The city provided three new apartments for the family, including the spotless 700-square-foot, two-bedroom apartment she now shares with her son, her father and three generations of the Shih Tzu dogs she raises. The apartment is legally hers, although she had to promise not to sell it for five years.
Sitting in her new living room, in front of a display case containing photographs of her dogs and one of Mao Tse-tung, Yu broke into a sassy smile.
"I'm kind of enjoying the municipal relocation," she said.
Even people whose experience has been less satisfactory say the subway construction is worth it.
Guo Jian Hong, the manager of a tobacco and sundries store in central Shanghai, has seen her business dry to a trickle because subway construction has turned her street into a dead-end. Still, she said, "the subway is a good thing -- it benefits people." Some residents and stores nearby had to be relocated, she said, but "I haven't heard of any complaints or protests."
"Maybe in foreign countries it's different," she said, "but in China it's no problem."
Xu Dao Fang, an engineering consultant with the Shanghai Transportation Assn. who helped design the city's subway system, said he encounters envy when he talks to transportation planners elsewhere who must appease opposing forces before forging ahead.
In the United States, he said, "you cannot neglect the opinions of all the various parties. Here, it's a lot easier because the system is more centered."
Brian Taylor, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, noted that the United States used to be much more heavy-handed in its planning policies. Consider, for instance, the way whole swaths of central Los Angeles were razed to make way for the Santa Monica Freeway. Perhaps, he said, China is simply at a different stage in its evolution, both in terms of economic development and political participation.
From about 1890 to the late 1970s, he said, Los Angeles expanded its transportation system at an astonishing rate, first building the world's most extensive streetcar system and then tearing it down and building the world's first and largest freeway network.
"So it's not as if we haven't had these enormous investment eras in transportation infrastructure," Taylor said.
Cities "go through these various epochs of growth," he said, and at the moment, Los Angeles is in a very different stage than Shanghai.
