Deputy director-general of the Shanghai Municipal City Planning Management Bureau Wu Jiang said on Tuesday that the city government would issue an order disallowing any changes to be done to the 64 old streets in the city. The order aims to protect the original style of these streets that reflect Shanghai's history and culture.

Over the past few years, Shanghai has done much to protect the city's historical and cultural sites as well as the historical buildings. Some experts say the new order shows that such protective measures have begun to cover the city's old streets.

According to Wu, these protective measures were first applied to individual buildings in the city and later will expand to the whole area of the historical and cultural zones. Recently, they discovered that the city's old streets are worthy of protection, too. If, some day, these streets are re-constructed or widened for city expansion purposes, a historical buildings nearby will be inevitably affected, too. To protect the area as a whole, the Shanghai government had decided to issue an order to the effect that these old streets should never be expanded in future.

Sixty-four streets in the order, including Hengshan Road, Yuyuan Road, and Shanyin Road. In the city's downtown area, there are altogether 144 roads under protection as they are scattered in one of the 12 designated historical and cultural zones, and are therefore protected as an indispensable part of the zone itself.

In order to restore the city's historical feature and save the old trees growing in protective zones, the Shanghai transportation department has already cut off the city's rail construction volume.

So far, 27 square kilometers of land in the city's downtown area have been approved as historical and cultural zones, accounting for one-third of the city's total downtown area measured in 1949.

(Chinanews.cn June 23, 2006)