From my new favorite site Smashing Telly.
He/She is writing about Dubai, but so true for Shanghai/Beijing as well... I thought something like this many times but could never express it so well.
"It looks like Manhattan except that it isn’t the place that made Mingus
or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolfe or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any
one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas
that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme
toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a
self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the emptiness that surrounds them."
