Posthuman policies for creative,smart,eco-cities? Case studies from China

Abstract

Policies promoting creative, smart, sustainable cities continue to dominate global urban policy scripts. This article explores how posthuman assumptions embedded in such scripts render the socially embodied human invisible and analyzes cases of their rationalization and enactment within China. The article concludes that understandings of creativity in Chinese urban aesthetics expose premises of globally promoted urban policy scripts more transparently than those informed by European aesthetic traditions. The Chinese city is understood to manifest the creative obsessions of humans rather than to actualize a transcendent, idealized vision separate from that of its human creators. This resembles Guy Debord’s idea that what we see in the world—how the world is architected—is a materialization of triumphant ideologies. The contemporary Chinese city, incentivized by the entrepreneurial state, makes visible Debord’s globally dominant “integrated spectacular.” Once creativity and intelligence are rationalized, the autonomous “creative,” “smart,” “eco” city is branded in a global supply chain of city production. Consequently, the posthuman city need not account for the conditions under which embodied humans are actually inspired to create and adequately compensated for their creations. Rather than attributing the failure of posthuman policies in Chinese cities to Chinese exceptionalism, these cases expose universal fault lines in the policies themselves.

Keywords

Creative city smart city eco-city Chinese city posthuman

Introduction

Inspired by global urban policy trends, the Chinese central government has incentivized the building of creative, smart, and green cities since the early 21st century. In general, such cities aspire to foster civic ideals of creativity, openness, and attractiveness. Creative city, eco-city, and smart city policies differ in substance, but as a whole they aim for (1) flexible, entrepreneurial economies; (2) enhanced mobility via information and communication technologies (ICT) infrastructure; (3) participatory, transparent governance; (4) clean, sustainable environments; (5) high levels of culture and education; and (6) creative, tolerant people (Vanolo, 2014: 887). Nonetheless, many new Chinese cities, often dubbed “ghost cities,” lack embodied vibrancy. Planned culture as themed cities or districts feature shiny architecture, art zones, ethnic culture shows, and ecological parks. Despite attempts to enliven space, they are often deserted, instead used to primarily flip real estate or to stage events such as weddings (Wang et al., 2010). Many lack necessary infrastructure and employment opportunities (Kim, 2014; Shephard, 2015). Spontaneous cultural activities are often monitored or disrupted, with only municipally sanctioned activities promoted (Oakes, 2015). The capital accumulation motives driving eco-city development wreaks havoc on the environment (Chien, 2013; Chang and Sheppard, 2013). Implementation of nearly half the global market share of video surveillance technology, including facial recognition software, and use of software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens, severely hampers entrepreneurship (Zhai and Chan, 2018). In short, it appears that the promised ideals of creativity, openness, and attractiveness fail in the context of the new Chinese city.

Some have argued that such policies fail due to Chinese exceptionalism. Many scholars within China attribute this to the “peasant mentality” of Chinese urban officials (Huang, 2006; Yu, 2018). Others claim that Chinese cultural notions of creativity, and the recombinant nature of current policy frameworks, stymie innovation and dynamism (Keane, 2009; O’Conner and Xin, 2006). Still others attribute policy failures to systemic problems such as rent-seeking, censorship, theft of intellectual property, and lack of public participation (Zheng and Chan, 2013). But some attribute the failure of creative/smart/green policies in China to short-term incentives bred by global neoliberalism (Chien, 2013; Kim, 2014). I agree with these latter analyses and furthermore suggest that the lack of vibrancy in the new Chinese city illuminates, with remarkable transparency, global issues in the neoliberal calculus informing much current policy-making. Additionally, I submit that such a calculus is dominated by posthuman perspectives which humans can choose to adopt, adapt, or reject. Finally, I highlight the risks of enacting policies uncritically informed by posthuman assumptions that displace the site of intelligence and creativity from the embodied individual to the city as a whole.

As a humanities scholar specializing in Chinese urban literature and cultural studies, my primary methodology is to “read” cities as texts. From 2005 to 2017, I visited each of the cities discussed in this article (some multiple times), conducting interviews and attending conferences and meetings related to urban planning policy. Initially (from 2005 to 2008) during two year-long research leaves in China, I conducted semi-structured interviews with urban artists and urban planning officials, professors, and doctoral students about newly emerging creative city, cultural city, and eco-city policies in China. Interviews and field research trips were conducted in the major municipalities of Shanghai, Beijing, and Chengdu. During shorter field research trips, I again visited Shanghai in 2010 and 2012 and Beijing in 2010, 2012, 2015, and 2017. I rely heavily upon secondary literature from social science field research to inform my interpretations of the success of these creative/green/eco-city policies in China over the past decade. I also regularly communicate with Chinese urban planners and policy-makers.

From a theoretical perspective, I start with the premise that above all, creativity and vitality require an acknowledgement of humanity. While the city has long been understood as an environment that instrumentally rationalizes human relationships (e.g. Simmel, 1903), the degree to which human bodies have become viewed as prosthetic devices or data assemblages to be manipulated by powerful elites is alarming in an era increasingly governed by unchallenged posthuman assumptions. Despite celebrating creativity, openness, and attractiveness, it seems that the human as an embodied source of urban dynamism has become oddly invisible in creative/smart/eco-cities. This may be because technological advances have rendered 21st-century vitality in the creative/smart/green city a no longer humanistic endeavor. As literary scholar Ihab Hassan opined in 1977, “five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call post-humanism” (830). N. Katherine Hayles identifies a posthuman perspective as follows: (1) it privileges patterns of information over material instantiations, embodiment in a biological substrate is incidental to life; (2) it considers consciousness an epiphenomenon rather than fundamental to life; (3) it considers the body as simply the first prosthesis we learn to manipulate, extending or replacing the body with other prostheses merely continues a pre-birth process; (4) it sees the human as seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines, there are no essential differences between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals (Hayles, 1999: 2–3). Posthuman perspectives see current technologies as fundamentally altering forms of creativity, intelligence, and life itself.

