Chinese Urban Landscape

In his time at Harvard, BAM Co-Founder Jake Walker has penned a manifesto entitled “The Chinese Urban Landscape,” an outpouring of 15 years of work experience on the landscapes we love, with searing comparisons to counterpart landscapes within the United States.

PLACE: Graduate School of Design, Harvard University

YEAR: 2022

AUTHOR: Jacob Walker

TITLE: The Chinese Urban Landscape and Public Realm

Misfortune may give rise to blessing, but may also hide within it.
— Laozi —

FOREWORD

This article is intended to provide a unique perspective on the Chinese urban landscape and public realm. Here the definition of the Chinese urban landscape and public realm is framed through a contrasting and argumentative position on the American discourse on the public realm and urban spaces. My critique of the American lens is aggressive, and frankly a discussion of the Chinese urban landscape and public realm warrants an approach that does not attempt to compare one condition to another. As such, the chapter of this article dedicated to the American lens, which is knowingly conflated with the topic of American Exceptionalism, could be entirely omitted. Removing this polemic would not only produce a more concise and pointed account of the Chinese urban landscape but also avoid potentially contentious topics and clearly represent a ‘safe’ approach. However, when considering the removal of an address of American Exceptionalism, I fear a visceral impulse would be lost in the position taken, and given this article is not the conclusion of a potential direction of research but instead closer to a beginning, I believe there exists a value in attempting to thread together disparate considerations.

While the focus of this writing is primarily aimed at the larger scale and more ‘universal’ discourse related to urban sociology, design, and planning theory, a latent secondary concern exists local and specific to the pedagogy of elite institutions for higher education and specifically Harvard. At the scale of the discourse, if a balanced definition of the Chinese urban landscape and public realm is to be arrived at and communicated, there first needs to be a recognition of the biases inherent when viewed from a framework established to address the American context and discourse. The recognition of potential biases must be accompanied by attempts to dismantle them to reconstruct the perceptive framework to allow for definitions of the public realm to exist beyond a discourse that frames the American context as exemplary.

Being for, by, of, or in the public is fundamentally a dialectical construct in which a definition of self implies reciprocity through which the non-self is also defined. The meaning of what the ‘public realm’ is also transforms through the evolution of the definition of the ‘private realm.’ Therefore, to understand and discuss the sociological characteristics of the public, one must also grapple with the ethnographic dimension of self. Therefore, in an attempt to problematize American exceptionalism in the discourse of the public realm, the complex interrelation of democratic values, identity politics, capitalism, and the Anglo-Saxon myth become a vast territory for deconstruction. Fundamentally such deconstruction is not intended to be purely argumentative but intends to establish or induce a cultural ‘reformatting’ which often naturally occurs when one is a transplant from one culture to another. The intention is to break down the common, familiar, and typically unquestionable to allow space for the redefinition on other terms. American Exceptionalism is so deeply ingrained that any attempt to address it or strip it away from discourse results in a bewildering quagmire of hypothetical, causal, and synchronistic relationships. Even so, here exists an attempt to address the relationship of American democratic values, predatory capitalism, and self-centered identity politics, as a manifestation of American Exceptionalism which, if left unaddressed, produces a bias through which the rest of the world is understood to lack potential for substantive contribution to a discourse on social equity and urbanism.

The general arc of the argument with regards to problematizing the American outlook attempts to link a righteous religious mandate as a nation chosen by God with a capitalist impulse that predates and continues to override the establishment of a unified ‘social contract.’ The sentiment could not be better exemplified than by the words of one of the world’s greatest capitalists John D. Rockefeller.

God gave me my money. I believe the power to make money is a gift from God … to be developed and used to the best of our ability for the good of mankind. Having been endowed with the gift I possess, I believe it is my duty to make money and still more money and to use the money I make for the good of my fellow man according to the dictates of my conscience.¹

Following this thread of America’s divine capitalism eventually leads to an understanding that contemporary consumer culture is primarily driven by a desire for ever-heightening degrees of individuation expressed through ‘identity’ as defined through the purchase of consumer goods.  The American predisposition to a political discourse centered on identity is not exclusively arising from a call to social justice and equity but potentially more so a result of being ideal for capitalist-driven consumerism.  The flourishing of consumerism places undue pressure on democratic values, which in principle, are based on the idea of the public as active citizens instead of passive consumers.  Instead, the democratic system capitulates and is ultimately warped by consumerist practices in which the general public does not choose a form of governance based on policy or capability of representatives but instead through the reflection of self-image, which most closely aligns with one’s own identity and values.  The precarity of American democracy as ideal grounds for American capitalism as manifest through consumable individual identity is an attempt to expose participatory values as a veil for underlying power structures.  The hope would be that in recognizing these ‘facts’, one would be willing to allow for the construction of a definition of the individual-public dualism, which moves away from the overcharged political dimension posed by the American public discourse.

