Monthly Archives: February 2012

new project — architectural worlds

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I am currently working as an editor at Architectural Worlds, the journal of the Shenzhen University School of Architecture. The Journal has a long history, in fact, when I first came to Shenzhen in 1995, I also worked there as a translator! Anyway, this year, the journal is shifting its focus from buildings to the social context of architecture and urban planning. The preface from the first edition of the renovated journal is:

Why Architectural Worlds?

“S” is a tricky letter, signaling more than fill-in-the-blank grammatical shifts from the singular to the plural. Instead, “s” indicates an emphasis on and recognition of lived diversity. We start from one – one world, for instance – and by adding an “s” we suddenly find ourselves amongst a plethora of worlds – the peoples, societies, and institutions of the earth.  In other words, the presence or absence of an “s” reveals both the topic of conversation and our level of analysis. Are we talking about the nature of the world in general, or are we talking about distinct cultural worlds?

Examples of how an “s” might bring us from abstract musing to actual experiences abound. Being means “existence”, but the word beings includes all life forms. Culture refers to our shared capacity to use symbols, while the word cultures reminds us that in practice we use different symbols in different and often incommensurable ways. Indeed, for many topics, speaking about a singular, essential nature indicates an epistemological shift. Thus, in everyday life, we talk about birds or a bird, but mentioning Bird raises the conversation either to the level of taxonomy (all birds are in the Animalia Kingdom, Phylum of Chordata, and Class Aves) or to the poetic (The free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wings in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky…)

By changing the journal’s name from World Architecture Review to Architectural Worlds, we at AW are announcing our commitment to and curiosity in human diversity. We still provide the informed, scholarly perspective on world architecture that defined our previous incarnation. However, by widening our editorial scope to include the cultural values and social institutions that distinguish one architectural world from another, we hope to open conversations about the place of architecture in constructing fully human lives.

The journal is bi-lingual, although we are still working out the ratio and format of translations. We are looking for critical essays on cities, urbanism, and/or buildings. If interested in writing for AW, please contact me.

5:34 this evening

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This afternoon on my way home, I noticed that a crowd had gathered at the entrance to my housing estate, where an old woman lay on the ground, her right ankle propped on her left knee as if she were relaxing on the beach. Her clothes were baggy, but not dirty as if she had just decided to lay down and take a rest. She wore one of the plastic gloves that restaurants provide for eating goat ribs or pig feet. She held a hand-rolled cigarette and was explaining that she wasn’t sick and in fact had never been sick. Occasionally she puffed on the cigarette. Two police officers stood near her, their hands clasped behind their backs, gazing away from her. Our estate guard chatted with several of the  regulars who hung out in the garden — all wondered where she had come from since she did not live here. As a heavy set man left the scene, he called out to his friend, “There’s actually nothing to see.” No one knew who she was, nor did they know how to call for someone to come for her since she didn’t have a cellphone.

dog (fucked) times

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Last night, our downstairs neighbors locked their pooch out on the balcony, where it cried until well after midnight. I have noticed more and more pet dogs in Shenzhen. Feral cats have occupied greenspace on the Shenzhen University campus and  young children continue to purchase goldfish, turtles and rabbits, however, high status, well-dressed dogs ride in large handbags and appear with their owners in parks and on street corners, often joining them in restaurants and boutiques. Indeed, a good friend has a fluffy and quite friendly, brown bichon frise that is groomed weekly, eats from the table, and sits on his master’s lap at private teahouses.

The original scratched graffiti in the above photograph notes, “People who raise pets are abnormal [could also translate as perverted].” Someone then came along and added “don’t”, asserting that non-pet owners were the truly perverted.  Continue reading →

old haunts

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In the mid-1990s, when Nanshan District launched “Cultural Nanshan” most events were held in or around the Nanshan Cultural-Sports Center (南山文体中心), which included a sculpture museum and the Red Earth Cafe and Bar, where Zero Sun Moon, an early incarnation of Fat Bird first performed. The design and scale of the Cultural-Sports Center reflected early Shenzhen values; it was three stories high, had an outdoor stage for Everybody Happy (大家乐，video) events, and small, cultural entrepreneurs rented rooms. I remember walking two-lane boulevards to use the computers at one of those shops, as well as playing go at the weiqi and western chess club.

