Abstract
The pace of change in China in the past three decades has been breathtaking. Opening up to the world—at least in economic terms—has unleashed an historically unprecedented wave of urbanisation. Whole new cities with more than 1 million inhabitants have sprung up, while established cities such as Beijing and Shanghai have expanded rapidly since 1980. There are many ways to study this complex and far-reaching phenomenon and, quite rightly, this is indeed what happens as many academic researchers, from China and elsewhere, focus on different aspects of this sea change of global significance. Xuefei Ren in her book opts for a rather original approach by looking at the role and impact of architects and architectural design in what is now the largest construction market of the world. This endeavour offers a fascinating window not only on how architects and their designs are engaging in contemporary China, but also on how the broader processes of urbanisation and globalisation are intertwined in myriad ways, as well as on the role of its idiosyncratic institutional framework which combines state-led and market-driven elements in often opaque and unexpected forms.
In the first two chapters, Xuefei Ren presents a more general view of the rise of ‘transnational architectural production’ and how this is related to global city formation in China. She departs from theoretical notions derived from the work of Saskia Sassen on global cities, of Peter Taylor on world city networks and on that of Donald McNeill on transnational architects. In an ironic twist, the global city discourse—originally aimed at explaining how New York, London and Tokyo became dominant strategic nodes in the global economy—was used by Chinese policy-makers in the mid 1990s to construct a future vision of their large cities, Beijing and Shanghai in particular. They assumed that Chinese autonomy vis-à-vis foreign investors could only be achieved by having their own global cities. The task ahead, then, was to create global city environments to attract international investment independence, thereby reversing the causal chain of Sassen’s global city narrative. Indigenous Chinese architectural design, much of it still mired in the aesthetics and the organisational logic of the Communist era, could not meet the demand for iconic architecture that would suggest a global city environment and attract high-end producer services. Architects from abroad, therefore, had to be brought in to realise this vision of Chinese global cities and the stage was set for the arrival of foreign architecture firms.
Architectural design, meanwhile, had already globalised. The liberalisation of world trade in services, in combination with the possibilities offered by ICT, had enabled an ever-larger spatial separation of place of architectural production (say Rotterdam or Basel) and place of consumption (Beijing or Shanghai). This holds true for large, so-called strong-service architectural practices aimed at efficiently designing and realising more or less standardised, although large and complex, buildings (for example, SOM from Chicago) as well as for small so-called boutique or strong-design firms aimed at creating eye-catching buildings (for example, UN Studio from Amsterdam or Jean Nouvel from Paris). Demand for and supply of transnational architectural design evolved together, creating markets for different types of design.
Inviting foreign architects to help with place making in Chinese cities, however, has created tension. First, there is the inevitable lack of more intimate knowledge of the local context, be it institutional, technological, organisational or geographical. Using branch offices and local Chinese partners is one strategy to mitigate this tension. Secondly, and more fundamentally, there is the clash between the agenda and the aesthetical aims of the foreign architect (together with local public and private developers) and those of the local population, ranging from ordinary inhabitants to taste-makers. These tensions are dealt with in the subsequent chapters, which are case studies of several projects in Beijing and Shanghai. These case studies are based on ethnographic fieldwork and extensive knowledge of the local context.
The first case study investigates how a newly established indigenous Chinese real estate company, SOHO, has developed a Chinese version of loft-style apartments in Beijing. These apartments have been purposively designed to mix functions of living and work to allow not just combinations of home and office, but also to make possible an easy switch from residential to commercial space. To sell these apartments, a branding strategy was devised which involved conspicuous media events, including the publishing of a literary magazine, boosting the symbolic capital of the apartments aimed at the new élite (entrepreneurs and high-income professionals) in China. Market-making, apparently, cannot rely on ‘starchitects’ alone.
The next two case studies look at the attempts to preserve historical buildings in Shanghai and Beijing. In Shanghai, amidst urban renewal projects of giant size (where, between 2001 and 2004, no less than 300 000 households were relocated from their old central neighbourhoods to high-rise housing in the suburbs as part of an urban renewal plan), it gradually dawned upon policy-makers that attractive environments for transnational élites to work, live and shop are often historical neighbourhoods as they seemingly express a local identity in a globalising world. An American architectural practice was hired to redevelop the Xintiandi area with its traditional Shanghai shikumen buildings and turn it into a popular destination for high-end living and shopping.
The fourth case study examines the struggles for the commissioning and realisation of the iconic Olympic Stadium or Bird’s Nest designed by Herzog & de Meuron. The choice for this particular design by the Swiss ‘starchitect’ firm was daring and explicitly intended to mark Beijing’s claims to be a global city, not only in the international arena but also within China itself. As in Shanghai, hundreds of thousands of households had to be relocated, but in this case there was also serious contestation because of the expensive design and because of its ‘foreignness’ that was seen by some as going against the grain of their conception of ‘authentic’ Chinese culture. Herzog & de Meuron were able to pull through, thanks to the support of the budding liberal cultural élites in Beijing and only after cancelling the expensive roof construction.
Xuefei Ren has provided a well-written, timely and fascinating window on the intertwined processes of globalisation and urbanisation in China through the lens of architectural design. It shows the blurred, ever-changing and, hence, unpredictable boundary between state and market when it comes to urban development, although it could have paid more attention to this aspect. It also makes clear how internationally renowned architects are used to flag the claims of large cities, in particular Beijing and Shanghai, as global economic centres. The wider impact of their realised designs is not much touched upon in this book—but then, the nearly all-encompassing process of urbanisation takes place at such a staggering scale in China that one author can only deal with a tiny fragment of that process in any depth. Xuefei Ren, deploying such a narrow focus, has come up with a very valuable and original contribution to the debate on Chinese urbanisation.