphasis added)

Further consideration of the symbolic content and practical implications of this plaza

permits greater precision in evaluating Russian responses to it. In the text, the design of

the tower has been presented as a synergy of important Russian and Chinese symbols:

the top of the tower supposedly is simultaneously a two-headed eagle and a flower. In con-

versation with a representative of the firm in December 2006, the flower was described as a

lotus, an important Chinese symbol. The text here refers only to clover, the sign of luck

eliding the national Chinese presence in the tower. But similarly to a map in the design

book showing Russia and China linked by a pearl (the Baltic Pearl project), this landscape

element seeks to position Chinas power and its initiation of Russo-Chinese cooperation

grandly on the local skyline.Chinese interviewees did not uniformly approve of this element. A research associate

at Tongji University in Shanghai, who had been associated with the early stages of

Figure 2. The Lotus Tower in the Southern Square, displayed in July 2008. Photograph by author.

560 M.L. Dixon


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planning for the project, suggested that the design for the tower had been decided exclu-

sively in Shanghai via a separate competition among Chinese architects. The research

associate had little else to say about the design, but he did indicate that this plaza did

not form a part of the project as it had been envisioned by the Tongji team that initially

collaborated with Russian counterparts. His demeanor suggested disapproval of this

element that interrupted a complete vision of the space as an urban district of a certain

modern type (Xu 2008); the addition of the flower and eagle contradicted the purity of

the global hybrid vision with nationalist specifics.

When asked about the ideal form in the Baltic Pearl, the Tongji research associate

rejected the idea that there would be any distinctively Chinese forms. Rather, he said,

the space would be characterized by the most popular, successful European style of life

to St. Petersburg, bring a new lifestyle to St. Petersburg . . . with global-approved forms

(Xu). As expressed by Cai LaiXing, the main press representative of the Baltic Pearl subsidi-

ary in St. Petersburg, the Baltic Pearl will have a modern operation and management model

[that] will represent the latest European lifestyle at the frontier of the world today harmony

between human andnature (Conception). In this comment we can see, perhaps, an attemptby some Chinese designers to take over the conversation between the global and the global

talking about the local: after appropriating this idealized universal European globally-

approved mode of space, the Chinese would now take their own version of it to Russia.

Russian reactions to Chineseness

The presentation of the project in Russia was initially very cautious, partly in anticipation of

xenophobic reactions. Aleksei Oreshkin, a journalist for Gorod, one of the more liberal news

magazines at the time, wrote in December 2004 that he was struck by the complete absence

in the design of Chinese identity or recognizable Chinese forms. In spite of early reportsthat the project would include a branch of the Peking opera and a Buddhist temple, no such

element appeared in any design document that I saw. Oreshkin apparently regretted this; he

summed up the design as classic townhouse. As he added, it was obvious that the Chinese

investors had set out to create a project that would in no way remind anyone of the words

Chinese quarter or Shanghai, which, according to Chinese intelligence, have negative

connotations in Russia (Oreshkin 2008). Unlike projects in Western Europe, such as Frank-

furt and Rotterdam, where local developers and urban administrations are creating China-

towns in order to lure and house employees of Chinese firms that are clients of those ports,

the Baltic Pearl has been from the beginning carefully couched to be a project for locals

not for potential Chinese buyers. Oreshkin also noted that at the press conference heattended, the companys representative asserted firmly that no more than 1% of housing

in the Baltic Pearl would be sold to Chinese citizens.

Certainly there were xenophobic reactions, with recognizable tones and forms of

expression. Some of the most notable of this type are as follows:

Life will flow there by its own laws and traditions! Chinese always and everywhere live inisolation!

1% [of the housing] that means more than 10 thousand square meters where youll havebunks stacked three high and Chinese will sleep there in three shifts, who wont study thelanguage and wont observe the laws of the land where theyre staying, and will live by

their own rules in isolation.

On one side your neighbor will be a Chinese drug addict and on the other a Chinese drugdealer, above you a Chinese prostitute who invites clients home and below you Chinese



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Mafiosi, filthy entrances and yards, shot-up doors, you can only go outside during the day.(Comments)

Notably, these anxieties are directed at two factors: a misuse of the housing space according

to Russian notions of conceptions and goals of spatial utility (overcrowding) and the for-

mation of a separate lawscape within space occupied by Chinese. These anxieties are shaped

significantly by Western Russian perceptions of current realities in the Russian Far East,

where, as one contributor to a news blog wrote, [I saw] an announcement hanging

openly that said No Russians may enter! The notion of diluting national space with a

proxy polity composed of swarming laborers alarms many Russians who share these views.