After taking issue with American exceptionalism as manifest through proclaimed democratic values deniably hijacked by capitalism, a more balanced and comparative approach is taken to establish a definition of the Chinese public realm, focusing on three characteristics, mythology, leisure, and the cultural propensity for change.  While the characteristics of mythology and leisure in the urban landscape are unique in their own right, the topic of a culture primed for and practiced in rapid change attempts to bring full circle the importance of an examination of the Chinese urban landscapes in terms unfamiliar to western urban socio-political and analytical discourse.  Regardless of where American values lie, the technological, economic, and political rise of China has the potential to construct a world order which is not only unfamiliar to American value systems but will inherently be viewed as a threat given America’s underlying mandate from God.  The very real potential for conflict elevates the importance of a greater understanding of uncomfortable and potentially threatening territories.

PROBLEMATIZING THE AMERICAN DISCOURSE ON PUBLIC REALM

The context of this writing must first be understood as an all-consuming polemic arising from observations in navigating the process of professional practice in designing urban landscapes in China.

In Kelly Brown Douglas’s Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God, she expertly unravels the history of American exceptionalism with its roots in the construction of the Anglo-Saxon myth during the English Reformation in the 15th century when splitting from the catholic church.  The Anglo-Saxon myth, constructed in opposition to Roman Catholicism, is heavily rooted in a morality granted through a combination of divine right and bloodline.  “To be an Anglo-Saxon nation is to be a chosen nation.  It is this constructed racial-religious synchronicity that makes America exceptional.”² Given the foundational aspect of the Anglo-Saxon myth in the American psyche, the resulting form of exceptionalism reformulates issues specific to America as global while also placing itself at the fore of discourse and solutions.  While Douglas examines this lineage of American exceptionalism through the racial conflicts of present-day America, wider ramifications exist when considered in the global context.

While most contemporary understandings associate America’s exceptionalism with its form of democratic governing and its mission to spread democratic principles across the world, to understand it as simply about politics and mission does not capture the racial or divine character of America’s narrative of exceptionalism.³ 

Much of the progressive discourse arising from America concerning urbanization and the public realm is a field of paradoxical landmines.  One such condition is the unavoidable and unfortunate fate of a discourse framed through the lens of equity and politics in which, no matter how well-intentioned or inclusive the intention is, positions will inevitably be unaccounted for or marginalized.  In liberal discourse and associated planning theories, American exceptionalism is neither overt nor intentional, yet it has an inherent, unavoidable bias that contradicts the progressive agenda.  It was not the initial intent to become fixated on accounts of American exceptionalism; however, the recollection of experienced counterpoints from over a decade of living in China was unavoidable.  However, subtle American exceptionalism seems pervasive in constructing a discourse on the public realm.  Therefore, any line of inquiry on the public realm focusing outside of the United States which does not initially problematize the American lens will continue to proselytize American values as global.

The traces of American exceptionalism lightly peppered through the contemporary framing if the discourse on the public realm could potentially be overlooked, however with the overriding theme of justice as the central component to a definition of the public realm, it invites a problematic trajectory in which the idea of justice concerning the American urban context is viewed as universal and should therefore be applied everywhere, in the same way, across the globe.  It is not unlike the messaging associated with American democracy in which the idea of American democracy becomes more important than the reality of how it functions.

Americans may be encouraged to vote, but not to participate more meaningfully in the political arena. Essentially the election is a method of marginalizing the population. A huge propaganda campaign is mounted to get people to focus on these personalized quadrennial extravaganzas and to think, “That’s politics.” But it isn’t. It’s only a small part of politics. The population has been carefully excluded from political activity, and not by accident. An enormous amount of work has gone into that disenfranchisement. During the 1960s the outburst of popular participation in democracy terrified the forces of convention, which mounted a fierce counter-campaign. Manifestations show up today on the left as well as the right in the effort to drive democracy back into the hole where it belongs.  Bush and Kerry can run because they’re funded by basically the same concentrations of private power. Both candidates understand that the election is supposed to stay away from issues. They are creatures of the public relations industry, which keeps the public out of the election process. The concentration is on what they call a candidate’s “qualities,” not policies. Is he a leader? A nice guy? Voters end up endorsing an image, not a platform.⁴

