Category Archives: photos

lecture notes – SCUT

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Yesterday, I participated in a Biennale event at 华南理工大学 (South China University of Technology campus slideshow, below).  The event was organized into three sections: SZHK Biennale 2011 Main Venue; SCUT professors who had participated in SZHK Biennale 2009; and a SZHK Biennale 2011 sub venue event, the Enning Road Transformation Study Group (恩宁路改造学术关注组), an alliance of students and residents to voice concerns about Guangzhou’s plans to raze this historically important part of the city.

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Now, visiting Guangzhou, especially with Guangzhou people is pleasurable because they love their city. They also love to compare their city to Shenzhen, which is interesting for what it tells us about the different ways we create a sense of belonging to “our” cities. The conversations I had highlighted important differences between the creation of urban identities in Guangdong Province’s two most important cities. Continue reading →

Historic traces – Xixiang Qilou (骑楼)

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Buildings connected with archways, qilou (骑楼) are architectural symbols of Cantonese urban modernity. They first appeared in the early 20th century, when Guangzhou razed its city wall in order to expand streets for commerce and modern forms of transportation, but the style quickly spread throughout the Pearl River Delta. Some say that qilou were a continuation of an indigenous Cantonese architecture style, protecting pedestrians from both the sun and the rain. Others claim that qilou were a Cantonese adaptation of western architectural forms. Nevertheless, what remains clear is that like the Paris arcades or Venetian sotto portico, qilou enabled shopkeepers to display their wares and pedestrians to stroll by and window shop, creating the vibrant street cultures that we associate with these cities.

The former county seat of New Baoan County, Xixiang was one of the first areas outside the Shenzhen second line to urbanize. However, unlike guannei, where urban educated architects and planners designed with an eye to contemporary western forms, Shenzhen villagers designed with an eye to Guangzhou and Hong Kong indigenous urban forms. Consequently, on some of the streets in Xixang it is still possible to stumble upon contemporary adaptations of the qilou. Although, like Guangzhou’s early 20th century qilou, Xixiang’s 1980s qilou will most likely be razed to build air conditioned malls, further privatizing street culture. Nevertheless, glimpses of a few corners from Xixiang street life suggest the variety of possible urban forms.

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Just FYI, in Dongmen, some qilou have been preserved during the construction of the Dongmen pedestrian commercial area. Also, there are some qilou along the older sections of Nanxin Road, just beyond Nantou, the county seat of Baoan during the Ming, Qing, and Republican eras.

imported greenspace, clear skies, and sun

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clear skies have returned and shenzhen shimmers, entices actually. when the horizon opens, walking settles the heart and has me thinking that we need sustainable worlds for no other reason than the joy they bring; smog discourages in all senses of the word.

yesterday, i wandered through some of the universiade greenspace/ coverage to prevent visitors from seeing nearby construction sites and noticed, once again, the extent to which the city and developers have taken to importing foliage to create beautiful spaces. the (malaysian, i believe – if you know please tell me) trees grow here. and yet. bringing this foliage requires uprooting other landscapes, burning fossil fuels, and (in houhai) filling in coastal waters with imported soil. moreover, these high end landscapes do not flourish without extensive care, so that this beauty remains entangled not only in unnecessary, but also unsustainable inequalities.

shenzhen is not the only city importing foliage in order to make a more perfect world. certainly los angeles and las vegas have set the global standard for transplanting eden. and perhaps that’s the point. in our rush to build a perfect world, we fail to realize we’re already there.

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Shenzhen Bay Park

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The rough edges of the Shenzhen Bay Western Area Landfill Zone, or Houhai (Backwaters) are being smoothed into upscale coastal parks. In fact, the construction is so fresh, seashells and oyster shells still surface in the sod. Yesterday, I walked to the Shenzhen Bay Park, which extends from the western edge of Mangrove Park and used to be a small harbor called Dongjiaotou, where goods and building materials were shipped to and from Baoan County and earlier incarnations of Shekou. Importantly, this upgraded coastline functions like so many parks in Shenzhen; the pleasantness of the park literally covers and symbolically blurs what it took to get here; and in this visceral sense, urban planning and landscaping are ideological practices. Impressions of Shenzhen Bay Park, below. Photos of Dongjiaotou Harbor Area and bluer skies from 2003.