The posthuman city manifests the global “integrated spectacular” form of power (capital) theorized by artist and cultural critic Guy Debord. In his 1967 treatise, Society of the Spectacle, Debord defined the spectacle as the material realization of a particular ideology, capitalist power in a media society organized around images, commodities, staged events, and vast institutional and technical apparatuses that habituate consuming spectators into passivity. Put succinctly, “The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images” (Debord, 1994: I). In his 1988 Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, Debord posited that the integrated spectacular had become globally dominant, a combination of the diffuse form (American-style commodification of culture) with the falsification and secrecy of the concentrated form (which characterizes authoritarian regimes) (Debord, 1988: IV). In China, new city projects often exhibit the spectacle: shiny branding, unique architecture, capital accumulation, but few residents.

Debord argues that governments previously characterized by diffuse forms of the spectacle are intensifying the concentrated form of the spectacle seen in more autocratic regimes. It is noteworthy that mayors in New York, London, and elsewhere are increasingly looking to Beijing for guidance (Wu, 2015). Books by urban theorists such as Peking University dean Kongjian Yu are translated into English and promoted in the Anglophone world to inspire and guide large-scale urban–rural integration in regional development projects outside China (Yu, 2018). Debord also argues that governments historically characterized by concentrated forms of the spectacle are embracing more diffuse forms. For example, President Hu Jintao promoted the idea of cultural soft power during his 2007 keynote speech at the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party of China, repeatedly stressing the need for “autonomous innovation” (zizhu chuangxin 自主创新): “Culture has become a more and more important source of national cohesion and creativity and a factor of growing significance in the competition in overall national strength” (Quoted in Keane, 2009: 221). Yet if culture is understood as embodied social practices and material artifacts that maintain continuities across times and places, it appears disembodied, dismembered, dislocated, displaced, and destroyed by China’s green, smart, creative city policies. This is, in part, because posthuman policies rationalize the integrated spectacular, a society “characterized by the combined effect of five principal features: incessant technological renewal; fusion of State and economy; generalized secrecy; forgeries without reply; a perpetual present” (Debord, 1988: VI).

To explore the premise that urban practitioners tend to ignore posthuman assumptions in current creative/smart/green city policies, and to illustrate the potentially disastrous outcomes for vitality within such cities, the article is divided into two major parts. First it explains how posthumanism renders the embodied human invisible in creative/smart/eco-city policies in general, and specific policy rationalizations and enactments within China. Secondly it analyzes three major metropolises that were among the first to implement creative/smart/eco-city policies in China: Beijing, Shanghai, and Chengdu.

The invisible human in creative/smart/green urban policies

The “creative” city, “smart” city, and “eco” city may be catchphrases that have outlived their usefulness in practice, yet the concepts continue to inform urban policy worldwide (Oliveira, 2017). While the history of each policy differs, today they often exhibit in the built environment as forms of Debord’s integrated spectacular, exhibiting the five features stated above. “Incessant technological renewal” and the “fusion of state and economy” are evident in the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (2006–2013) for Research and Technical Development, which prioritized smart cities, allocating massive funds to support such projects (Söderström et al., 2014; Vanolo, 2014). Similarly, the state incentivized building smart eco-cities in China’s Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011–2015).

The posthuman assumptions embedded in such policies have progressively rendered invisible the production of space by its bodied inhabitants by increasing the scale of autonomy from the individual, to the city, to the regional ecosystem. Creative city policies, which originated with the UK Department of Culture, Media, and Sport’s 1998 Mapping Document (DCMS), emphasized the creative individual as a source of independent wealth and promised to liberate autonomous entrepreneurs. Yet many studies have shown that after implementing creative industry policies, the livelihood of creative workers is increasingly precarious, with profits skimmed by intermediators (Caprotti, 2014; Evans, 2009). Studies of so-called “exemplar” creative cities have shown they actually damage existing cultural infrastructure and creative economies (Evans, 2009). Gentrification causes many creative workers to move far from city centers, or to second-tier cities (Liu et al., 2013). Promoting creative industries as “unique” allows specialist agencies to insert themselves into the creative process, often merely extracting profit and increasing precarity for creative entrepreneurs. Thus, many creative cities have produced the most extreme forms of social inequality (Caprotti, 2014; Evans, 2009).

Smart city policies shift focus from the individual to city-scale technology, adopting ICT to ensure urban security and that critical infrastructures and utilities are managed more efficiently. Most visual representations of smart cities present images with hi-tech symbols and no visible human presence, even when those policies ostensibly celebrate community (Vanolo, 2014: 892). Smart city policies historically “focused on physical and technical endowments, neglecting the truism that cities are made of people” (de Oliveira, 2016). Thus, some now define smart cities as “places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems” (Townsend, 2013: 15, emphasis added). Yet such definitions still view the human as a problem to be solved by the city, or as one urban assemblage among many. One example of such policies backfiring is that after facial recognition software databases (also used by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI]) were implemented Xinjiang Province in 2014, many entrepreneurs went bankrupt. Fixed-asset investment from private investors fell by 22%, a sharp reversal of several years of double-digit growth. Investors from outside the province moved their businesses elsewhere, and movement within the province was greatly inhibited. The problem is “people will believe that they are being watched all the time. And this will cause them to curtail their own freedom” (Jim Harper, quoted in Zenz and Leibold, 2017).

Eco-city policies widen the scope of autonomy from the city scale to the regional scale. They apply regional-scale techno-environmental solutions to urban, climate, and energy crisis, combining ideas from the entrepreneurial creative city and technologically advanced smart city to create a regional ecosystem without maintaining the pretense of human-scale initiatives. One definition of an eco-city is “an entrepreneurial city, dependent on the ‘active remaking of urban environments and ecologies’ and based on the integration of states and financial markets in the financing of new urban and infrastructure projects” (Caprotti, 2014: 11). This approach to city-building particularly resonates with entrepreneurial, autocratic governments such as China. By 2011, China was building 100 of 170 eco-cities in the world (Caprotti, 2014: 10) to facilitate the development of planned regional-scale mega-urban projects, or what some have called “urbanization planning” (Visser, 2016). This aggressive development, in China and elsewhere, has actually accelerated destruction of ecology and heritage (Caprotti, 2014; Chien, 2013).