If a sacred American institution, such as democracy, can be transformed into a tool of capital yet maintain almost unanimous support as egalitarian, so too can the criteria of justice and equity obfuscate more problematic inner machinations in urbanism and urbanization. This is not to say justice, equity, and participatory processes should not be explicitly pursued, but there should also be recognized that the use of such methods can also be a means to an end, a language, and a framing that can function as a justification for or obfuscation of the status quo.

The opportunity for an equity-based form of urbanism and justice must also exist beyond the confines and mechanisms associated with American democratic practices.  While it may be overly critical and nihilistic to propose that an insistence on democratic values permits the power of capital to remain unfettered, it is also a reality of the relationship between consumerism and governance in contemporary America.  While the infamous legacy associated with American urban renewal programs has left an indelible mark on both the American psyche and the role of the designer/planner in the wave to develop counter methods that operate in opposition to the modernist design imposition, the pendulum has swung so far, and the design imposition so demonized, that designers must instead find ways of manipulating so-called democratic processes to legitimize the intuitive impulse to action.

Design is an inherently optimistic pursuit.  To endure the pain of the design process, which is typified by the perpetual trampling of ideas beyond recognizable form, one must constantly be self-assured that each step has something which can be salvaged.  Regardless of how seemingly insignificant that salvaged element or idea may be there has to be a belief that it can be designed to be a little bit better than if left alone.  Is it not an inherently just act to attempt to achieve an ideal against all odds?  If not justice, does it not reflect an inherent potentiality or intent to be?  What is the justice associated with beauty?  Is it not important for humans to experience the sublime or be filled with wonderment?  To take away the aesthetic experience from life would be truly unjust, and thus, is the provision of an aesthetic dimension of life and space not a form of justice?  A beautiful building, a romantic tree-lined street, a unique sculpture in a plaza, or a touching memorial, are these acts of creation not fundamentally some tiny form of justice?  While it may be over the top to attempt to state that all design is inherently just, by contrast, to assume that justice and equity must be explicitly the intention for design for it to be just is reductionist and inherently devalues the potential of design.

What is concurrently devalued is the role of intuition.  The need for things to be explicit is the material of capital flows, the power of the implied is the poetics of art and the foundation of culture.  The urban landscape, as a realm for design in America, has been consumed by the need for the explicit.  Trees cannot be discussed for their beauty; they cannot be discussed for their ephemeral qualities through the seasons, such as the smell of blossom in the spring or the crisp aroma of light decay of leaves fallen to the ground in fall.  Trees are instead monetarily measured for their ecological benefits, validated through their ability to draw down carbon, increase property values, or how they can create more equitable neighborhoods.  While the explicit value of land as a commodity is well understood in America, the implicit value of the constructed landscape is not.  This is prevalent in the ubiquitous treatment of sidewalks as a drab and un-designed territory left to entropy.  Where there is little implicit understanding of constructed landscapes as a realm for poetic expression, there is little hope for the beauty of the constructed realm to be understood as just.  America will, unfortunately, continue to perpetuate its abject ugliness.  The realities of this realm have so affected the imagination of its possibilities that American expectations for what it could and should be are limited.

Sidewalks are unassuming, standardized pieces of gray concrete that are placed between roadways and buildings, and their common appearance belies their significance and history as unique but integral parts of the street and urban life.⁵

The American sidewalk is likely one of the most physically nondescript and uninteresting sidewalks in the world, and, while possibly an accurate reflection of the American perception of the public realm, the gray nondescript nature of most American sidewalks cannot be understood to reflect the values of other cultures, only that of America. If sidewalks can be understood as reflections of cultural values, then through examining sidewalks and associated urban landscapes of other cultures, insight can be obtained concerning the differences in how the broader public realm is perceived.

Sidewalks, as is the case with landscape, are plagued by the problem of invisibility. They are so omni-present, and their condition so ubiquitously disregarded that the general public, politicians, and even architects don’t see them as places where aesthetics has critical value. While they are physically present, they are also invisible.  This invisibility is in large part due to the car. As Sennett notes, “the erasure of alive public space contains an even more perverse idea-that of making space contingent upon motion.⁶ Culture produces forms of invisibility unique to that culture.  This is to say that being thoroughly steeped in one’s own cultural milieu while potentially providing deep insight as a ‘citizen expert’ also produces equally impressive blind spots. The reality of the American sidewalk as an invisible, perpetually disintegrating realm, barely maintained to a subsistence level suitable for traffic, is not unrelated to another form of collective blindness in America, which is that the United States refuses to see itself as anything other than a democracy.