Further, though, there were very specific objections to the Baltic Pearl as a designed

space, claims that certain elements would not fit within the local St. Petersburg con-

ceptions and goals in an esthetic and social sense. Alluding to the Soviet approach of

developing large city blocks as single projects or kvartals, another blog contributor wrote:

The kvartal construction proposed by the Chinese is not typical for Petersburg. Our city wasfrom the beginning built up project by individual project and this gives it a particular unrepeat-

ability. Building by blocks took place in Soviet times and reached its peak from the 1960s to1980s. (Comments)

Another contributor also wrote that he was bothered most of all by the Soviet-ness of the

design. That is, he saw the design not as bringing a new style of life and a vision of uni-

versal European urban delight, but as reimposing overly controlled space (see Figure 3).

Asked specifically about the Southern Square, one Russian architect had only scathing

remarks. For him, this plaza represented not a step forward into post-industrial functions

but a step backward into overscaled Soviet spaces.

Its completely clear that here two scales, two cultural environments cohabitate. Here its dis-tinctly and completely visible that this part and this part were drawn by different people, andthis part with this flower [the Southern Square], with this exit to the sea, these are drawn bydifferent people. And if this [eastern residential] part is drawn for people, and its understand-able why there are such gaps and distances, then this [commercial area] continues to be drawnfor Soviet man. . . . Its again the ideas of a certain composition, you understand, in which aperson becomes a part of some kind of spatial game, its Stalinism again, China, MaoZeDong. (Kharchenko 2006)

However, contrary to the comments of the Russian blog contributors, who disliked the

elements they saw in the project of Soviet kvartal-style planning, the two Russian archi-

tect-planners whom I interviewed had had precisely this set of conceptions and goals for

spatial utility in mind during their own interactions with the company. Kharchenko

approved the courtyard spaces inside the residential complexes.[This arrangement] is different from our kvartals, its not so bleak, it has a different scale, itbecomes more European. It has a more human face, [theres] more warmth, more humanismin this environment.

Former government architect Nikitin, who was the main liaison with the succession of

Chinese design teams (and had visited Shanghai during the projects early stages) also con-

ceded the quality of the residential space.

[In China] they build a lot of good housing. Therefore . . . they will definitely meet this chal-lenge [here]. I dont doubt that the housing will be of good quality. A higher quality of housingand residential environment than our Brezhnev kvartals. It will be super-social housing. So in

that sense its a success. (Nikitin 2006)He added, though, that the project per se, the general composition, is terribly weak.

Overall, the other architect Kharchenko agreed with the bloggers that the ultimate result

562 M.L. Dixon


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left much to be desired and (again) was far from a new universal vision of transmuted

European urban life:

. . .

this was essentially the first case when, after a decade-long interruption, we in the city hadthe chance to see in the shape of this big territory, how it [ kvartal-scale planning] woulddevelop . . . and naturally, knowing what is going on in the world, knowing, and hearingthese promises from the Chinese, that the project should be interesting, contemporary,

Figure 3. The interior courtyard of a residential building under construction. Photograph by author.



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taking account of world trends, in the area of housing, in urban planning, [we figured] that thisproject should be interesting. But the result was a bleak pragmatic uninteresting project, nobetter than Soviet ones.

So while there was anxiety from uninformed citizens about Chinese stereotypical over-

crowding and conflicting political loyalties on Russian spaces, conceived of as an inva-

sion, some Russians deeply involved in negotiation over the project perceived it as areturn to Soviet qualities rather than either a step towards a stronger re-Europeanized land-

scape or, for that matter, a nationalist Chinese imposition on it.

By contrast, the Chinese often perceived the conditions in which they had to operate as

overly conservative and oppressively local. The promotional literature produced by the

Baltic Pearl continually emphasized the connection to local Petersburg architectural tra-

dition; in fact, the November 2006 iteration of the design plan, completed by

OveARUP, included an extensive backstudy of the structure of residential courtyards

throughout Petersburgs history. Yet while the firm has incorporated local urban mor-

phology into the discussion throughout its design process, the firm has never sought to

copy local norms. It emphasizes adherence to actual codes and ordinances as a way tofacilitate the construction process, but the firms promotional literature constantly empha-

sizes the creation of a new way of life and a new Petersburg brand. In a revealing

passage from the 2008 UN Habitat Award competition application, the documents

author emphasizes the contrast between global world or international Chinese

thinking and localized conservative, out-of-date, obsolete Russian thinking.