To consider how posthuman assumptions in such policies are normalized, it is instructive to examine an award-winning New York Times bestselling book that popularizes ideas prominent in many urban policy circles. If, as Silicon Valley entrepreneur Martin Ford predicts in Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future, technology will replace humans in domains previously considered exclusive to human ingenuity or experience, then practices of creativity, craftsmanship, and knowledge are increasingly becoming post- or even anti-human phenomena (Ford, 2015a).¹ Ford cites current examples: news articles mass-produced by programs that process sports and financial statistics; management and legal decisions determined by algorithms that mine “big data”; original symphonies and paintings generated by robots. Ford elaborates in an interview:

You can think of information technology today as being almost like a utility. It’s almost like electricity, except that rather than delivering electric power, it actually delivers, in some sense, machine intelligence. So it’s delivering the ability to actually make decisions and solve problems and, most importantly, to learn. We now have algorithms that can learn and get better and better, and that’s really quite unprecedented. So what we see is this utility-like technology that delivers intelligence; that delivers brainpower rather than muscle power, and it’s happening everywhere. It’s happening throughout the whole economy in every employment sector. (Ford, 2015b)

There are some important rhetorical moves in this statement. While the first two sentences qualify analogies between information technology and utilities (“almost like,” “in some sense”), the third directly asserts that machine intelligence, seemingly independent of human inputs, is capable of making decisions, solving problems, and learning. When Ford says “so what we see is this utility-like technology that delivers intelligence,” he correctly asserts that information can proliferate among material substrates. Yet he neglects to mention that this information is extracted from, and manipulated by, humans. The human interfaces are rhetorically rendered invisible. It is true that AI (artificial intelligence) can exclude human intervention, but that is a programming choice. Ford's final sentences naturalize the jobless economy as inevitable by characterizing “intelligence” as a neutral, disembodied entity. Naturalizing joblessness depoliticizes the issue for the reader. Labor market flexibility is not assumed to be a choice, but rather a common sense goal of the “smart” economy.

Ford’s metaphor—the delivery of nonhuman intelligence as a utility—is a type frequently used in urban policies that envision cities as entities that efficiently generate and circulate information, innovation, and sustainability. To take but one example, the Torino Smart City website reads:

Turin becomes intelligent. Turin becomes smart. A smart city, in which the quality of life improves with the ability to promote a clean and sustainable mobility, reducing the energy consumption, producing high technology, offering culture, be accessible. These are the objectives that the city is given within the Torino Smart City Project. (Quoted in Vanolo, 2015: 4)

In such branding, there is no mention of citizens. It is the city as abstract entity that improves quality of life (for whom?) and promotes cleanliness and culture (for whom?). If information is seen as a commodity to be extracted from largely unconscious human bodies (posthuman perspectives consider consciousness a mere epiphenomenon) then seen to function independently of them, cities themselves become endowed with agency. Thus, “Turin becomes intelligent. Turin becomes smart.” The consciously “smart” city regains a hierarchical position over the largely “unconscious” body politic, in a reversal of classical liberal values. Once intelligence is rationalized at the city scale, the autonomous creative/smart/eco-city is more easily branded and marketed as part of a global supply chain of city production (Hult, 2013; Kim, 2014). As a result, the rhetoric and practice of planning such cities need not account for the conditions under which bodied humans are actually inspired to create or adequately compensated for their creations (Breitbart, 2013; Mould et al., 2013). Instead, it is enough to think of creativity as something that can generate added value for a venture, and thus be capitalized upon.

The very notion of planned urban vitality elicits bewilderment or skepticism from some artists, who question how one can “make” a creative city (Visser, 2010: 78). If artists themselves knew the conditions under which creativity flourished, would they not have packaged that formula centuries ago? It is worth asking: has something fundamentally changed since the third-century poet Lu Ji’s masterful exposition on creativity in “The Art of Poetry”? In it, he opines:

Perhaps someday the secret of this most intricate art may be entirely mastered. In making an axe handle by cutting wood with an axe, the model is indeed near at hand. But the adaptability of the hand to the ever-changing circumstances and impulses in the process of literary creation is such as words can hardly explain. (Lu, 2000: 8)

Instead, Lu Ji imagines the creative process as follows: “Standing erect in the center of all, the poet views the expanse of the whole universe, and in ancient masterpieces his spirit rejoices and finds nurture…Thus moved, he will spread his paper and poise his brush, to express what he can in writing” (Lu, 2000: 9).

By this account, the writer appears to immerse himself biologically and spiritually in sensations that move him to express his experience of them. An essential feature of his creative process is also spending time engrossed in earlier poetic masterpieces. Counter to posthuman perspectives, Lu Ji’s description of creativity assumes embodiment in a biological substrate and (some degree of) consciousness as essential rather than incidental to vitality. He thinks of his body not merely as one prosthesis among many (such as his ink brush) but as necessary to situate him historically in time and geographically in place. Lu Ji claims creative inspiration occurs via conscious, embodied contact with historical, environmental, and formal exemplars of virtuosity, as an intuitive, immersive process which cannot be manufactured.

Yet some argue technology has altered human experience to such a degree that Lu Ji’s humanist notions of creativity no longer hold. Media theorist Mark Hansen, for example, argues that humans can no longer channel our experiences exclusively through higher-order perceptual capabilities long understood to characterize the human as human. We are so inundated by information and intense stimulation that experience evades our perceptual grasp, necessitating alternate ways of accessing and expressing worldly sensibility. In a world saturated with micro-computational sensors, driven by massive data collection and analysis, we may no longer be able to participate meaningfully in human-scale experience (Hansen, 2014: 218). Hansen understands technology to be autonomous from its human creators in terms that resonate with Ford: “Twenty-first-century media, with its focus on animating the environment with the aid of microsensors, smartphones, data gathering, and so on, opens a resolutely nonhuman realm of sensing, a direct sensing or sensibility on the part of the world itself” (Hansen, 2014: 219). Like Ihab Hassan, he concludes we are, by necessity, helplessly posthuman.

Such posthuman perspectives increasingly inform urban policies. Posthumanism imagines an autonomous world of information technology where human inputs are invisible. A posthuman cosmology sees people as dependent upon smart technologies (inscription devices, biometric and environmental sensors, etc.) to convert sensations into human experience. Creative/smart/eco-city discourse tends to naturalize the city or metropolitan region as a single, homogenous, unitary actor in city-branding competition. Just as corporations have been deemed “persons” in an increasingly posthuman legal regime, so, too, have cities and regional ecosystems been ascribed qualities once solely attributable to human individuals.