…the US has essentially one political party, the business party, with two factions called Republicans and Democrats. And they consistently follow policies that are in the interest of their business constituency and sometimes of some help to the population, sometimes not.⁷

The myth of America as a democracy allows for the perpetuation of a system that is not.  In 2014 a study undertaken by Princeton University and Northwestern University, published by Cambridge University online press, concluded that America functions not like a Democracy but instead an Oligarchy.⁸ The problems and invisibilities of the American sidewalk are thus not inherently a result of mismanaged resources resulting from a democratic process, but instead a neglect that originates from a system of governance which citizens do not direct but instead is directed by capital.

As noted, the aesthetic of the American sidewalk is primarily defined by its materiality.  An engineered cementitious mixture that creates large uniform slabs prone to breakages and cracks provides a vast dullness and emphatically expresses its deterioration. The Chinese sidewalk, by contrast, is rarely a poured material but typically comprised of units of stone, brick, or concrete. Units are well suited to Chinese industrial processes; they can be fabricated, shipped to the site, and rapidly deployed by a large labor force. At every step of the process, there exists a kind of vernacular aestheticization. Units are not designed simply for slip resistance; flowers, patterns, or colors are imprinted or cut. When being laid on the site, patterns are often created, zig zags, checkers, lines, and interlocking patterns are common among the cheapest and most common of spaces and applications. In fact, an almost inverse relationship occurs in the poorest and least developed regions which tend towards the more unique and flamboyant paving patterns. Even through a superficial and cursory examination of sidewalk materiality, we can ascertain that China and America not only have completely different public realms but also have entirely different outlooks concerning the role design plays in the urban landscape.

A mindful examination of the Chinese public realm is necessary to establish new concepts and frameworks for defining the public realm and urban landscape. Viewing the Chinese condition through the lens of American discourse is only inherently problematic, as it narrows the potential for new forms of knowledge while denying legitimacy to cultural systems and opposing systems of governance based on their unfamiliarity; it is also unjust.

WAR AND THE MAKING OF INVISIBLE LANDSCAPES

The invisibility of the profession of landscape is one of the overarching and deep-seated issues in the discourse of landscape architecture.  Even the founder of the profession, Fredrick Law Olmsted, lamented the lack of recognition and understanding of what designing the landscape is.

“If people generally get to understand that our contribution to the undertaking is that of the planning of the scheme, rather than the disposition of the flower beds and other matters of gardening decoration, it will be a great lift to the profession.”¹⁶

Architecture, at its core, is constructed and as such, has an intrinsic clarity. It may not be hyperbole to state that it is impossible to imagine any example of architecture that is not constructed. By contrast, the discourse of Landscape Architecture often attempts to contest its constructed nature and is, therefore, less intrinsically clear and more conflicted than architecture.  Landscape Architecture is eternally bound by its engrained conflict, cyclically confronting, embracing, then subsequently rejecting its own constructedness. The nuances of landscape’s intrinsic nature-culture dialectic formulate an innately more philosophical discourse, although the architectural community would widely contest such a statement.

The perception of Landscape Architecture as predominantly nature-based, as opposed to a culture-based field, ultimately leads to differing definitions of what and where the landscape’s physical, conceptual, and academic territory resides.  Culturally contingent understandings of where landscape resides produce culturally specific ‘blind spots’ or invisibilities in the landscape.  American is deeply ambivalent about the idea of nature as constructed; however, not all cultures are similarly ambivalent.  The Chinese culture has long since sidestepped this issue in the long-held belief that nature itself can be enhanced by correctly constructing landscapes and architecture.  This understanding is the foundational ethos of the practice of Feng Shui, which entails the beneficial management of qi flows. “Qi is usually translated as “vital life force,” and according to Classical Chinese Philosophy, qi is the force that makes up and binds together all things in the universe.”¹⁶ The qi of a river, mountain, site, or garden can be enhanced through design and physical manipulation. The Chinese idea of nature is not necessarily a wilderness but instead understood to be that which can be constructed and manipulated to be ‘better’ than nature could be on its own accord.  This results in a condition in which there exists no inherent conflict in the idea of a constructed nature. This concept of nature manifests not only as an entirely different outlook of the built environment but also in utterly different practices of Landscape Architecture and Architecture.  A fundamentally different understanding of the relationship between constructed and non-constructed environments comes with its own unique blind spots and invisibilities.