Located diagonally across the street from the Cultural-Sports Center, the Nanshan Library was finished in time for the Handover and signaled the area’s future designs. Beijing sculptor, Bao Pao collected discarded metal and sutured it together to make the Library’s fence, which still stands. However, the Cultural Center crumbled where it stood until 2009, when Nanshan District approved an 800 million (8亿) budget to build a landmark building on the site. By this time, of course, the Coastal City mall was already open and the abutting Tianli and Poly Center Malls were nearing completion in anticipation of the Universiade. The point is that this area of upscale consumption is now called “the Nanshan Cultural Center” and the Nanshan Cultural Sports Center has been demoted to a bus station even though that’s where all the cultural infrastructure was / is being built.

Below, pictures from a walk around the Nanshan Cultural Sports Center block. Of note, Nanshan District’s neo-Confucian propaganda, the remnants of Old Nanshan, and the neoliberalization of the cityscape, including a high-concept Marriage Registration Bureau Hall and shopping plaza. Also, there will be a diamond market just around the corner.

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The Shenzhen Model, 20 years after Deng Xiaoping’s 1992 Southern Tour

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Reading a Shenzhen newspaper requires a sense of the absurd, a sense of the city’s history, and awareness of what’s up in Beijing. The front page of today’s Jing Bao (晶报2012年2月24日), for example, proclaims, “If the Special Zone doesn’t reform, it will soon disappear (特区不改革很快就消失).” The next headline is “In 2025, Shenzhen’s GDP will be the 11th largest in the world (2025年深圳GDP全球第11名)”, asserting that “The Shenzhen Model has Great Significance for the Country (深圳模式对中国意义重大).”

Inquiring minds want to know, well, which is it? Is Shenzhen not reforming fast enough to avoid extinction or is the Shenzhen Model stable enough to become the  world’s 11th largest urban economy over the next 13 years? Continue reading →

blooming schlumbergera

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I knew it as a Christmas cactus, but our blooming cultivar is officially a member of the Schlumbergera genus, buckelyi group. Plant is thriving in muggy warmth of Shenzhen February. Of interest du jour, a brief search for instructions on how to keep said cactus happy also turned up the information that Schlumbergera is originally from eastern Brazil.

Apparently, Schlumbergera truncata was first cultivated in Europe by 1818 and S. russelliana was introduced in 1939. My S. buckleyi is a descendent of an 1852 deliberate cross of truncata and russelliana. Yes, the English plant crosser was surnamed Buckley. Schlumbergera had its 15 minutes and was cultivated in different colors for hothouse habitats, but by the early 20th century (a mere 50 years later!) it lost popularity and many of the breeds were lost. From the 1950s, breeding resumed in Europe and North America, which is also when S. buckleyi made recorded appearance in the Pacific colonies of Australia and New Zealand.

What I’m curious about is the history of South China traffic in houseplants. Clearly, schlumbergeras, which were named to commemorate Frédéric Schlumberger, a French cultivator of cacti didn’t jump across South America and then swim to Shenzhen on a pacific gyre. I’m assuming that an ancestor of my S. buckleyi came to Hong Kong through postwar British colonialism. But I’m not sure. After all, there were British concessions in Tianjin and Shanghai and I’m sure that one or two of the elites would have had hot houses. I’m thinking that if cacti survived a trip from Brazil to England, they could also have survived one from England to the Chinese coast. So, does anyone know interesting stories and / or books about household gardening practices that illuminate the tortured tracks of colonial homemaking abroad? If so, please let me know.

field at hongshuwan

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Plastic bags and spent firecrackers accumulate on reclaimed field at the Hongshuwan subway station.