There are potential risks in displacing the site of intelligence and creativity from the embodied individual to the city or region as a whole. With creativity and intelligence ascribed at the abstract city-scale, certain types of bodies in the city can become disciplined in relation to their contribution to, or detraction from, unitary aims of city vibrancy. This calls to mind Debord’s notion that “the government of the spectacle, which now possesses all the means to falsify the whole of production and perception, is the absolute master of memories just as it is the unfettered master of projects that will shape the most distant future. It reigns unchecked; it executes its summary judgments” (Debord, 1988: IV). Debord’s assertion, if true, is chilling. His central claim in 1967 was that “spectators” had voluntarily acquiesced their power to the spectacle, rather than being rendered helpless in their adoption of posthuman perspectives. In many ways, his theses are calls to creative individuals to regain conscious awareness of the stakes of embracing posthuman assumptions, and to choose to enact rather than relinquish power.

Posthuman urban policy scripts as Chinese government policy

Urban policy scripts governed by posthuman assumptions are widespread in China as elsewhere. Creative/smart/eco-city policies have dominated urban-development strategies in China this century, replacing 20th-century modes such as small-scale agriculture, local town–village enterprises, and state-owned industrial production. Richard Florida’s 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class was quickly translated and immediately lauded by Chinese academics and policy-makers, and cities nationwide have passionately pursued a title in UNESCO’s Creative Cities Network.² Other municipalities have launched ambitious urban renaissance plans based on ancient cultural motifs. Still others have launched utopian smart eco-city projects despite the fact that many of these city renovations have been irrationally planned and constructed, resulting in so-called “ghost cities.” Many feature extravagant buildings and high-tech culture shows, yet lack the widely hyped increases in residents, tourists, employment opportunities, and rational infrastructure, while the aggressive development harms local communities, economies, and fragile eco-systems (Visser, 2016). Such instances of “creative destruction” tend to erase existing forms of human culture—urban fabric, cultural heritage, agriculture, arts and crafts venues, educational institutions, etc.—often with little subsequent “creative regeneration.” Smaller cities often flourish at the cost of others in a zero-sum game. It is common to find construction of central business districts stopped, stadiums abandoned, bridges left unfinished. Destruction often largely outweighs reconstruction (Kern et al., 2016: 70).

Posthuman urban policies in China originated with early 21st-century central government policies promoting ecological civilization and urban–rural integration. Ideas of the integrated spectacular were introduced into Chinese urban policy in part by rationalizing them according to traditional Chinese understandings of creativity. In 2003, Kongjian Yu, now Dean of Landscape Architecture at Peking University, published (with Dihua Li) the influential book, Road to Urban Landscape: A Letter to Mayors. He sees the city, like all human media, as an outgrowth of human desire: “Engraved on the earth are people’s complex needs and nature, which are contained in a place known as the city and eventually transformed into an urban landscape” (Yu, 2018: 1). He interpolates global urban policies via Chinese aesthetic tradition where “culture” (wen 文, etymologically linked to “engraving”) arises from these creative stirrings within humans. Urban landscape, for Yu, is an “engraving on the earth” of complex human desires. Yu’s aesthetics resonate with the earliest statement on creativity in the Chinese written record, which sees it as an external manifestation of inner preoccupations, a pre-articulate state of mind which arises from an involuntary response to the environment (Owen, 1992: 27).

Yu’s central argument is that urban landscape manifests society’s central preoccupations, and the Chinese city form is unsustainable because it derives from deep-rooted agrarian norms. The parochial aesthetic that characterizes China’s cities, Yu claims, is incapable of expressing the true elegance and power of China’s civilizational legacy. Rather than critiquing traditional values, as pro-Western Chinese intellectuals had a century prior, he calls for their expansion and elaboration. Yu’s implied audience is city mayors, most of whom, like himself, were former farmers who rose through the Communist Party ranks under Maoism. Yu’s call for a long-term vision and theory of “negative planning” for ecological infrastructure is rooted in an Idealist aesthetics—a complex legacy of 19th-century Marxist, 20th-century Maoist, and a 21st-century hyper-capitalism rationalized by neo-Confucian eco-civilizational discourse. This aesthetics believes in the power of culture to exhibit legibly in the built environment.

Yu’s solution to “unsustainable urban landscapes” is not to slow development and revitalize local economies. Rather, it is to plan at unprecedented scales. Based on a series of actual talks to urban officials, Yu’s influential book implicitly advanced the cultural economy explicitly promoted in China’s Tenth National Five-Year Plan (2001–2005). The Plan called for regional urban–rural integration (chengxiang tongchou 城乡统筹), which legitimized rural land transfers and large-scale industrial agriculture. The Tenth Plan fleshed out the announcement in 2000 by Minister of Culture, Doje Cering, that China would “build 400 cities in 20 years” through planned urbanization and social engineering, whereby nearly 400m small-scale farmers are incentivized (or coerced) to relinquish their land and move to cities.

The Eleventh National Five-Year Plan (2006–2010) officially promoted private capital investment in creative industry parks in top tier cities, and the Twelfth Five-Year Plan (2011–2015) proposed large-scale development of creative industries and the building of smart eco-cities. By 2012, 200 smart eco-city projects were proposed, under construction, or already implemented (Chien, 2013). The first phase of 90 pilot smart cities was launched in 2013, followed by 103 in 2014 and 277 in 2015. Smart city technology manages critical infrastructures and utilities more efficiently, and facilitates what Party officials call “grid-style social management” (shehui wangluohua guanli 社会网格化管理), which segments urban communities into geometric zones so security staff can systematically observe all activities. Piloted in Beijing in 2004, it relies on big data analytics, connecting a network of closed-circuit television (CCTV) cameras with police databases to achieve enhanced, automated surveillance (Zenz and Leibold, 2017). The Thirteenth Five-Year Plan (2016-2020) continues to emphasize smart, green, creative cities, referencing the following terms the number of times in parentheses: smart (36), intelligent (17), green (48), eco- (29), creative/creativity (17), culture (44). The plan also promotes creative, eco-friendly, and intelligent agriculture.

