A cheap meal, a strip club or a Brazilian wax: it's not uncommon to get flyers promoting these goods shoved into your hands while walking down the streets of New York City. In China it’s a different story. Often promoted goods by flyers are the so-called HOPSCA’s (hotels, offices, parks, shopping malls, clubs and apartments): compound-like areas that offer living space for the newly enriched middle class. It comes as no surprise in a country with the highest rate of urbanization in the world.
In the recently published book How the City moved to Mr Sun by the GoWest Project (an urban research lab with offices in Amsterdam and Shanghai) the newly emerging megacities in China are being explored through photographs, statistics and interviews with local architects and city officials.
What is interesting about the book is how it touches upon the relationship between public sphere and physical public spaces, such as the traditional old city center. What happens if you demolish a century old neighborhood completely and replace it by an office drawn high-rise fantasy? How does this influence the public sphere? For people interested in the development of a contemporary, mass scale version of a Grid-like plan this book is highly recommendable.
- Jonas Kooyman
