Bridging
[EN] The Design Unit addressed the issue of quality of collective places in large-scale urbanization processes in China. As widely known, the construction of hundreds of new towns is progressing rapidly, with a weak stratification of social and cultural values. The grain that “makes the city” is no longer the house, as it was in traditional China, neither the public space, but large mono-functional lots avoiding any chance of keeping the human dimension as a fundamental of the project. To face this problem through a critical approach, the Design Unit worked in collaboration with Tsinghua University on a New Town located in the periphery of Chengdu, Sichuan Province. The aim of the project was to realize complex urban spaces, focused on community life and collective “human-scaled” places.
“Provincializing global urbanism means identifying and em- powering new loci of affirmation, from which to speak back against and contesting the mainstream global urbanism. Mainstream global urbanism cannot meet with others, which cannot be fully reduced to its own image and assimilated to itself.”
Eric Sheppard, Helga Leitner & Anant Maringanti
Many countries that for a long time have been strongly influenced by the western culture, in urbanism and in social contest, are rediscovering the importance of their traditional cultures. Traditional notions, concepts, methods are increasingly used to solve nowadays situations and issues.
In many case this traditional way are successful, and this suggest the opportunity to develop the research in this direction of the Provincialization. This concept has multiple potential meanings that share the goal of deconstructing what we think we know about different culture, disturbing norms about what is familiar for us and what is strange. This pays homage to a genre of post-colonial, or post western, approach and theories. That searching to demonstrate the provincial character of universal knowledge has to be followed in the idea that it is impossible to have, as a definition, a mainstream global urbanism. The cities in the global South are at once full of hope and aspiration, risk, and danger, full with sharp contrasts and contradictions related to their own culture and society. They are places for which it is di cult, or impossible, to plan with a preordined method.
In our project we have imagined a viaduct in the heart of the science city we designed. Many via ducts and pedestrian overpasses in Asian cities are purely functional elements, but due to the big scale of the structure of the underpass which was built for vehicle under the lake of the city, we found an opportunity to create a unique public space in the heart of our new city. The ambition was to make this space as full of different functions and activities as possible. In the design of our public spaces, where does not exist gated space, but all is interconnected simultaneously with visual puns on several heights, with an organic pathways that allow continuous use. Organic is also the morphology of the connecting spaces between the various pub- lic functions included in the bridge. So, from the regularity of the urban fabric of the masterplan of the city, we move on to an organic vision of architecture forms of public buildings, in order to allow a different reading of these public spaces.
We believe that this idea of Provincialization is a very topical issue, which should be considered not only in large-scale urbanism, as we tried to point out in the this third part of the paper, but also on the smallest scale. It is a very important point because it considers as main point people’s lives and the cultural differences between them. It takes into account how different we are, and how many ideas and possibilities these differences can give to us.
Alberto Lotti & Luca Naso.
Illustration by Lucy Davey and Geoff McFetridge for silhouettes of the Views.