While local municipalities in China are accountable to the central government, urban governance is largely decentralized. Entrepreneurial cities strategically implement central policies and actively promote creative/smart/eco-city development. “A main reason why Chinese local governments are so keen to develop new towns at the outskirts of cities in the name of smart and eco projects” is a 1994 tax reform allowing local governments to expand extra-budgetary revenue through land finance (converting rural land to urban land) (Tan-Mullins et al., 2017: 2–3).

Cultural and creative industrial clusters and sustainable Beijing 2020

Many of China’s most avant-garde artists moved to Beijing in the late 1970s, and its contemporary art scene gained international recognition by the late 1990s. As struggling “floaters” who lacked a Beijing hukou (household residence permit), migrant artists initially created vibrant clusters near the Old Summer Palace in the 1980s, the “East Village” in the early 1990s, and the 798 Art Zone, Songzhuang, and hundreds of other warehouse districts and border villages in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2006, seeking to industrialize creativity, Beijing implemented 10 planned Cultural and Creative Industrial Clusters, exerting control over the existing 798 Art Zone, the Zhongguancun Creative Industries Pioneer Base, and the Songzhuang Art and Cartoon Zone. This planned approach to creativity immediately spawned cynicism among artists. For example, when asked in 2006 about Beijing’s creative city policies, Rui Huang, artist and former proprietor of 798 Art Zone, responded wryly: “Now [Beijing municipal officials] want to “do culture” (gao wenhua 搞文化). When people who are fundamentally opposed to culture start promoting it, you can imagine the results!” (Visser, 2010: 72).

Rui Huang, like Kongjian Yu, anticipated that Beijing’s creative city policies would fail due to the “peasant mentality” of Chinese officials. A portion of Rui Huang's 2006 interview is quoted at length because his explanation for the lack of urban vibrancy in gentrifying Beijing is very common among Chinese urban elite.

From the time of the Mongolians to the era of Mao Zedong, its city culture has been established by “peasant types” (nongmin daibiao 农民代表). … This has had disastrous consequences for Beijing’s urban culture. Today, when the dominant slogan in Beijing is “economic development,” officials can easily destroy massive amounts of traditional urban fabric, without even a faint voice raised in opposition. The average citizen doesn’t think about whether or not he has political power, or of the relationship of political power to cultural heritage. So at the very same time Beijing is disappearing, its officials are raising the question of “urban culture.”

Officials need to fill in the “empty cells” (kongdong de xibao 空洞的细胞) of the disappearing city, and they attempt to do this with “culture,” but they are infusing the empty cells with emptiness. The old cells are empty, and they do need to be filled, but after destroying the city’s heritage, we find the replacement cells are still empty.

Officials are acting just like the peasants of the past. They simply destroy the old and erect the new. But they are the new rulers of the city and should value its cultural cells. On the one hand it would enhance their own power; on the other, it would strengthen the citizenry to provide them with their own foundation for growth. After all, the central government is in Beijing, and Beijing is the heart of the nation. So cultural trends flow through the nation from Beijing. But if Beijing doesn’t preserve its advantage through more rational heritage preservation and planning, it is squandering its most precious resource. (Huang, 2006)

Underlying Huang’s denunciation of city officials as “peasants” is a claim that they are deficient in “quality” (sushi 素质) as citizens or leaders, given their acculturation by agrarian social norms. “Quality” is a pervasive, pernicious concept among Chinese urban elites, partially influenced by the influential legacy of eugenic ideas in Social Darwinism. China’s autocratic legacy unquestionably discourages civic activism, but many scholars argue that short-term structural incentives, such as the fact that officials got promoted by building more highways and commercial districts, led to the rapid demolition of Beijing’s heritage (Song et al., 2006).

In the wake of the radical gentrification and commercialization of Beijing’s city center for the 2008 Olympics, the “cells” of the formerly “emptied” urban fabric have slowly been filled with commodified culture of the type Debord denounced as consumerist spectacle rather than generative creativity. The most prominent cultural quarter in Beijing is 798 Art Zone. Artists started renting studio space in the Bauhaus-style Dashanzi factory complex in the mid-1990s, after being forced to leave other spaces. The complex accommodated their needs for cheap properties, large working spaces, and relative quiet. In 2000, a portion of the Dashanzi complex was acquired by the Beijing Sevenstar Science and Technology Co. Ltd, and over an 18-year period from 1995 to 2013, rents rose from 8.2 yuan/month/m² (1995) to 20 yuan/month/m² (2003–2004) to 150 yuan/month/m² (2013) (McCarthy and Wang, 2016: 8). That is, rents increased by nearly 250% in the nine years prior to cultural policy implementation, and 750% in the subsequent nine years. Whether “creativity” or overall market trends drove the exponential rise in rents, many artists were displaced as commercial businesses (boutiques, media companies, book shops, tattoo parlors) moved into the 798 complex. Over five years, the percentage of art studios dropped from 47% in 2003 (18 of 38 total rentals) to 8% in 2008 (25 of 298 total rentals) (McCarthy and Wang, 2016: 8). Artists interviewed by McCarthy and Wang believe Beijing Sevenstar’s public–private management model prioritized commercial (consumption-based) benefits at the expense of artistic (production-based) development (9). I also regularly interviewed artists at work in quiet studios or at edgy art events in Art Zone 798 in the 2000s, and noted that the 2010s ethos became far more commercial, touristy, and proprietary (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Beijing’s Art Zone 798 has become a tourist hot spot in the 2010s. Photo by author, 2017.

In general, Beijing cultural policies focus on maximizing land values and rental income, with clusters adopting a consumption-led approach attractive to tourists but detrimental to art-producing tenants. By 2014, thirty Cultural and Creative Industrial Clusters had been designated in Beijing but as a result of these policies, many truly innovative artists who had once lived in Beijing proper were forced to relocate to satellite towns, to far less accessible rural villages, or even neighboring provinces (Liu et al., 2013). This despite the fact that buzzwords such as “sustainability,” “affordability,” “livability,” and “ecological responsibility” were explicitly promoted in the 2004 master plan for Sustainable Beijing 2020. Such failures derive less from deficient “quality” or “peasant mentality” and more to the calculus of neoliberal policies in Beijing, which have erased the very conditions by which creative individuals can flourish there.