While the American urban discourse invites conflict and reframes it as necessary or unavoidable, by in large, violent political conflict in American streets is relatively nonexistent. While America does have a history of protest and, in some cases, rioting, the prospect of all-out war has historically been minimal.  The civil war was the last war to be fought on American mainland soil.  Additionally, it could be argued that any armed conflict representing a true threat to American sovereignty, other than self-inflicted, would date back to the war of 1812 and the preceding Revolutionary War.  While the American desire to go to war abroad has remained unsatiated since WW2, the concept of all-out war and occupation of America, perpetrated by foreign nation-states, is extremely remote.  While during the cold war, McNamara’s strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) elevated fears and the distinct possibility of nuclear annihilation.  However, barring the adornment of some suburban homes with bomb shelters, all aspects of American life and livelihood, including urban planning, real estate development, and design, professions charged with designing and creating the urban realm seemed to progress, unshaped by the possibility of war.

The Chinese relationship with war is very different. While America repeatedly ‘finds’ itself abroad at war, since the establishment of the Peoples Republic of China (PRC) in 1949 China has only on a few occasions sent soldiers over the border and, in general, is lauded by the international community for becoming a world superpower without the use of overt force and violence. While contemporary China is virtually war-free, China’s early modern history has formulated a unique psychological relationship to war, which is not only profoundly internalized but manifests in China’s urbanization and built form.

In the one hundred years predating the establishment of the PRC, China was in a state of almost constant and perpetual war.  European colonial powers forcibly opened port cities for trade. Rebellion against the Qing dynasty sparked the largest civil war in the history of the world, with 20 million casualties spanning two decades. Repeated wars with the Empire of Japan, including WW1 and WW2, resulted in a significant loss of territory. Revolution precipitated the fall of dynastic rule, then further descended into a fragmented ‘war lord’ decade. The resurgence of revolution and civil war between the Republic of China and the Chinese Communist Party was partially halted during WW2 and reignited upon the surrender of the Japanese, who raped, pillaged, plundered, and bombarded Chinese cities. The appendix to this article provides a more accurate timeline of these events.  What is essential to recognize is the roughly one hundred years of effectively continuous warfare and conflict which characterized China before the establishment of the PRC. During this tumultuous period in which a modern nation-state was forged, there existed a growing concern for how to protect civilians and the general public during times of war, with particular attention paid to the bombardments endured during WW2.

In 1951 two years after the Chinese Communist Party established the Peoples Republic of China, the first edition of national building codes was issued.  In the first edition of the national building code, there was a section on Civil Air Defense. Through subsequent editions of the Chinese national building code, the specificity and regulations associated with war-proofing buildings were not only further engrained into the building code but were expanded in scope, application, and variety. The ubiquity and uniformity of the national building code designed for public safety in the event of war produce unquestionable and physically present invisibilities in the Chinese built environment, public realm, and urban landscape. One of the more intriguing invisibilities in the Chinese urban landscape is the persistence of structures, spaces, and boundaries associated with Civil Air Defense policies aimed at protecting civilian populations from bombardment during times of war.

Physical manifestations of wartime mentality are not only seen in the large-scale known and rumored infrastructural projects and spaces. For example, Beijing’s main street ChangAn Jie is suspiciously long, straight, and wide, with ample architectural setbacks providing enough space to land large airplanes or host many tanks abreast. Vast, secretive underground networks of tunnels intermingling and intentionally obfuscated by expansive public transport metro networks are some of the more obvious examples of how the anticipation of war shapes the Chinese Urban landscape. Architectural manifestations of war anticipation run so deeply that they have become invisible. These architectural manifestations exist not only as the urban form itself, in the design and organization of the streets and metro, but also in the Chinese homes that have come to define China’s unique form of urbanization.

Ask almost any person living in China, most of whom now live in high-rise buildings, if they know what the giant submarine-like doors in the parking garage of their tower are for.  Inevitably one will receive a blank stare or possibly even the query, ‘what doors?’ Maybe it is the lack of an architecturally trained eye; maybe it is the lack of inquisitiveness resulting from the culturally specific aversion to questioning order; however, it is more likely a form of culturally conditioned blindness.  Whatever the answer is, the giant hulking mass of concrete-filled steel blast doors as the main entry feature to everyone’s home is typically not recognized, let alone its origins understood.

