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Let’s go riding on the wings of imagination, taking in the landscape of modern greater Kunming. Here are 330 places classified as “urban villages” covering 18 square kilometers in the main city construction zone,...... imagine further all this remodelling into urban villages being done as “strip integration,” which will draw in neighbouring localities that were outside the demolition and remodelling plan. As things stand, the scope of such urban village renovations can be expanded to an even greater scale. A recent example is the urban village renovation of Panjiawan in Kunming. Although this urban village is only 39 acres, the area to be demolished is 129 acres. Imagine this picture of the future city: high-rise towers; all residences over 40 stories; the concrete forests and steel cities will of course be interspersed with green space and plazas......This is the legendary “Oriental Geneva,” a “bridgehead to Southeast Asia” and a “bright—pastoral—sanitary city.” Such a picture of the future of China’s urbanisation is no isolated case. I call this sort of city renovation and urbanisation “urban dinosaurisation.” Dinosaurisation refers to the enormous bodies formed by their expansion; to the unsustainability of this urban development; and obviously also to their dinosaurish fate. It can be predicted first of all that the cost of the dinosaur-style outcome will not be borne by those who created the dinosaurs—city leaders, planners and real estate developers. These people will leave early, and the price will be paid by those living in these areas. It’s not going too far to call such cities dinosaurs. While satisfying a modernist pleasure to gaze over the human realm from some cosmic vantage point, such high-rise communities are hollow, and will extinguish the intrinsic vitality of the city. In the old cities in today’s China, vitality is generated by three types of residential areas: first, traditional neighborhoods, like the hutongs of eastern and western sectors and the Xuanwu and Chongwen districts of old Beijing. These have centuries of history, and the city’s life was formed out of their neighborhoods with their mixtures of residents always in view of each other. The second is the work unit communities formed in the 1950s. While the architecture in these areas is unremarkable, they have, like the older city neighborhoods, social capital and vitality. Third are the urban villages. These areas are urban communities formed in a village framework. Completely stigmatised in the current urban remodeling movement, as those who have lived in these places and serious researchers know, they are the same as the first two urban communities in terms of being places that are functionally intact and orderly (albeit not in the eyes of city leaders), and where residents are in close contact in a livable environment. It is these places, which extend the life of the city and disseminate the vitality that the modernist dinosaur city wants to extinguish and replace. Can communities in the dinosaur city promote urban vitality? When a host of such communities emerged in the 1990’s, people designed ideal social spaces for these places, with democratic homeowner’s committees and market-oriented property management. But still the most fundamental problem of these communities is the impossibility of organising the community and the difficulty of forming committees of homeowner’s, leaving them to skirmish with, rather than resist, the property companies. These areas superficially look bright, but apart from a minority of residents composed of people from a work-unit who bought their housing collectively, they don’t properly solve resident/management problems. A great deal of social science investigation has confirmed this view. Such modernised communities need several decades of people “living with” the other people and things found there, before enough vitality gathers to change it from being a giantwith an empty shell. Urban dinosaurisation is reflected further in its external expansion and engulfing of land and other resources to sustain it. Let me stay with Kunming as a case I know well. The area of the entire Dianchi watershed is 2,920 square km. Counting the plain and basin alone, the area is only 590 square km. According to official plans, the central city area Kunming should have been confined to 164.25 square km by 2010. The main urban region of Kunming already reached 249 square kilometers two years before. The consequences of such “urban dinosaurisation” have already been enunciated by experts on resources and ecosystems. Following this year’s devastating drought in the Kunming region, some experts pointed out that one of its causes was the rapid advance of urbanisation in the Dianchi Lake Basin, which has brought the capacity of its supporting water resources to the limit. Another example is the insertion of the north-south Kunluo Road that extinguished the “muckrakers” along the east coast of Dianchi Lake. [1] The route planned for the road destroyed the irrigation system built in the 1950's, so that a place that in former times maintained high yields has been turned into one of alternating droughts and floods. Such roads also intensify urban expansion: once there is a road, property development frenzy follows. Kunming in the pre-drought years was already one of the nation’s 14 most water-stressed cities. This may seem ridiculous, but it’s true. My warnings about urban dinosaurisation were based on the notion that the dinosaur manufacturers entertained a naïve modernist aesthetic. But I see that, in fact, all the 40-plus storey buildings imagined by these people are nothing but heaps of “silver” reaching to the sky —from the huge land transfer fees arising from urban village demolitions to the astronomical prices of the mansions—and of so-called political merit. Such are the dreams of the dinosaur makers. How to put an end to urban dinosaurisation with one or two realistic proposals? Let us put an end to the utopia eulogized as the “bright—pastoral—sanitary city”. The violence of money-driven major demolition and construction finds legitimacy within the enchantment of this “utopia,” while the world of daily life of countless people meets destruction. Let us hold fast to each “decrepit” neighborhood and compound, and firmly reject the hard and soft violence of the money utopia. Taking this standpoint, the spread of urban dinosaurisation will be stopped. * Zhu Xiaoyang, “Jingti chengshi konglonghua” [Beware the dinosaurisation of cities!], Nanfang Zhoumo, 31 March 2010 [朱晓阳： “警惕城市恐龙化！”，南方周末，2010年3月 31日 (<http://www.infzm.com/content/43327>here).]. [1 ] Trans.：粪瓢人 © Copyright 2010 by Boxun News Top of Page |
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