In the wake of economic reforms in the 1990s that helped set off the largest urban migration in history, China had the rare opportunity to embrace cutting-edge city-building approaches as it expanded its skyline. It could have avoided the mistakes that made Los Angeles into the land of gridlock, or bypassed the errors that turned the banlieues of Paris into what one American planner calls “festering urban sores”.
But China looked back instead of forward.
— theguardian.com
Meanwhile in Africa: Urban China: Chinese Urbanism in Africa
7 Comments
simple answer - because most of the american companies are planning chinese cities
its a huge topic; I don't think it can be encapsulated so easily in an article.
While working with developers, it struck me how uncritical -simplistic- they are of the perceived end result for a project. It really usually is about copying something already existing. Development seemed to be about appropriating the site as much as possible to the perceived architectural and living environment present elsewhere rather than the other way around.
On the surface its quite simple ..but in its depth, its about a lot more: cultural associations, financial benefits, lifestyle clichés (which relate back to cultural associations), etc. Hence, ownership of cars and prestige, professional allure of office glass towers, etc.
It's overly simplistic to compare to US models. China's historical legacy has left cities fragmented in a way that US cities never were, and development occurs with huge disconnects in style - and demographics - between adjacent districts. While certain of America's mistakes (proliferation of highways and thus congestion, embrace of car culture) are in evidence in China, others (such as the suburban/urban divide, so violently illustrated over the past few weeks) are not. The contemporary Chinese city now exists as a kind of metropolitan field condition in which the urban and rural intermingle in a heterogeneous patchwork in all but the most dense, historic city centers.
The headline is somewhat misleading, given that the article's text explicitly states that China's government planners and private developers *have* been learning from their mistakes, and are making earnest efforts to reverse the troubling trends that lead to environmental degradation, alienating suburban landscapes, dissolution of community, etc. It's thus somewhat disappointing that positive developments are downplayed in favor of schadenfreude clickbait. (The author's "Original Copies" suffers similarly - the premise and conclusions of that book are infinitely more nuanced than the title and the "duplitecture" neologism used within).
For a more in depth study of the architecture of modern and contemporary China, I can't praise Jianfei Zhu's Architecture of Modern China (2009) enough: it's the best book I've read on Chinese architecture - perhaps on Chinese history - and does an excellent job of situating recent developments their proper in historical context.
Wasteful consumption is a sign that you've arrived. It's all about status, so if we have terrible traffic jambs, at least it's people who can afford cars (stuck in traffic), not poor bastards out in the country side on their bikes. Eventually they'll get on board once hipsters rule the world, but for now they will ape the first world as Americans aped European Beaux Arts in the 19th century, and its modernism in the 20th century. Fortunatly, for the former, but unfortunatly with the latter, we had the budget to build a lot of it, while the Europeans where smart enough not to listen to their own "futurists" and filled their suburbs with these perfectly sunlit towers surrounded by highways in ample open space. Ha!
"China had the rare opportunity to embrace cutting-edge city-building approaches as it expanded its skyline. It could have avoided the mistakes that made Los Angeles into the land of gridlock, or bypassed the errors that turned the banlieues of Paris into what one American planner calls “festering urban sores”. But China looked back instead of forward..."
Ironically, when the New Urbanists "looked back" for solutions to this very real problem, they where derided by the "cutting edge" crowd in the West for being reactonaries rather the progressives they actually were, both environmentally and socially. Why is this? Becasue schools in America are (for the most part) dedicated to promoting anything that isn't associated with history and tradition. Never mind if there's an actual solution perfectly adapted to our current times, it's been done before. Now the Harvard Boys club wants to re-dress their modernism point 7.0 into Landscape Urbanism where all the storm water will be cleaned by parks (great idea) except that humans will still be condemmed to live in these dystopian modernist landscapes. Che cagata!
I love these philosophical constructs, but it is still a lot of US architectural and infrastructure consultants that make a lot of decisions. The chinese governmental authorities lap it up because they are so much in awe of the overseas designer. And the cycle of shit starts.
^ Beyond that there is the export of capitalist culture in all its forms including the imaginary visions of television and advertising, and China's penchant for coping industrial tech and culture ('modernization').
A few years ago I was approached by a Chinese importer who had outfitted factories with equipment. I this case a huge facility had been set up with state of the art equipment from Italy and other places to produced insulated metal panels - your standard prefab construction panel - by the square mile, but they didn't have a product line or even an understanding of how the panel system works and needed someone to design a system and product lines, set up promotion, marketing, etc. They were ready to fly me to China all expenses paid, but I had zero interest.
It is interesting to see a couple hundred years of industrial revolution compressed into a few decades. And sad. The question now is can they transform again into a more sustainable society. Which I doubt, as greed rules there as much as it does here. Interesting to note that the importer was fairly fluent in English and wealthy enough to live in NY while sending his kid to an elite private school.
Well I'm not really sure how true this is, but I've heard that Chinese culture in general suffers from a sort of creativity problem that is a product of strict "in the box" schooling and upbringings. Hope this doesn't sound stereotypical...but this phenomenon had been linked to the many Chinese copy cat products, the copy cat towns, and probably this copy cat infrastructure. It seems that Tammuz's point is probably even more true in certain cultures that lack/discourage "out of the box" thinking.
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