According to the Chinese national building code section ‘Code for design of civil air defense works of dual-utilization of peacetime and wartime,’ (平战结合人民防空工程设计规范) all subterranean parking levels of all buildings are to be designed as bomb shelters.  Among experts in Chinese building code, it is generally believed that for standard forms of bombardment, the parking-garage-bomb-shelter is sufficient, however, there is less general consensus and confidence with regards to nuclear attack, yet given the ubiquity of the code, considering every building built in China since 1951, taken together there does exist a substantial wartime infrastructural security network.

A parking-garage-bomb-shelter then produces an intriguing series of externalities that must be considered.  If people are trapped, how will they get out?  Or conversely, if people must stay below ground for prolonged periods, how will resources for sustaining long-term subterranean life be supplied?  These externalities in the form of architectural cores are prescribed through building codes and leave an indelible mark on the urban landscape.  Civil Air Defense cores are highly regulated with a variety of different functional types.  For example, some cores are designed so hoists can be attached to lower resources or hoist up people.  Some cores have inbuilt ramps with easily removable or blast-away coverings to allow cars and trucks to go in and out in times of emergency.  Complex organizations of drains, vents, ramps, stairs, hallways, and blast doors are arranged to create an easily accessible, highly secured subterranean realm designed for sustained long-term use if needed.

Thus far, this article has addressed very ‘concrete’ elements such as sidewalk pavement and Civil Air Defense Cores, which produce a very different public realm that cannot be evaluated according to the same logic as the American counterpart.  This argument attempts to engage the relationship of the built to the social.  However, what truly distinguishes the Chinese urban landscape and the associated definition of the public is predominantly defined through cultural enactment in the urban landscape.  While the physical accounts of burdensome policy, heavy-handed planning, and mega infrastructure, to some, may induce a depressed reading of the Chinese public realm, by contrast, the cultural performativity in the urban landscape provides, by most accounts, a humor-filled, joyous, and ultimately unique precedent for the relationship of landscape to culture.

MYTHOLOGY IN THE CHINESE URBAN LANDSCAPE

Qingming Festival, also known as Tomb Sweeping Festival, is a fantastic time of year.  It is a traditional Chinese festival celebrated on the first day of the fifth solar month, placing it in the early spring.  The traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar which means that it is formulated both through the movement of the sun, similar to the Gregorian calendar, as well as the moon, which through its cycles, creates a highly differentiated annual calendar in which many holidays and festivals occur in different periods of the year.  The moon dictates many important days in the traditional and contemporary Chinese calendar.  The interplay between lunar and solar cycles creates a vibrant and more exciting year, which does not fall prey to the monotony of an annual calendar pegged only to the sun.  The moon’s schedule, in contrast to the sun, seems to play to its own beat; it is dynamic, changing, unexpected and surprising; a culture that attends to the cycles of the moon undoubtedly contains poetics that the sun does not afford.

While the sun controls the daylight and provides warmth, the moon controls the fluids of all bodies on earth, from the oceans to our cerebral fluids.  Over millennia the agrarian civilization which came to define China was very much in tune with the relationship of the moon to the cycles of agriculture.  Major lunar dates in the Chinese calendar are inseparable from festivals which typically coincide with major agricultural events such as harvest in the fall and sewing seeds in the spring.   While it may seem divergent or extraneous to recount holidays, festivals, and their lunisolar origins when contemplating the public realm, it is precisely these types of characteristics that should be considered in reframing the western lens to produce a reading of the Chinese public realm which is based more closely on the terms through which it is lived and experienced.

The question is, what does it really mean to have an urban landscape and cultural realm defined so heavily by the moon?  The moon is not simply a means for telling time differently; the larger cycles of the moon, as defined through the Chinese zodiac, is also a means for structuring and predicting personal characteristics, fortune, luck, and identity.  Not only does the moon play a role in one’s own given personal identity from birth, but it also has ramifications for the nation.  For example, Dragon and Tiger years are more competitive in academics as more couples prefer to have children in those years.  The moon structures Chinese society in ways that no corollary exists in the west.  As such, the moon certainly plays a role in structuring the Chinese urban landscape.  There appears to be little scholarly work concerning how one’s outlook and perspective on the urban environment changes when the timing of key societal and cultural events are not only linked to national and political bodies but also, or primarily, linked to celestial bodies and their cosmic relationships.

