The Urban Historical, and the Urban Historicized in Modern-Day China

Ref.: 3
Área temática: 01 Integridad física de los paisajes urbanos históricos
Fecha de recepción: 24/10/2008

AUTORES (* Autor principal)

MORLEY, Ian * (China) - Chinese University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT

For thirty years China has been experiencing urban transition as an outcome of restructuring its national economy. In accord with this economic alteration metropolitan growth has expanded, and the face and morphology of large-sized settlements has moved away from what it once was to that of present-day metaphors of skyscrapers, multi-level roadways, and monumental boulevards. Such evolution, understood by many as China's desire to catch up with the West, however misunderstands the development of Chinese settlements, and in particular the management and meaning of historic urban environments.
In explicating the modern-day Chinese relationship with urban development and heritage underlying environmental, cultural, and political factors must be appreciated. Firstly, it must be recognised that `new' cities have been built as part of a national process to manufacture the local and regional pieces needed to compete in the global economy. This procedure by its very nature has necessitated the conversion of existing settlements in provinces like Guangdong, the nation's industrial heartland. Accordingly the State has encouraged the renewing of urban districts within such territories. Yet this process is far from unambiguous. Whilst the razing of urban settings belonging to eras when the country suffered from age-old social problems has been welcomed, it has arisen at great cost. Many notable historic urban landscapes (HUL) have been lost even though the marriage of modernity with heritage is purportedly perceived as being fundamental to what the `new' Chinese city is supposed to be. As such reform-era urbanism may be seen as having two contrasting but complementary tracks: one building components necessary to compete in the global economy via clearing (historic) sites; the other maintaining local traditions via a dialectic of safeguarding the spirit of HULs rather than the physical manifestations of that spirit, e.g. by installing architectural and landscape features related to China's past within new districts. Consequently historicised rather than historic environments have transpired.
As this proposal, by drawing attention to Foshan in Guangdong Province shall explicate, urban heritage and conservation policy in China sits in a culturally contradictory position despite the deep observable value of HULs. On the one hand heritage has been utilised as a means to purposefully connect the contemporary city with the country's past, to authenticate present-day nation building practices, and to ensure the modern urban environment contains a more than adequate degree of `Chineseness'. As such, `history' in the form of architecture and environments has been exploited to unite China's past with present, and thereby direct the nation's future in the context of a global economic framework. Yet as this work shall explain the alliance of past and present in China is complex, and involves not only the need to clarify the association between HULs and historicised urban landscapes, but moreover to abstract the value of heritage in the milieu of contemporary city making. Asking thus how HUL and historicised ones are formed, how they interact, and what they compose of, ultimately this paper enquires as to what `history' and the `past' is understood to be, and if theoretical solutions in urban redevelopment within historic Chinese cities can ever be found.

BIBLIOGRAFÍA

Batisse, C., Brun, J-F., and Renard, M. F., `Globalization and the growth of Chinese cities', in F. Wu, Globalization and the Chinese City. Routledge: London, 2006.
Broudehoux, A-M. The Making of post-Mao Beijing. New York: Routledge, 2004.
Chen, N.N., Clark, C., Gottschang, S., and Jeffrey, L., China Urban: Ethnographies of Contemporary Culture. London: Duke University Press, 2001.
Gaubatz, P, `Urban Transformation in Post-Mao China: Impacts of the Reform Era on China's Urban Form', in Davis, D., Kraus, R., Naughton, B., and Perry, E. Urban spaces in contemporary China: The potential for autonomy and community in post-Mao China. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Ma, L.J.C., and Wu, F. Restructuring the Chinese City: Changing Society, Economy and Space. London: Routledge, 2005.
Graeber, D. Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Lu, D.Remaking Chinese urban form: Modernity, Scarcity and Space, 1949-2005. London: Routledge, 2006.
Perkins, D. The Challenges of China's Growth. Washington DC: American Enterprise Institute Press, 2006.