Abstract
In Building Globalization: Transnational Architecture Production in Urban China, Xuefei Ren offers an empirically rich and theoretically sound analysis of ‘transnational architecture production’ in Beijing and Shanghai. This book is especially useful for its insight into the use of ‘globalization’ as a buzzword to describe China’s fast-growing cities. The fast production pace of avant-garde designs, modern high-rises, transnational headquarters, and international events in contemporary Chinese cities can easily create a misconception that China has broken away from its socialist past, and that global market logic now determines the production of urban space in the city. Ren’s analysis paints a much more nuanced picture of how the state, together with local elites, enables, realizes, and interprets large-scale, iconic, transnational projects in Chinese cities.
Chapter 1 presents a framework of four structural conditions that, together, have enabled the full-fledged globalization of architectural practices: the liberalization of trade and services by the World Trade Organization; the innovation of telecommunication technologies, thus allowing fast transfer of graphic drawings from overseas architecture firms to construction sites in China; the deindustrialization processes implemented by local governments, which seek to reinvent old inner cities as a means to attract foreign investment and boost consumption; and the enhancement of inter-city competition through the rescaling of urban-level state power by the central Chinese government.
Building on a network analysis of 516 branch offices of top architecture firms in 198 world cities, Chapter 2 constructs a binary typology that distinguishes production cities from consumption cities in the realm of transnational architecture. Production cities are ‘imagineering’ centers, where highly innovative design concepts are first produced and then exported to consumption cities worldwide. Cities in this category include New York, Tokyo, London, Paris, and so on. Whereas the real estate sectors of production cities are typically saturated, consumption cities have booming construction markets; Ren depicts these cities as wild frontiers, where avant-garde and banal design schemes are both realized and the advantages of cheap design and construction workforces (the majority of them migrants) are enjoyed. Shanghai ranks at the top and Beijing the fifth among the consumption cities compiled by the analysis.
In the next three chapters, in-depth case studies based on ethnographic methods provide empirically rich and well-crafted accounts of how global architectural projects are locally embedded. Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to two high-profile international architecture projects, Jianwai SOHO in Beijing and Xintiandi in Shanghai. In Beijing, the municipal government’s pursuit of entrepreneurial urban governance has created new central business districts (CBDs) where luxurious development projects branded by contemporary architecture dominate the real estate market. In Shanghai, historical preservation of shikumen, traditional row houses built by Westerners in the former foreign concessions in the 1920s and 1930s, is shown to be the outcome of two forces. One is the municipal government’s response to local opposition to large-scale chaiqian (demolition and relocation) projects; the other is design ideas put forth by international architectural firms, which mix the old with the new to create a niche real estate market and broaden profit margins.
What is clear from the case studies Ren presents is that design concepts alone do not make cities global. It is through local governments’ and developers’ redirection of resources from traditional industrial sectors to consumption-oriented economies that a city’s global image is created and projected. This structural transformation has impacted different social groups unevenly. Many groups are excluded from the production of global spaces in Chinese cities: migrants working on the construction sites for these international projects, long-term residents relocated away from shikumen neighborhoods, and laid-off workers whose former state-owned factories became development complexes. Ren’s ethnographic accounts remind us that building global cities also generates social divide and income polarization.
Chapter 5 offers a detailed and informative analysis of the National Stadium, called the ‘Bird’s Nest’ by the public, that was the centerpiece architectural creation of the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Ren’s discussion of this building further illustrates the intricate relationship between nationalism and transnational architecture production. Through all five chapters, Ren demonstrates a skillful combination of quantitative and qualitative methods. Although the research is based on the two most politically and economically powerful cities in China, a wider application can be extended to examine smaller, more resource-stringent and geographically remote cities to understand their path toward globalization.
The book concludes with a discussion of the role that ‘territorial elites’ play in facilitating transnational architecture production and the construction of global cities in China. ‘Territorial elites’ is a term used by Ren to describe domestic entrepreneurial class, property owners, state bureaucrats with global agendas, foreign investors, and cultural elites. On Ren’s final analysis, three components have created a breeding ground for transnational architecture production in China: the promotion of place-making by these territorial elites, the cities’ desire for the symbolic power derived from architecture designed by global firms, and the efforts of political and economic powers to influence and shape urban policies. While certainly accurate and informative, one is left wondering about the degree to which Ren’s binary typology of production cities and consumption cities holds, considering that her own in-depth and well-grounded ethnographic work shows that transnational design concepts are being reproduced and reterritorialized, rather than simply consumed in their intact forms, in Chinese cities. Xuefei Ren’s work is a significant scholarly contribution to contemporary China Studies and opens up an exciting research topic for further investigation.