In the spaces of the city, most people will typically utilize the sidewalks and street corners for their offerings. An incomplete circle called a Hua Guo (画郭) or “painted wall” is drawn onto the pavement; the opening in the partial circle is intended to face the direction of where the ancestral grave is located to ensure that the ancestors are able to collect the money and assets while keeping out any other unwanted or lonely ghosts. The offerings are placed inside the partial circle and burned. When more offerings are to be given, a new circle is drawn, and offerings placed inside are set afire. Walking the streets during tomb sweeping is a bit like walking through a city after a firebombing or a zombie apocalypse; every street corner and sidewalk across the entire city and, indeed, the nation are aflame.

In an interview when talking about the mythologies associated with the painted caves of Lascaux in France, Joseph Campbell was asked why he sometimes called the caves ‘temple caves’ in response, Campbell noted: “Temple with images, stained glass windows, cathedrals, are a landscape of the soul, you move into a world of spiritual images.”²¹ He then continues to discuss the purpose of ritual and ritual spaces, specifically in the context of the Roman Catholic church, as an enactment which is intended to move one out of their day to day, and by extension beyond the self.

There’s been a reduction, reduction, reduction, of ritual, even in the Roman catholic church by God!  They’ve translated the mass out of the ritual language, into a language that has a lot of domestic associations.  So that, every time now, that I read the Latin of the mass I get that pitch again, that it’s supposed to give, a language that throws you out of the field of your domesticity.  The alter is turned so that priest’s back is to you, and with him you address yourself outward like that, now they’ve turned the altar around, looks like Julia Childs giving a demonstration, and its all homey and cozy… and they play guitar. Listen, they’ve forgotten what the function of a ritual is, its pitch you out, not to wrap you back in where you have been all the time.²²

What is essential to consider is the reading and understanding of the contemporary Chinese public realm and urban landscape as the place for enacting not only cultural activities but mythological enactments.  What kind of urban realm is created when ritual is not bound or contained within specific theological spaces but instead the spaces of the city, the streets, and the sidewalk?  The experience and reading of the urban landscape and public realm are transformed through collective mythology in the contemporary public realm, which extends beyond its physicality.  In these moments, the Chinese urban landscape expands beyond mere politics and, indeed, beyond space-time itself.  This act and others like it throughout the year make evident that the public realm must be conceptualized on an entirely different basis for which a western-centric discourse of the public is unfamiliar.

Apart from the insistence on the importance of landscape as a cultural realm, or the reading of the production of landscapes as fundamentally different in China due in part to a more robust cultural relevance of landscape spaces, the visceral and experienced reality of the Chinese urban landscape exists beyond analytics as it is primarily a landscape of joy. Unfortunately, in discourse, especially academic discourse of architecture, the topic of fun and joy never truly comes to the fore. Palpable joy throughout the urban landscape prefigures, entices, and is derived from creative expression through the invention of new forms of leisure. Therefore, the Chinese urban landscape is not only a place to enact predetermined and set forms of leisure but also the catalyst for the creation of new forms of leisure. “The public park, I suggest, is an active agent that helps produce creative expressions by transforming into a creative hotbed of its own right, invented and maintained by retirees.”³² What should be noted is the importance of the elderly in producing unique and creative forms of leisure, which are instrumental in reinforcing the relationship between landscape and culture.

Because the State previously provided all forms of livelihood, from work to housing, retirement was and continues to be regulated. Retirement is not something that is up to the individual; it is established through policy that once at a certain age, one must retire. Given medical advances, the age of retirement is relatively young. This means that leisure activities become a vital part of the life cycle. Cultivating hobbies and learning new leisure skills becomes integral to dealing with one’s free time as a retiree. The communal dimension provides easy access in the form of introduction to different types of leisure as well as support. Leisure then becomes something about more than oneself; it is not only one’s own time but collective time. Collective enactment of leisure is not only a societal construct but something which reinforces the spaces in which they are enacted as a realm that reinforces cultural expression.

Chinese believe that longevity is achieved through self-cultivation. Self-cultivation extends beyond ideas of biological health, as framed through western medicine, and is more holistic than the medicalized notions of keeping fit and eating healthy to live longer. As longevity in the Chinese sense is related to the Chinese concept of Qi, a culturally inflected metaphysical dimension exists. Longevity and health are not entirely void of a cultural component, and collectivized acts of self-cultivation also relate to the construction of collective identity. The urban spaces in which such activities occur become integral to cultural values and identity creation.

