Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 2015. xv, 185 pp. (Figures, maps.) US$45.00, cloth. ISBN 978-0-8248-5383-9.
Anyone spending any time in China these days cannot help but be overwhelmed by the disorienting scale of urban transformation going on there. To say that the traditional urban fabric of most cities is being ripped to shreds would be an understatement. The built environments of imperial, Republican, and socialist urbanism—cityscapes of different eras that have until recently mingled together as part of a coherent whole—have all been rendered obsolete by an incessant quest for the new, the global, the ultra-modern. China is increasingly committed to an ex nihilo form of “green-field” urbanism, in which whole new cities are being planned, designed, and built from scratch. In Changing Chinese Cities, Renee Chow argues that what is being lost in this transformation is not simply an urban heritage of buildings, designs, and spatial arrangements, but an entire urban fabric that made cities legible and useful to their inhabitants. Instead of the continuities across neighbourhoods that gave Chinese cities their distinct identities, Chinese cities have joined “the globally familiar cacophony of discrete interventions” (1). By this, she means an urbanism dominated by “figures” rather than “fields.” The former refers to the object-qualities of buildings, their stand-alone character, their ability to draw attention to themselves. Beijing has become a city full of figures, from Rem Koolhaas’ CCTV Tower, to the “Bird’s Nest” Olympic Stadium, and Paul Andreu’s National Center for the Performing Arts. Figural urbanism, Chow argues, has “lobotomized” China’s cities, turning formerly “horizontal cities” like Beijing into collections of objects separated by voids of green space, their architectural coherence destroyed and replaced with singularity and verticality. In such cities, she argues, everyday life is splintered and disorienting, the urban fabric rendered illegible, uniform, monotonous, and homogenous.
The word Changing in her title should be read in two ways, as both a transitive and an intransitive verb. Chinese cities have clearly been changing at a pace perhaps never seen before on earth. But Chow’s book is also a manifesto for changing Chinese cities in a way that recovers the legibility, identity, and continuity of the urban fabric. “Field urbanism” is her proposed solution to the lobotomization of China’s cities. A field is “a mesh that invites appropriation of uses rather than being assigned functions, and supports spatial connections rather than isolation or separation” (8). As a subset of the urban fabric, a built field is “characterized by a relation of elements and spaces in which continuities bring coherence to diverse elements while maintaining the identity of each” (99). If that sounds like a tall design order, Chow demonstrates convincingly that it’s actually quite simple. The basic urban grid of Manhattan, some have pointed out, is a field in the way it maintains continuity throughout the urban fabric—linking blocks and neighbourhoods together—while being flexible enough to accommodate distinct features throughout. Traditional Beijing’s basic courtyard structure, separated (but also linked!) by garden walls and alleyways, is perhaps China’s quintessential urban field.
Chow argues that even though professional competence in designing fields lags behind the development of signature projects, China’s current mega-block urban development structure actually offers a good opportunity for designing progressive fields. After part 1’s initial exploration of “traditional” built fields in China (i.e., Beijing’s siheyuan courtyard structure, the linked canal structure of water towns such as Zhujiajiao, and Shanghai’s lilong alleyway and shikumen housing pattern), Chow explores in part 2 the key elements that are currently splintering and fragmenting these older built fields, such as the supersizing tendency in current urban development projects, the alienating nature of “public space,” and the “sunlight regulations” that govern the presence of empty outdoor space between buildings (such spaces become larger—and more empty—as residential blocks grow taller, in order to meet the sunlight requirement for each apartment). These are, of course, in addition to the more obvious infrastructural elements like vehicular transportation.
Part 3 of the book then explores the possibilities for field urbanism to challenge these fragmenting elements. Chow is careful to insist that this does not necessarily mean preservation of the older built fields, but it does mean drawing on what made those earlier built fields legible, that is, usefulfor residents. The essays in this part offer reflections on what makes fields work, what gives them their continuity, and how they create a sense of “being inside” a nesting of spatial patterns that allows one to always know where they are within the broad horizontality of the city. Each essay in part 3 also features a sample design project through which we can explore the possibilities of field urbanism. These include a project to enhance the legibility of neighbourhoods along the Huangpu River in Shanghai, a revitalization of Tianjin’s Wudadao neighbourhood, and an upgrading of Zhujiajiao that eschews frozen preservation but maintains the basic historic field through which the town’s layout relates to the water and canals.
Changing Chinese Cities is richly illustrated with diagrams and photos, and is—as one might expect—beautifully designed. It’s the kind of book you feel good about holding in your hands. The essays are short and crisp. Those looking for extended theoretical or historical discussions will not find them in Chow’s narrative, and aficionados of China’s traditional urban cultural landscapes may be disappointed by the book’s brevity in discussing the intricacies of siheyuan or shikumen design. I read the book as more of a guide for on-the-ground urban practice rather than a meditation for contemplation. As such, it is a guidebook for a possible future, more than a lamentation for the lost past. It would be ideal for introducing students to the underlying legibility of China’s cities, the ways that legibility is being destroyed, and what might actually be done to move forward in meaningful ways, rather than succumbing to the temptation, as many of us often do, of consigning China’s traditional built environments to the dustbin of history.
Tim Oakes
University of Colorado, Boulder, USA
pp. 870-872