For example, although the Beijing 2020 master plan claimed that its satellite town of Tongzhou, 12 miles east of Beijing, was to be planned as an artist enclave, studies indicate that low-income housing projects were not realized (Huang and Li, 2014; Li and Chand, 2013). In 2014, Beijing announced that its municipal offices would move to Tongzhou, accelerating its gentrification. During a 2015 visit to nearby Songzhuang village (Figure 2) (where many Tongzhou artists relocated), I learned rents had dramatically escalated there as well, causing artists to relocate once again across the border into the neighboring province of Hebei. Access to Beijing is now more difficult, and many artists now limit visits to the metropolis. Beijing (including Tongzhou) master plans frequently change, their history disappearing into a “perpetual present”; “generalized secrecy” makes these “forgeries without reply” hard to trace, all features of the integrated spectacular.

Figure 2.

Rural residents play cards in Songzhuang village, an artist commune east of Beijing. Photo by author, 2015.

Shanghai creative industry clusters and smart eco-cities

Shanghai was the first city in China to implement creative industry policies, and the first to experiment with smart eco-cities. Spontaneous artist clusters had first emerged in Shanghai in the late 1990s, about a decade after Beijing, located mostly near Suzhou Creek, where artists rented warehouses in the former industrial district of M50 (Moganshan Rd. No. 50) (Figure 3). The Tianzifang and Taikang Road Art District was a hub for more commercial designers and artisans, after residential street committees initiated culture-led urban renewal. A variety of street-level cultural activities also arose in the early 2000s, such as business-sponsored art openings or music festivals for lesser-known artists, or cultural events in boutique venues within the former French Concession or Jing’an District.

Figure 3.

Shanghai’s most prominent art district, M50, at its inception. Photos by author, 2004.

These decentralized cultural activities were short-lived. The vitality generated by creative practitioners drew the attention of the municipal government, and in 2004 it set up the Shanghai Creative Industry Center (SCIC) to govern the creative industry market. In early 2005, the Shanghai Economic and Information Technology Commission approved 18 creative industry clusters (创意产业集聚区 chuangyi chanye jiju qu, CCJQs), and by 2011, there were 81 official creative parks, most located in former industrial spaces or residential areas (He: 66). Yet as Jun Wang’s study of one of these creative industrial zones concludes, “while the project was initially based on artists’ space consumption, these artists themselves—particularly the struggling ones—were not truly welcome in the new creative community” (2009: 329). Jane Zheng’s extensive review of Shanghai creative industry clusters provides further insight into the perspectives of policy makers. For example, Zengqiang He, secretary general of SCIC, says “creative industries need containers” and creative industry clusters function as “show windows of creative industries in Shanghai” (Zheng, 2011: 3567). The dynamism of the artists themselves, and their relationship to these spaces, appeared irrelevant. SCIC officials assumed creativity was ensured by its display within a certain type of architecture and urban landscape, namely, “a new shining urban landscape” (Zheng, 2011: 3561). As Zheng points out elsewhere, the basic mechanism for using CCJQs to generate urban growth leverages China’s dual land use system, with its significant disparity between land allocated for state-owned institutions and leased land. CCJQs can bypass approval procedures and avoid the high taxes levied on commercial land use. Further, the CCJQ is considered an alternative form of office development, contributing to taxation revenues of local governments (Zheng, 2010: 149–150). Zheng concludes that creative industry clusters enhance the city’s attractiveness to investment and business capital, while failing to boost entrepreneurship within creative industries themselves.

These findings seem to validate Kongjian Yu’s and Rui Huang’s low estimations of the ability of Chinese urban officials to appreciate creativity. Further, Shanghai’s spectacular investment in skyscrapers and radical destruction of its urban fabric over the past two decades has also eliminated vital connections to its history and presents challenges for human-scale creativity. The relevance of the multi-layered historical meanings that accrued to art spaces initially rented in Shanghai’s Suzhou Creek warehouse district, a once-thriving Japanese munitions factory in semi-occupied Shanghai, was lost on many urban policy-makers and practitioners. As in Beijing, this was due to short-term incentives inherent in the neoliberal calculus of urban gentrification as much as the “low quality” of the officials in question. Most notoriously, Liangyu Chen, Party Secretary of Shanghai (its de facto mayor), was removed from power at the end of 2006 for his reported lead involvement in embezzling a huge amount of money from the municipal pension fund into the lucrative real estate market.

Jinliao He’s important study of Shanghai’s creative industry clusters provides quantitative and qualitative evidence that rather than being situated in shiny buildings, the most successful creative clusters are located within milieus generating historical-cultural resonance, with enhanced cultural diversity and cosmopolitanism. His spatial analysis of 81 creative industries finds that 90% are concentrated in Puxi (Old Shanghai) as opposed to Pudong New Area, with a high preference for formerly colonized zones (He: 68–69). Furthermore, in surveys and interviews with artists and creative workers, he found they prioritized (from highest to lowest) (1) affordable rents; (2) the environment within the building; (3) the image of the building; (4) policy incentives (He: 88). Affordability was paramount, as were environs that evoked nostalgia for architecture and ethos of colonial Shanghai (a strong branding strategy). As such, they were sensitive to the 人气 (renqi, status, popularity) of the environment and its location, and emphasized the need for their own product, status, and style to be commensurate with that of their surroundings. For example, He interviewed a Taiwan artist located in M50 (the biggest art cluster in Shanghai, near Suzhou Creek) who discussed how he chose his workshop:

When I first came to Shanghai from Taiwan, I didn’t know Shanghai very well. I had my gallery in an antique market, a place very close to a second-hand market. My friends suggested that I should move to some place better because that place doesn’t fit my status. My works are original and should belong to some place of high standard. (So) I decided to move here (M50), though there was no more room in the park available for me. I have finally found a place not far from the park like many other artists. (He: 87)

He’s study reveals some continuities in Shanghai-style creativity (also known as haipai, “Shanghai-style”), which is considered more commercially driven, status-conscious, and culturally hybrid (mixed with colonial influences) than Beijing creativity (known as jingpai, “Beijing-style”), considered more influenced by Mandarin official culture.

