Escolar Documentos
Profissional Documentos
Cultura Documentos
A Sampling
Rem Koolhaas famously highlighted the uniformity of Chinese
cities with his identification of the generic city in the Pearl
River Delta in the 1990s. Here Jiang Jun, Editor-in-Chief of
Urban China magazine, and Kuang Xiaoming highlight the
unified diversity and complexity of contemporary urbanism
through his own system of classification.
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Migration City
This is a city with a mobile
population, or a city on the move
with the people inhabiting it. There
is either an attraction here or a
driving force elsewhere to keep the
city/people moving; thus it is about
the dynamic inequality between
both ends of the migration, as well
as the insertion of an alternative
content (people) into another
context (city).
Macro-Planning
Centralism in government always leads to the
prioritisation of planning in the urbanisation process.
When planning is top-down beyond the city itself, it
becomes macro-planning. Chinas planning has been
projected at a national strategic level both in feudal
times and under communist rule. The configuration of
urban policy has been determined either through social
institutions from Confucian ideology (which for elders
and social superiors was a major tenet) or as
administrative commands through government
sanctioned by red-titled file directives from the
Planned Economy. The city in feudal times was
developed through a courtyard house model designated
by the emperor, and in socialist times it was developed
through a workshop model designated by national
industries. As the Chinese city was not a city with its
own civil independence, it is necessary to define the
macro-planned Chinese city within its social and
physical context.
Hi-China
Urban Chinas Hi-China (a general
taxonomy) is a database of surveys of 100
Chinese cities that includes more than
500,000 photographs. It is also a general
directory that is intended to operate as a
whole, reflecting the multiplicity of
Chinese cities and offering the most
efficient way of managing, and searching
for them. Not only can this generic
directory instantly classify the large
numbers of images from each city, it also
generates links between the different
cities by recognising the parallel
relationships between them, such as the
urban activities of dwelling, producing
and consuming. As the subdirectories of
all levels are simultaneously a series of
independent urban projects, Hi-China is
gradually evolving into a project of
projects, in which each project can be
linked to all those cities that share the
same segments of knowledge. In this
way the invisibility of order is indicated
by the visibility of the phenomenon: the
super-reality is constructed by the
ordinary and trivial reality.
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BoomBust
The Open Door signals that Deng Xiaoping communicated
through his second tour of Southern China in 1992, when he
visited Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Zhuhai and Shanghai making
speeches that reasserted his reformist economic policies, were
soon taken up by the whole country. One after another, almost
every city started to build its own small Special Economic Zone
(SEZ). These development zones generated important tax
revenues. Ironically, in the mid-1990s Chinas largest economic
zone, Hainan, lost its leading position in an economic bubble
created by the real-estate market, and became a failed
experiment a rotten-tail city with thousands of square metres
of unfinished building sites. However, the Hainan Lesson did
not spread across the whole country like the successful
Shenzhen Experience did. Obviously, with development zones
flourishing throughout the country, some cities became little
Shenzhens, while some others inevitably became little Hainans.
This only goes to show the double-edged effect of an informal
economy based on market principles with loose governance.
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Rotten-Tail City
This is when a city-making movement is frozen by the collapse of
the economic ecosystem during a bubble economy. Enough halfconstructed buildings and infrastructure litters the urban landscape
to make it the city incomplete.
Collective Space
To unify urban diversities is to introduce the generic into
the specific. Macro-planning deploys the states generic
urban programmes and planning structure across the
borders of individual regions. Once the prototype of the
city is set up as a developing model, it can be generalised
through a centrally managed system. As the genesis of
most cities was created under the same patriarchal
system, similar forms of urban living and functioning
operations both mass-produced could be easily found
even among distant and dissimilar cities. So in these
different cities, parallel lives of sameness can be regarded
as taking place in a self-organising way. The spatial
structure of these generic cities mutates with time, while
the parallelity of similar lives and urban activities in
between them can be seen as a collective heritage from
the socialist policies of the past. In this regard, the
taxonomy of Chinese cities becomes legible as a universal
subdirectory that is based on a generic spatial structure.
Once a self-sufficient and isolated island China despite its recent ambitious
globalisation process, remains deeply affected by colonialism, communism, global
industrial transfer and the financial markets. Globalisation is diluting Chinas
uniqueness (its national character), and this is being replaced with
homogeneous parallel universes of urban phenomena co-existing simultaneously
both in China and in certain countries abroad (communism, the Great Leap
Forward, science cities, instant cities, the Peoples Commune, shrinking cities,
mega-dams, Olympic cities and so on), reflecting the parallelity of Chinas
collective fate with that of the rest of the world. Shown here is the cover of the
Urban China Special Issue on the Parallel Universe (Issue 26, 2008).
Deconstructed City
The reverse action (demolition) of citymaking is actually a preparation for
constructing the city. The constructed
that replaces the demolished with new
content needs to match the original value
of the targeted demolished urban sites but
with new added values. This is a socalled victory of the purely economic
value of new zoning plans compared to
the historic value of the existing
architecture and urban fabric.
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Generic Model
As contemporary Chinese cities can be regarded as sharing a common
structure of space and time, a generic model can be set up to categorise
any of these types of cities. The Modernist classification of urban
activities living, working, shopping and transporting is still feasible
in configuring a triangular circulation model, while the Chinese
characteristic of the administration-oriented city-making model is
emphasised by the CCU (central controlling unit) in the political core.
Public spaces and social services, provided either by the government or
by society, are distributed in between. The dimension of politicised
urban timelines feudalism, colonialism, socialism and post-socialism
influences stacked layers of the whole city structure, thereby acting as a
counterforce of tabula rasa Modernism. A generic urban model is an
all-inclusive envelope for a number of cities to be interconnected nodeto-node, integrating them into a hyper-system of cities.
Overwritten Time
Factory-Product City
This is a mono-type city that revolves around
the manufacture of a certain group of
products. The urban lifeline is also the
product line, and the inhabitants are the
workers, who with their families work on the
same type of products. In the recent wave of
urbanisation this has become the most
common type of city generation. A monotype city is producing, while the city itself is
also being produced by a specific product. It
either has an integrated production line, or is
within a region with a larger production
framework. A factory-product city is always
identified with its product, expanding and
shrinking physically with export-market
fluctuations elsewhere in the world.
University City
This city is formed out of a single university, or
several universities clustered together on one site.
It has the usual functions to match the integrated
composition of an entire city. The consumption of
its population, as well as the magnetic pull of its
national and international cultural economy, make
it an important governmental gambling chip for
the catalytic development of a new, much largerscale city around the university.
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Event City
This is a city generated or strengthened by a specific
mega-event, which provides a platform for the
extraordinary injection of funds around the
designated time and place of the event, and where
disproportionate resources are invested in order to
maximise the energy of the event. Sometimes the
physical resources and infrastructure produced are
massive enough to generate a new city in itself, or to
regenerate an old city. A related variation is the
theme park city, which provides Arcadias of
exoticism, where dwellers are only consumers and
tourists instead of permanent residents.
Village City
The village city is the physical product of the
conflict between rapid urbanisation and the urbanrural duality of the planned economy. Massive
amounts of built-up infill are placed on rural land,
which results in the collective construction efforts of
the villagers, who build private houses on the site of
their urban village motivated by potential rental
income. This type of informal implosion provides
affordable spaces for the poor immigrant labour
force and creates a dense, chaotic or even terrifying
urbanscape in the government-organised scene of a
new city under construction.
Text 2008 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. Images Underline Office
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