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汉奸 — notes on China’s gendered racism (and it lives just like gendered racism in the United States)

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The bloggers at 乌有之乡 continue to push neo-Maoism to its logical extremes. Today, Feb 21, one of the hotter posts is 今日汉奸知多少. The keyword here is 汉奸, which can be translated as “traitor to one’s country”, but literally refers to “a person who betrays the Han people (背叛汉族的人).” Thus, the article title, which clumsily (albeit patriotically) alludes to Meng Haoran’s poem (春晓), might be literally translated as “Who Knows How Many Are Betraying the Han People Today? as well as figuratively as “Who Knows How Many Are Betraying China Today?”

The slippage between betraying the Han people and betraying the Chinese people is a key difference in contemporary critiques of what’s wrong with Mainland society, reminding us that racism continues to shape these debates. It bears mentioning that 汉奸 debates are eerily similar to White supremacist concerns with race traitors because yes, the talk gets just as ugly just as quickly and yes, the loudest voices in the debates are also men who embody an ideal racial type.

For example, Mu Chuan identifies those who are not only corrupt, but like Guo Jingyi whose corruption leads to the transfer of Chinese resources to foreign multinationals as being Han traitors. This seems rather straightforward enough. However, Mu Chuan also accuses intellectuals like Xiao Han (萧瀚), a lawyer and proponent of making Chinese legal system more democratic as being 汉奸.  Continue reading →

new village origin stories: Caiwuwei redux

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What to make of the following quote by Terry Farrell, architect behind the KK 100?

The site of KK100, [Farrell] says, used to be Caiwuwei village, a poor and rundown area. Kingkey had to build seven towers to rehouse local people and a further seven for other locals to own and rent out, so that they might share in the boom. It’s an extraordinary idea: even as China hurtles into capitalism, it does still show remnants of old socialist ideals.

It echoes a quote from archello, a website dedicated to world architecture. Although archello has erased the reference to socialism:

The 3.6-hectare site [for the KK 100] was previously occupied by a dense residential quarter, Caiwuwei Village. The developer had the creative vision to form a company with the villagers, initiating an entirely new approach to the art of place-making in Shenzhen. This serves as a model for 21st century for urban change all over the world. Existing buildings were run down and living conditions were poor. As part of initiating this transformation, a Joint Development Initiative was formed in which villagers became stakeholders. Each owner was offered a new property as well as a second home which serves as an income generating asset. This meant the preservation of community links that are built over generations.

Origin stories for Shenzhen and its various buildings continue to use “poor backward Baoan villages” as a foil for their own achievements. In Mandarin, stories about the KK 100 are more detailed (深圳城中村专题－罗湖蔡屋围，蔡屋围：梦想的真实围绕, for example), but in essence no different: the KK100 symbolizes urban proress.

What’s more these stories share an enthusiasm for height, illustrating how phallic aesthetics not only bridge the social distance between England and China, but also between the Shenzhen Municipal Government, KK 100 developers, and Caiwuwei Villagers. Indeed, Farrell has received acclaim both for his design and the fact that it is the tallest building ever realized by a British architect, a neat illustration of the link between competitive masculinity and nationalism.

Importantly, the idea of the KK 100’s height is established through explicit comparison to low (level, quality, income) Caiwuwei. Continue reading →

Thinking conservation: whose lives matter?

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Thursday last (Feb 16), the Hong Kong version of the bi-city biennale opened and then on Friday afternoon, Shenzhen began its closing events with a series of roundtable panels. Along with moderator Juan DU, architect Ben Wood, and urban planner Michael Gallagher, I participated in panel #2, contemporary perspectives on preservation.

We agreed that history should serve living people and thus conservation was not a question of saving old buildings for their own sake. Rather, what is conserved are patterns of human relation and environments that support those relationships. In this sense, any act of conservation entails a value judgment; whose lives do we wish to strengthen and deepen by creating sites that reference the past?

Not unexpectedly, it was at this moment of making value judgements that our differences became clear precisely because history serves different purposes in different social groups. Continue reading →