Another highly informative study zeroes in on class differences between artists in Shanghai’s highly stratified market. Sheng Zhong finds that artists in elite networks (largely based upon the prestige of the arts school they attended) enjoy substantial power in determining both the physical appearance and the cultural agenda of art districts. For example, M50 had an informal “Artists Confederation” of elite artists who served as the “brain power” for property managers conscious of their own lack of cultural insight. By delegating power to elite artists, property managers could entice them to stay in their premises. Alternatively, as former socialist cadres, the managers had essential connections with government officials, expediting permissions for cultural events (censored by the state) or development (all urban land is owned by the state). Despite elite artists’ self-branding as “avant-garde” or “free” of state control, engaging in cultural-capital-governmental networks ensured the stability of elite art districts (Zhong, 2016: 168). Elite artists parlayed pedigrees into cultural capital, regarding their taste as “the most advanced [in] international design” to help art spaces “catch up with global practice” (Zhong, 2016: 169). On the other hand, non-elite artists, ravaged by the 2008 global financial crisis and subsequent escalating rents, were forced to adapt by illegally subleasing studios or “wall space” to even more marginal artists. Growing gaps between elite and non-elite artists, based on institutional prestige, family background, and gender (see Welland, 2018), replicate globally prevalent neoliberal patterns. Yet creative elites in China, regardless of city, aspire to so-called “global practices” as the gold standard.

Shanghai’s drive to “align with international standards” (yu guoji jiegui 与国际接轨) also motivated its experiments with eco-cities. Dongtan Eco-city was a Sino-British project initiated in 2005 planned for the east end of Chongming Island in the Yangtze River north of Shanghai. The London-based developers, Arup, envisioned Dongtan as a compact city with low-rise condominiums and high-tech, energy-saving homes interspersed with green spaces that would rely completely on electricity generated by burning rice husks, and from solar panels and wind turbines. Mayor Liangyu Chen's signature political project was aborted after he was imprisoned for corruption charges. Aside from lack of fiscal transparency and feasibility, the plan was critiqued for being located on a conservation wetland to host exclusively high-end residential property, considered harmful both to the ecologically sensitive Yangtze estuary and the economic livelihood of local residents (Chang and Sheppard, 2013: 62–63). The fate of two additional eco-city plans in and around Shanghai Municipality, Chongming Eco-Island and Lingang Marine Eco-city, is similarly uncertain due to fiscal mismanagement, ecological harm, and a lack of employment opportunities (Chien 2013; Visser 2016). Like Lingang, many of Shanghai’s nine “new towns” built in the mid-2000s remain “ghost towns”. Limited opportunities for investment mean “hot money” chases high-profit housing in and around Shanghai and other large Chinese cities. Yet because there is no further investment in new city infrastructure, these creative/smart/eco-cities often function more as virtual realities than inhabited communities; instead, “the city is used as a fix to absorb capital” (Wu, 2008: 9).

Creative smart green policies in Chengdu garden city

A decade of creative/smart/green city policies in the southwestern “Garden City” of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan Province, also reveals posthuman assumptions. Chengdu developed light industrial production in the 1960s–1970s in the fields of electronics, aerospace, manufacturing, and military-related industries, before becoming China’s western center for logistics, commerce, finance, science, and technology in the post-Mao era. It promoted urban–rural integration in 2003, intensifying large-scale urbanization in 2007 when Chengdu and Chongqing established the first national experimental zones in rural land transfer. With a population of 14m, Chengdu is considered one of the most livable cities in China and is touted as a city that strives to facilitate post-Fordist linkages among the arts, urban design, spatial relations, and financial institutions. By 2010, 179 of the world’s largest 500 firms had established businesses in Chengdu, and it was designated a key city for smart city policy development (Chen and Gao, 2011: 509–510).

Smart city construction in Chengdu aims to mitigate the digital gap, balance public services, and promote urban–rural integration. China Telecom, the biggest landline internet provider in China, built its information center for western China in Chengdu’s Tianfu new district in 2011, and China Mobile, which controls a 70% market share of mobile services in China, built a data center there in 2012. Chengdu is also the first western city in China to reach 100 thousand installations of Fiber-to-the-Home (Tan-Mullins et al., 2017: 6). Chengdu’s smart agriculture projects include an Agricultural Internet of Things (IoT), smart agriculture service platform, and an application to assist aquaculture, facility agriculture and agro processing industries (Tan-Mullins et al., 2017: 7)

In 2008, after a devastating earthquake struck Sichuan Province near Chengdu, national and international media attention alerted the municipality to a need to upgrade its urban branding. Employing an international consulting company, the city aimed to be among the third tier cities in the world, benchmarking against cities such as Melbourne, Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Seattle. The branding juxtaposes Chengdu’s “vibrant city life” against its “traditional culture”, its rapidly developing hi-tech “city” against its famously fertile “nature,” and its cosmopolitan openness to both “Chinese” and “foreigners” (Björner, 2013: 219). The city actively engages creative clusters in its branding campaign. For example, Redstar 35 Advertisement Park, a former state-owned printing factory located within the city center, organizes city-wide annual events such as advertisement design exhibitions and contests for public-interest advertisements for governmental and non-profit organizations. Its advertising and design companies work closely with local universities, and the majority of their employees are young with university degrees. In 2014, Positive Energy Culture Communication, a company within Redstar 35, collaborated with Metro Chengdu to launch a “clean government” campaign, and their ads (“Clean Chengdu, You and I Together”) were placed in major subway stations (Ren, 2015) .

Redstar 35 appears to be an example of a vibrant, integrated creative cluster. Its antecedents nonetheless clearly lie in China’s state-run propaganda industries. The Metro ad campaign, for example, closely resembles Mao era propaganda campaigns. The only difference between contemporary creative industries and their state-run predecessors appears to be that, in keeping with creative-industries policies, they ostensibly originate from individual creativity, skill, and talent, and use intellectual property to create wealth and jobs. In China, “many culture industries are tightly linked to the state, and most culture workers are employed by hybrid entities: as graphic designers who print banners for both local city governments and corporate events, architects who work on projects organized by state-owned but nominally private real estate firms, or artists who hold teaching jobs at state institutions” (Chumley, 2016, 17). Keane argues that although “the cluster phenomenon has resulted in a substantive remaking of the social contract [in China] these processes of adaption are mostly driven by real estate developers working in partnership with local government officials. Cut and paste design is the fast road to completion. In this sense, the description ‘creative’ may well be redundant” (2009: 221).

