The following article, written by Jacob Dreyer and originally published in The Calvert Journal as "Maximum City: the vast urban development projects of the Soviet era in Russia are reborn in modern China, "analyzes a fascinating phenomenon: the export of Soviet urban planning - or rather the Stalinist planning - shaping Chinese cities today.
As I cycled to work on May 20 this year, Yan'an Expressway - crosstown artery Shanghai, named after the utopian socialist city that was 1940 fortress of Mao Zedong - was strangely silent, curly for a visit by President Vladimir Putin. We discovered the next day that the outcome of his visit was the signing of a contract of $ 400 billion with China for the export of gas and oil. As President Barack Obama had promised he would, Putin made a pivot to Asia, although on a slightly different axis. Shanghai, the terms of the agreement - which was extremely beneficial to China - did believe that if Russia was voluntarily become a vassal state of the PRC, making a reality both of dystopian predictions fantasy novel the day of Vladimir Sorokin and Russian Oprichnik of scary stories about Chinese immigrants flooding in Siberia
irony is that the company's models imported from Russia during the Soviet period -. as embodied in popular culture, legal devices and, of particular interest to the cyclist, in architecture and urban planning - are as influential as ever in China. If, as the Chinese philosopher Wang Hui noted in his book The end of the revolution, socialism was the door through which China adopted during his journey into modernity, then it was Russia that opened the door by export templates and expertise which has laid the foundation for much of what is modern China.
Perhaps the most tangible legacies is the aspect of contemporary Chinese city; and since China is a command economy, this look is remarkably unified. The shaping factor of choice for modern Chinese city was the Soviet urban planning - or more precisely, the Stalinist planning. In 1949, when the Communists came to power, Beijing was a city of half a million people: 95% or more in both the population and structures built in 20 million people today agglomeration emerged of the revolution, and Soviet advice that the new government is pressing. In his brilliant book Beijing Record, Wang Jun made clear the extent of this influence: "On September 16 [1949], a group of Soviet experts in municipal government arrived in Beijing, they were supposed to help the new government. efforts to plan the development of the city. in reality, however, they had to have a absolute example in everything. "
the Soviet city planners and architects, led by MG Barannikov, submitted a report, proposals on improving the Beijing municipal government, which was largely shape the development of the city to come. They came to China not only for geopolitical reasons, but, as the theorists of Japanese urbanism who came in the 1920s and 1930s, and as Western starchitects coming today because of. China's capacity to undertake large projects, offering the speed and enormous power the Soviet model city planners could be achieved on Chinese soil when he could not be in Russia, because there were fewer obstacles, Mao was ready to demolish all old buildings. make the Chinese city a tabula rasa also Mao combined in one person the revolutionary desires of a radical Lenin with the total power of Stalin, he both wanted and was able to completely remake the urban society a "real ., more pure "version of the Soviet urban ideology could materialize in the Chinese urban desert - literally empty fields and illiterate peasants who were" modernized "-. in historically complex spaces, ideologically overdetermined Moscow or St. Petersburg
As the model Beijing has been replicated throughout the country, in rural and agricultural areas that had never known large cities, this vision has become ubiquitous: Soviet architectural typologies and models of Soviet urban planners were the original vision of cities of more glimpsed by Chinese farmers in a society that is rapidly modernizing. Indeed, to date, the campaign migrant workers jostle in the kind of large blocks of suburban tower overlooking the shores of Russian cities. Ring roads, the blocks of the tower, black cabs, restaurants seedy sidewalks lined with empty liquor bottles: the urban models of contemporary China are identical to those of the Soviet Union, just multiplied. The similarities do not end there: a frequent traveler of Blagoveshchensk to Heihe or from Beijing to Moscow, can not help but notice the bad teeth and asymmetrical haircuts billionaires, vulgar suburban replications of Versailles, the endless ringing in downtown.
Many Western observers condescendingly generally myopia, treat the Soviet model of the city - a planned component in national economic unity framework - as irrelevant. In fact, this planning model is booming. The clearest indication of its survival in China today is the concept of cities "at several levels", with Shanghai and Beijing being "first level", Hangzhou, Chengdu or Tianjin as "second class" and so right now. This is far from what the Dutch architect and theorist Rem Koolhaas called urbanism "delusional": the Chinese city is meticulously planned as part of a holistic national network of transportation systems, communication networks and network distribution of commodities - the vast majority is either state-owned or state-controlled.
The Western tendency to laugh, or to see what state control as evidence of corruption or inconsistency, is strange given the widespread concern expressed the worrying development of the Chinese economy, and particularly the rapid emergence of some of the most dynamic cities in the world such as Zhengzhou, Hefei, Shijiazhuang, Changsha. We must not forget that, somehow, all these cities are mutated children of the beautiful Stalin era. The ultimate goal of Stalinism - to rapidly develop the economy in order to destroy Western hegemony - is being made as we speak, by people who were members of the Communist Party lifetime. Western observers may feel they are not "real" communists because they drink fine wines, visit prostitutes and drivers: these commentators are obviously unfamiliar with the nature of Chinese society in the years of the zenith Maoist radicalism, in which all these features existed in abundance.
Moreover, not only is the prevalence of Soviet central planning model of indisputable planning it is to be welcomed. Although this would require the passing of much cynicism inevitably engendered by the ideological apparatuses that seek to convince us that our Western way of life is the only, the future and the best people - the anonymous aggregated masses of workers whose life play away from the city - lies in the Soviet model of Chinese development. This model is disgusting for its relentless materialism - that of its elite, and its lowest citizens, but eminently practical for the same reason.
The creation of generic architectural typologies that can be infinitely duplicated the model of an economic system that puts everyone and everything in a collective aspiration to increased production - model " Chinese "urban planning, which has deep roots in the work of Soviet theorists is growing everywhere that the Chinese public companies operate (and often in the former USSR states) today. The Stalinist-Maoist model, which exploits the relationship between people and their environment to generate industrial wealth, even at enormous cost to people and the environment, is alive today and growing. Soviet city died -. Long live Beijing
Jacob Dreyer is a writer and architectural theorist based in Beijing. He is editor of lifestyle 品味 生活 Magazine and his work has been published in a wide variety of newspapers in the US, UK and China. His book The Nocturnal Wanderer is due to be released by Eros Press shortly and his writing can be found here.
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