THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
CULTURAL CONTEXT Movement of ideas
American and European planning ideas became influential in China during the Republican era, between 1911 and 1949. Rational, functionalistic planning ideas and techniques were imported, among them the American neighbourhood unit, adopted by Chinese planners in the 1940s.5 At the time, Chinese intellectuals were occupied with figuring out how China could take advantage of Western science and technology without sweeping away Chinese traditions (Lagerkvist, 2007). A political modernization framework evolved that provided ways to absorb ideas
from abroad, divided between substance (ti
体) and use (yong 用) (Ibid,
p. 16). Chinese intellectuals used the catch phrase: ‘Chinese learning for essential principles, Western learning for practical functions’ (zhongxue wei ti - xixue wei yong,中学为体,西学为用) (Wang, 2010, pp.
112-113). Ideas from outside China that were regarded as important for modernization, the intellectuals decided, should be included in and adapted to the Chinese context. In the Chinese setting the American neighbourhood unit was therefore modified, losing some of its social connotations, and became more a scheme for rational organization (Lu, 2006). After the Chinese Communist revolution, beginning in 1949, when the ideological links between China and the Soviet Union were strong, Soviet theories and practices of urban planning were adapted, and the neighbourhood unit was replaced by the Soviet micro district, which also was adapted to Chinese preferences (Ibid).6 In the Mao period, 1949-1976, an urbanism based on the Chinese work unit (danwei,单位),
emerged as the political distance to the Soviet Union grew larger.7 These earlier models for residential planning—the American neighbourhood unit, the Soviet micro district and the Chinese work unit—have influenced the development of the modern Chinese residential quarter, the xiaoqu小区. Today the xiaoqu, or superblock, with dimensions of around 400
to 600m x 400 to 600m, is the basic unit for urban expansion (Ibid).Borrowing from other cultures, as the above mentioned examples illustrate, was a means to advance economic development and modernization, notes Chinese scholar Wang Bing (2010). Wang writes that the borrowing was influenced by the political and economic conditions of the time, and ideas introduced were selectively used and modified. The conflicts that followed from the borrowing came to test and broaden
‘the receptive capacity of Chinese culture’, says Wang (p. 113). In the reform era, from 1976 to today, which is characterized by pragmatism and globalization, the Chinese architecture and planning community has become very open to ideas from abroad. But as many scholars observe, imported ideas are still selectively used and modified, processes of particular interest for Western design firms who seek to develop a deeper understanding about planning practice in China (Friedmann, 2005; Leaf and Hou, 2006; Logan, 2002). China’s urbanization can only be understood by considering the contemporary characteristics in combination with historical continuities, says John Friedmann who adopts a civilization perspective in his studies on the Chinese city, China as a civilization with 5,000 years of history (2005). China’s endogenous development should not be underestimated, Friedmann says, and despite globalization, China can be expected to largely develop from within, taking on its own dimensions and specificities. In the following sections
Figure 4-1.
拆
(chai), to demolish, written on a building in Zhongguan-cun, Beijing.Source:
Victoria Sjöstedt (2009).
I outline a set of ‘cultural continuities’ with implications for landscape-oriented urbanism in the Chinese setting.
Rapid development pace, cellular urban patterns and weak public space Town planning in traditional China can be characterized by a cellularity principle and these planning principles were described as early as in the Spring and Autumn period (770 BC–221 BC), in the official town planning document ‘Record of Artificers’, Kaogong ji
考工记
(Li and Yeo, 2007).The principles in Kaogong ji emphasize unity, symmetry, societal order and strict hierarchy of the spatial organization (Ibid). These principles gave the traditional Chinese city a chessboard structure—the centralized power reflected in spatial form—with symmetrical grids and modular units (Ibid). In an essay comparing ancient city-making in the West and in China, Italian architect Pier Vittorio Aureli notes that the urban pattern evolving from the principles in Kaogong ji was so efficient that China became the place ‘with the largest cities in the ancient world’ (2007, p.
35). Due to shifting power constellations, Aureli writes, cities in ancient China often changed location and were rebuilt in relatively short periods of time. To move and reconstruct cities at such a pace would have been unimaginable in the West where urbanisation evolved at a slower pace, he writes. Contemporary rapid urban development pace in China has a historical precedent, notes Aureli: the ancient cities were continuously reconstructed, the cities were not intended to be ‘permanent locations’, they rarely ‘survived the foundational political regime’ (p. 36).
Cellular urban patterns found in the Chinese city seem to repeat over time, in terms of both physical structure and governance structure. Compared
to the European city, the Chinese city operates with a more ‘introverted spatial culture’, says German sociologist Dieter Hassenphlug (2010, p.
144). Space for community, for instance residential and educational space, are developed in a cellular pattern that interrupts the urban fabric, writes Hassenphlug. He notes that such ‘community-dominated’
spatial development is directed inward: space for community produces introverted and enclosed space (p. 144). Public space, understood in the West to refer to civil society and the right to the city, exists only to a limited degree in China, writes Hassenphlug. Instead, he identifies an engagement with ‘open space’ and says that commercial and political interests give the open space its character of commercial use, mobility and power. Open space is regarded as ‘meaningless space’, until it is commercialized or communitized, he writes (p. 27). Centralized power, rapid development pace, cellular urban patterns and weak concern for public space are traits that also characterize contemporary Chinese urbanization. These traits raise questions to urbanism based on landscape systems as such urbanism operates at a slower pace, depends on interconnectedness and requires that attention is paid to the public realm.
The notion of landscape
The notion of landscape has a different origin in the Chinese setting than in the West. Traditional Chinese cultural philosophy builds on a non-dualist epistemology with roots in Confucianism, Daoism and Buddhism, where the relationship between humans and nature is seen as a relationship of harmony; there is no divide between humans and nature (Li and Yeo, 2007). The Chinese word for landscape—jingguan/
yuanlin,