City Plans

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Comment by Neville Mars on August 20, 2008 at 3:21am

The city is a location for acts of stratification. It is where society goes to organize itself into structures of power. In order to make sense to an individual citizen, the city must speak itself as he wanders through it. It must display certain qualities, and hide others.
At its low points the city doesn’t make sense and starts to feel wrong. Citizens start to think they want to get out — that they don’t like all this stratification, even though they are economically bound to it. They start to feel an anti-urban desire, leading in the twentieth century to the invention of mass suburbia.
Certain harsh qualities of the contemporary Chinese city are in place to produce anti-urban desires, but the conditions around them make traditional one-storey suburbia unlikely. Instead we see a number of high-rise building projects which seem to want to deny the very city they are a part of. They are designed and marketed as islands of non-city in the city, and lead to disruptions in the urban fabric.
In combination with the increasing motorizations of China, these anti-urban forms threaten crude stratification, and a hostile urban environment. We see the emergence of multi-lane highways, with sheet walls to either side. Moving through the city it simply doesn’t seem to be there any more. Neither top-down visionary forms of urban planning, nor bottom-up ideas of organic emergence, are adequate methods to protect the city from such a fate. Instead a public-private partnership will need to be developed, with greater focus on the importance of transitional tissue. In this way the social stratification cities necessarily impose can be made to make produce structures which are less alienating, and offer improved functionality.
From: The Chinese Dream