At the beginning of the project, we were faced with the conservative cultural thinking modeand out-of-date rules and regulations in Russia. In terms of design, for example, we invited themost prestigious designers in the worldfor creative designing, but there were a lot of restraintsregarding urban architecture. To protect the cultural relics, the city does not allow buildingany structure higher than 75 meters despite the fact that for a modern urban architectural

complex with colorful skylines and in diversified forms, the ornament of high-rise buildingsis indispensable. In a word, though we were conducting modern and internationalized plan-ning and design, we had to face the obsolete Russian standards and conservative attitudetowards new things and a string of issues regarding design, approval and management.(Habitat Business Award; emphasis added)

As the emphasized phrases indicate, the Chinese author of the application sees the Baltic

Pearl as very much identified with international architectural trends, including the assump-

tion that the ornament of high-rise buildings is indispensable. The description of the

local reaction refers to responses to design iterations in 2006 and 2007 by the City Archi-

tectural Council, that is, of a group of people who saw themselves as the guardians of a

particular mode of Petersburg architecture. The shift within the city since that time torely less on the so-called elites of traditional architecture and urban culture and more

on the forward-looking businessmen and proponents of international investment has les-

sened the opposition in the city administration to high-rise buildings.

Not surprisingly, the passage quoted above implies that global equates to modernity

and international success, while the local implies conservatism and obsolescence: this is

a common argument used against local resistance to internationally conceived projects.

By appropriating this familiar language, the Chinese firm also firmly identifies itself

with the most prestigious designers of urban space. While the Russian side in Petersburg

might sometimes portray the Baltic Pearl complex as the arrival of a nest of swarming

Chinese laborers, the Chinese side for its part portrays the district as the arrival in Peters-

burg of a node in the global web of urban elegance, a favor of sorts to the backwards-

looking Petersburgers.

564 M.L. Dixon


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Discussion: the end of the poetic tower

In April 2010, local news outlets covered the unveiling of a new Finnish-Chinese design,

the result of new consultations following the accession to the project of the Finnish firm

SRV Group. This design basically a huge gray glass-and-steel block with a vast

parking area between it and the main access road to the district has entirely lost the

promise or even hint of cultural hybridity or colorful globalization.

How did the project arrive at this point? Visits to the offices of the Baltic Pearl firm in

late 2006 hinted at heady cross-national cooperation: Russians worked alongside Chinese,

and not only local architects were engaged but a recent round of architectural bidding

(called an international proposal collection) that had just concluded involved some of

the worlds most famous high-modern architects, including Koolhaas. As mentioned, no

elements of traditional Chinese architecture had ever been part of the plans; the possible

Chinese architecture envisioned was quite different, more experimental. Interviews con-

ducted in early 2008 with representatives of the Baltic Pearl firm suggested a possible

association with the kind of urban architecture linked to redeveloped historical streets-

capes in Shanghai, such as the shopping/residential area Xintiandi. Fieldwork in Shanghai

and Beijing suggested that, were some of the latest Chinese architecture to come to

St. Petersburg, it would embody the colorful, oddly shaped experiments appearing in

those two cities.

Russian planners reaction to this new gray version showed that the Southern Square

tower, which had been seen as a capricious insertion in late 2006 and early 2007, now

seemed a better option than the gray block proposed by the Finns. The deputy chair of

the City Committee on Architecture and Construction (KGA), Viktor Polishchuk, was

quoted as saying that the design in the form of a flower was, perhaps, unusual, but

unique. Now they have decided to replace it with banal Eurotypicality (Instead of a

flower). BN.ru quoted Polishchuks comment that the project presented a banal Euro-pean composition. Here there is no symbol, no attachment to place, no connection to

the Baltic Pearl. It needs more emotional energy (Golokova 2010). In this way he dis-

misses the Chinese claim, made through the discourse of Europe, to be the best steward

of new spatial developments.

Instead of the new ease of globally hybrid and amenable spaces the Starbucks kind

of global comfort, if you will the outward appearance of the district, viewed through the

latest version of the Southern Square, presents the gray efficiencies and necessities of glob-

ally mobile investment. Arguably, the Starbucks version of globalization erases local

specificity and has its own serious drawbacks; however, in the case of the Baltic Pearl,

it is interesting that the initial hybridizing promise of the projects implications hasfaded somewhat, and the potential for the district to become a concentration of globally

anonymous, non-local, but universally enjoyed comforts has proportionately diminished.

Anton Buchev, the Chair of the St. Petersburg city administrations Committee for

Strategic Investments maintained that the project is a wonderful example of Russo-

Finnish-Chinese cooperation and shapes the investment climate in the city (In Peters-

burg). However, a news story reporting on the impending involvement of the Finns stated

that in this way, the most heralded project to lure foreign capital into the construction

industry in St. Petersburg has turned into a typical Petersburg building site (stroika)

(Nikiforov 2009). From trumpeting the expression of love, prosperity, happiness and

health in the Southern Square in 2009 (The commercial complex), the Baltic Pearl offi-

cial site now merely makes claims that visitors can do shopping of European quality

(The multifunctional complex).



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Conclusion

To develop further Dirliks point in 2005 about off-ground notions coming down on

Chinese locations, we must ask: What is off-ground influence now? As I have suggested,

the global has been to some extent nationalized, or even localized, as a tool to deploy in

development space by the Chinese. This refracted global now comes to Russian ground,

confronting a range of perceptions and expectations that affect how it will be seen

either as completely foreign and ungovernable, as a return to a rejected past, or as a poten-

tial importer of good new product.