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constructing the semi-public sphere – ocat renovations

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i have noticed that many of the shenzhen spaces that i enjoy might be defined as semi-public. small scale spaces designed with particular publics in mind, these spaces repurpose the clunky mass architecture of most of shenzhen into interesting nooks for conversation and debate, without falling into the normative excesses of so many private homes. indeed, recently, ocat loft has extended its conversion of industrial manufacturing zones into creative cultural spaces.  the newer area will be the site of the 2011 shenzhen-hong kong biannale.

importantly, cultural consumption and the gentrification of working class spaces have predicated the creation of this semi-public sphere, where individualized desires blunt the the progressive edge of public debate. and yet, if no one shops in these stores, hangs in the coffee houses, and attends gallery openings, the area will collapse and conversations displaced. such are the paradoxes of contemporary urbanization, images below.

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Education and the production of educated masses

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This is a speculative post from yesterday’s walk through Shenzhen University. What struck me in the rubble and organization of public spaces was how much was dedicated to creating mass audiences. Not just not enough for people to be present to observe and thereby constitute political hierarchies, but also that knowledge mediates the rituals of inclusion. Moreover, collectively watching sporting events seems to (1) create massive masses and (2) reminds us that we learn more through the body than we do through eyes and ears when they are pinned uncomfortably in plastic seats. And yes, all these bikes collectively used and then forgotten over summer vacation. For the over 40 crowd like moi, these images tell how extensively China’s political-economy has been restructured from cities of cyclists on their way to work units to cities of recreational biking and cars.  Impressions of technologies for creating educated masses, below:

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impressions of shenzhen north station

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Visited the new Shenzhen North Station (深圳北站) and it is as overwhelming as intended (my friend said that he had heard that the city aimed to construct the best train station in Asia, and then when I mentioned this description to another friend, he commented, “so it’s the largest in Asia, right?”) So yes, another complex of landmark buildings that seems to dissolve into the relentless shuffle of state of the art stadiums, ever-taller buildings, and more imposing public spaces and has me wondering if Shenzhen might be best experienced as an architectural museum – with all that such a characterization implies, including a general (global?) indifference to museum pieces except as collector’s items. Impressions below.

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qinghu – end of the line [du jour]

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Walked around the qinghu station, which for the moment, is the last station on the longhua line. in its underdevelopment, the area reminds us that Shenzhen’s “villages in the city (城中村)” began as “new villages (新村)”, as locals took advantage of their land, proximity to Hong Kong, and cheap labor to jump into global chains of production. Nevertheless, with the subway, bourgeois taste has begun to restructure the landscape and upscale housing developments now push Longhua factories and dormitories further inland. Pictures below.

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that was then

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Wandered over to the Shenzhen Bay sports stadium, where people took pictures of themselves in front of universiade installations and topiary. To give a sense of what is meant by “Shenzhen speed (深圳速度)”, I am posting pictures of that particular bit of earth, below.

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Importantly and often overlooked, hidden in plain sight behind painted walls and temporary green space, the bit of earth just south of the pageantry has gone to seed, awaiting post-universiade construction.

a facelift is only skin deep: dongmen

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Universiade facelifts continue and, along certain paths in the city – the global, neoliberal, middle class paths – one walks through rubble under tarps and past construction sites. Nevertheless, several steps off those intended tracks, life continues undisturbed by visions of what Shenzhen leaders think foreigners / outsiders should see. The effect of this selective construction is to further isolate pockets of working class ordinariness and transform it into unsightly poverty. In fact, one of the reasons urban villages are as such is because the city grew up around them, closing them in, and distorting their relationship to greater landscape. Thirty odd years ago, a village was a tight cluster of single story story houses and narrow paths in the midst of rice paddies, streams, orchards, and small docks that opened to either the Pearl River or the South China Sea; today an urban village is a tight cluster of three to eight story rentals that hum in the shadows of thirty story apartment complexes and postmodern skyscrapers even as the sea recedes.

Below, a walk through Dongmen, Hubei New Village, and Old Luohu work unit neighborhoods, begging the question: if what we see is what we get, why aren’t we learning to look more deeply?

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