姜巍
JIANG Wei
Urbanization in European has a history of over a thousand years while in china only lasts for 30 years since the economic reform. The speed of urban growth in china is unprecedented and will never be repeated in the future.
However, the physical infrastructure in Chinese cities is close to or even better than Europe's despite of the huge gap between the time of developing. Wujin District has its own Urban Planning Exhibition Hall equipped with advanced digital medias.
The problem is that when you walk on the eight-lanes-streets or vast squares in Wujin, you may feel infinitely miniscule and dominated within the space and you cannot tell the feature of this city cause it has the same appearance of most other cities in China. So, there are two main problems of modern Chinese cities I come up with after this workshop.
First of all, human scale is removed from the city design. Current government prefer oversized design to manifest local superiority and evaluate one design by “rankings“ like “the biggest“, “national class“ and “top 3“, etc. Second, to a varying degree most Chinese new developed cities have all lost their cultural characteristics. People have a sense of inferiority toward their traditional cultures and replace it with another exotic beauty in a worse-imitated way.
As a landscape design student, I think we need to release the camouflage to build real space based on human spirit and to preserve our cultural heritage to find our own identity based on city spirit. The city regeneration for china is still an arduous and long way to go, but we should remind us of former mistakes and stay positive to explore the most suitable strategies.