Specifically, the Chinese seem to be experimenting here with a new notion of the

Chinese self as designer of space. Whether it is a covert marking of the landscape with

a distinctly Chinese tower or the pretension to redefine the European notion of urban,

what is East here seems to be in flux, under negotiation, a moving target. A professor

of planning interviewed in Beijing suggested that after moving from Soviet-influenced

mass housing to a traditionalist period of strict preservation in the 1990s, China now

wants to chart a new course:

They are trying to balance these two things [traditional/historical and new]. They are alwaystalking about it during projects.

There is a big difference between the Eastern and Western cultures. Right now the East isreceiving a lot of Western influence. The West is comparative [accepts contrasts]. In theWest, there is fusion e.g. the Louvre glass pyramid in the palace courtyard: old and newtogether. Right now China wants more similar [things], more contact.

The Baltic Pearl thus is not only an experiment in finance and investment in a country with

a low degree of financial stability, it is also an experiment in place-making to rival the

experiments already conducted in Europe. As a small indicator of globality, we might

speculate on the possibility that this Chinese project will be the conduit for other agentsof globality to enter Russia. Starbucks is a ubiquitous sight in the spaces in Chinese

cities that are most hip: while it was pushed out of the Forbidden City, it prominently

occupies the former Emperors teahouse in the Qianmen development south of Tiananmen

Square. It also has a prominent location in Shanghais Xintiandi shopping district, the

epitome of successful hybrid development mentioned to me as a model by virtually all

of my Chinese interviewees. In an interview in December 2008 with the news journal

Kommersant, Baltic Pearl representative Wang Changda noted that the company was con-

ducting negotiations with international chains, especially British and American, for

tenancy in the planned retail and commercial space of the Baltic Pearl (Why do people

believe). Will this Chinese space become the mode of entry for that symbol of globalcaffeination and capitalism?

What will happen as the Baltic Pearl project becomes more fully built remains to be

seen. Buildings are sprouting up all along the Peterhof highway. The housing units are

selling, if more slowly than the company planned before the financial crisis. Perhaps

the space will feel Soviet when it is completed or perhaps it will feel new, clean,

modern, and efficient. As a pro-Baltic Pearl blogger wrote on a news website in 2003:

Of course I feel a personal interest in how it turns out. I live not far away and therefore I wantmy growing children to see not only dirty Khrushchev-era tenements but also to go to the[planned] water park, to stroll on a covered pedestrian walkway and so on. The way that ithappens in the whole normal world. (Comments)

This contributor envisions himself enacting simple spatial practices on the site that seem

to him completely normal and that support his idea of family activities; he does not

566 M.L. Dixon


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perceive the resulting development as an expanse of competing spatial practices, with

different cultural and social (national) representations demanding their own spaces.

How many people will share his view might determine the fate not only of the develop-

ment itself, but of St. Petersburgs sustainable social and economic development. It is a

distinct if glimmering possibility that a new pragmatism will override the traditional per-

ceived conflict between East and West.

My interviewee (Xu) at Tongji University in Shanghai put it well, when I pressed him

to describe what Chinese forms might be useful to adopt in Russian space. He persistently

resisted even an abstraction of any forms as Chinese, and finally said: Chinese things are

connected to the whole world. You cant have a cultural conflict with objects that you use.

Acknowledgements

The author would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of the reviewers. Research

for this manuscript was made possible in part through National Science Foundation

DDRI grant 0623599.

Notes

1. The genesis of the project and its connection to the Chinese state as well as details of itsimplementation through committees of the St. Petersburg administration have been discussedin Dixon 2010a.

2. Certainly large projects were carried out under the Soviet regime. However, strikingly, in morethan one interview, planners in St. Petersburg lamented the way that lack of funds in the Sovietperiod prevented the full realization of urban designs, leaving large housing areas deprived ofpromised amenities and effective infrastructure (e.g. Nikitin interview). They clearly expectedthat Chinese wealth could overcome those constraints.

3. The reaction of St. Petersburgers to, for example, the proposal for the Gazprom skyscraper (firstknown as Gazprom-city and later as Okhta-Center) is not merely a case of cultural conservatism;an important catalyst for the resistance was a desire to preserve the political leverage of develop-ing local building codes, which Okhta-Center at first ignored (see Dixon 2010b). (Also seeRuble 1990 about the political role of Petersburg landscapes in the 1980s.) That case furtherdiffers from the Baltic Pearl in that the conflict was Russian-on-Russian, in a way Moscow vs.St. Petersburg. That controversy in fact shifted responses to the Baltic Pearl, which began toseem extremely mild by comparison.

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