Incentivized by the Thirteenth Five-Year Plan, Chengdu also promotes “creative agricultural” zones in addition to redeveloping state-owned enterprises and neighborhoods into “creative industries” and “creative parks.” For example, the Blue Roof Museum in Sansheng Township, a mile outside of Chengdu, opened in 2009, and is surrounded by artists’ studios and residences, and art-related organizations. Its bohemian ethos resembles that of the 798 Art Zone and Songzhuang in Beijing. A long-renowned site for flower agriculture, the site is now commercially promoted for eco-tourism by treating the flowers as products of creative agriculture (Ren, 2015). Re-branding local agriculture practices as creative, to emphasize Chengdu’s status as a garden city, is yet another example of the integrated spectacle. Even as “creative agriculture” is celebrated, surrounding villages and ecosystems are destroyed in the process of industrializing and commodifying “nature.” Creative, smart, and green are readily collapsed within the integrated spectacular. That Chengdu held a 2018 summit on “Innovation, Artificial Intelligence, and Ecological Development” merely makes such correspondences transparent (Tianfu, 2018).

A capitalist mode of production that simply re-appropriates a socialist mode definitely indicates a lack of genuine innovation, yet what happens in Chengdu is not unique to China. Posthuman urban policies subsume “old” arts and cultural industries into creative industries, resulting in a “surrender of the arts economy” on a global scale (Evans, 2009: 1008). Recombinant annexations such as those in Chengdu are prevalent worldwide. Now-familiar coinages such as “new” industry formations, “new” post-Fordist economy, “new” growth theory suggest a break from the past both in terms of employment, production, and spatial practices, “however the creative and knowledge economies are also embedded in past practice, industrial economic models and traditional interventions” (Evans, 2009: 1004). Creative cities are most often located within light industrial and mixed-use areas, featuring preindustrial cultural activities such as performing and visual arts, festivals, crafts, designer-making, and live-work. Yet artisans and artists performing creative labor generally live far outside city centers due to increasingly lower profits and higher rents. Even nouveau riche entrepreneurs in Chengdu, living in expensive gated communities in the city center, are pessimistic about China’s long-term political and economic prospects, despite their short-term gains (Osburg, 2013: 14). With the exception of a tiny minority of extremely elite, economic security for the vast majority feels increasingly precarious globally.

Conclusion

This article has explored how posthuman assumptions embedded in creative/smart/green urban policy scripts render the socially embodied human invisible and analyzes instances of their rationalization, and enactment, within China. Based on the premise that urban aesthetics—how the world is architected—is a materialization of triumphant ideologies, it argues that the new cities built by the entrepreneurial Chinese state manifest what Guy Debord termed a globally dominant “integrated spectacular,” capital accumulated to the point it becomes images. In newly built or refurbished cities, the absence of human vitality in virtual Chinese “ghost cities” is often considered remarkable, attributable to Potemkinism or other post-socialist or cultural anomalies. This article argues Chinese cases instead showcase the spectacle at a scale previously unrealized. Having rationalized creativity, intelligence, and carbon emissions, such cities compete within a global supply chain of city production, focusing more on fleeting spectacular branding campaigns than on long-term embodied vibrancy.

The article also suggests that once humans adopt posthumanism as inevitable, the posthuman city need not account for the conditions under which embodied humans are actually inspired to create and adequately compensated for their creations. The case studies featured here showcase forced or necessary relocations, a trend which characterizes most lower socioeconomic classes in creative/green/smart cities. Chinese artists are increasingly excluded from first-tier and even second-tier cities, with obvious ramifications for the genuine vibrancy of urban culture in cities such as Beijing or Shanghai. While well-connected elites can thrive in all three major metropolises featured in this article, independent or experimental creative types have fewer opportunities to flourish. Chengdu may be an exception, given its long tradition of embedding its cultural practices within its rich social history and ecological environment. Given the rapid conversion of rural lands to urban development in the larger metropolitan region, however, Chengdu’s socially and environmentally conscious, and creative, artists and entrepreneurs may fall prey to corrupting trends that have dominated Beijing and Shanghai. Indeed, according to informants from the city's outskirts, Chengdu's elite entrepreneurs are already thoroughly corrupt (Osburg, 2013).

Finally, this article has suggested that understandings of creativity in Chinese urban aesthetics challenge premises of globally promoted urban policy scripts more transparently than those informed by European aesthetic traditions. The Chinese city is understood to reveal human preoccupations rather than transcendent, idealized visions separate from those of human creators. These ambitious obsessions are openly embraced and pursued in China as “scientific” indicators of human modernity and progression. Kongjian Yu denounces as crass the fixations of “peasant” officials, instead promoting elite forms of neo-Confucian eco-civilizational culture. The article argues that culturally specific understandings of cities do influence policy-makers, but the uncritical pursuit of neoliberal “international standards” (even when framed, as by Yu, as indigenous to China) is a major reason for perceived “failures” in Chinese urban aesthetics. The transparency of these failures primarily illuminates universal fault lines in the policies themselves.

This article reads the urban built environment as the outside of an inside, as the manifestation of neoliberal obsessions writ large, as desires dominated by posthuman perspectives which policy-makers have promoted as inevitable. The risks of enacting policies informed by posthuman assumptions that uncritically displace the site of intelligence and creativity from the embodied individual, to the city or region as a whole, are potentially catastrophic. In his inimically provocative way, Guy Debord declared “art is dead” (1988: XXVIII). Creativity is not dead, but it is tremendously squeezed. The least deceitful of the contemporary urban arts in China are beyond apocalyptic. And if one is to believe the claims of creative/smart/green policies, empirical studies cannot fully prove the vitality of a place. The truth is found in its all-too-human arts.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

A preliminary version of this article was delivered at the workshop “Making Cultural Cities: A Dialogue between China and the World” at City University of Hong Kong (4–5 June 2015). The author wishes to thank Jun Wang for organizing the conference, and guest editor Tim Oakes for his helpful comments on earlier versions of this article.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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