The elderly are part of the Chinese city and, through their collective leisure, also play a role in forming the public realm. By contrast, the elderly in America have no socially structured conduit through which to inform urban identity. More often than not, they are viewed as a burden and not seen as having an active or necessary role in shaping urban space. By virtue of the elevating of the idea of the public realm as defined through identities in conflict, the American urban landscape becomes a contested ground in which community is formed through the oppositional forces of activism and protest. Unfortunately, this limits the potential of the public realm as it can only be defined through those who are physically and mentally able to contest, which excludes the young and the old. While the old and young in America exist in the urban landscape, they are not permitted to shape its qualities. By contrast, through collectivized leisure practices, the elderly play a significant role in Chinese the public realm.

The Chinese urban landscape is not formed through one’s individual ‘rights’ to the space but through collective cultural expression. The urban landscape is not primarily a realm for one’s own activities but collective forms of self-cultivation, which reformulate the urban landscape as a realm that actively engages in the production of cultural values and maintains cultural continuities. The Chinese urban landscape is not just the reflection of cultural ideas but is, in fact, the vehicle through which cultural expression arises, which in turn reformulates the spaces.

THE PUBLIC REALM OF THE FUTURE

The American and western political establishment held a belief that if China were able to become wealthy enough and create a large enough middle class through capitalism, China would begin to ‘liberalize’ and become more ‘western.’ What is now becoming understood is that this expectation was incorrect and that capitalism cannot be inherently equated with America’s own self-image. While there are undoubtedly many reasons why America and western powers may have been optimistic about believing in the transformative and ‘normalizing’ power of capitalism, ultimately, it illustrates culturally conditioned blind spots inherent in America’s reading of China. Socialist values with Chinese characteristics are not supplanted by capitalism but instead provide a foundation upon which capitalist expression but a factor. “In the process of moving from plan to market in China, space itself has become commodified. Capitalist practices produce particular kinds of space, yet already inscribed in such space are memories and practices of a socialist ear that continue to inform the new.”³³ These blind spots exist not only in macro-geopolitical and economic terms but also in urban sociological terms. The academic apparatus and discourse on the public realm, which evolved primarily from and is tailored to the American context, is equally prone to blind spots when applied to the Chinese context.

In part, America’s oversight concerning China is related to a deeply engrained narrative created by American corporations and supported by the American government that capitalism and democracy are one in the same; therefore, capitalism democratizes. This democracy-capitalism linkage is a fabrication originating from the United States in which it is believed that a “new form of democracy in which business responded to people’s innermost desires in a way politicians could never do. …a form of democracy that is depended on treating people not as active citizens, like Roosevelt did, but as passive consumers.”³⁴ By extension, it is to say that through the ability to choose products, one is exercising a democratic right and vice versa; the choice of democratic candidates, like products, are intended to reflect one’s own individuality and identity.  

President Hoover was the first politician to articulate the idea that consumerism would become the central motor of American life. After his election he told a group of advertisers and public relations men “You Have taken over the job of creating desire and have transformed people into constantly moving happiness machines. Machines which have become the key to economic progress.” What was beginning to emerge in the 1920s was a new idea of how to run mass democracy. At its heart was the consuming self which not only made the economy work but was also happy and docile and so created a stable society.³⁵

It has become practically unfathomable to the American political and economic establishments that capitalism and democracy could be discussed in delaminated terms. It, therefore, is not only puzzling but perceived as an affront to the American way of life that China has been able to utilize a centrally planned government to control capital markets and combine capitalism with communism. This tension is similarly present in American urban sociology and planning discourse which refuses the delamination of democracy from the public realm. Ultimately, this does everyone, especially academic circles, a disservice. By understanding the American form of democracy as inescapably corrupted by American forms of capitalism, one should be equally as critical of discourse that arises from American ideals of democracy which carry inherent to them American capitalist trappings. Closing off the possibility for other forms of the public realm to be constructed in terms uncomfortable to American discourse limits the collective ability to navigate the future in which China will play an exceedingly significant role. Therefore, a purely pollical and ‘democratic’ lens through which to construct an understanding of the public realm is not only exclusionary to different forms of governance but fundamentally is detrimental to democratic values because there is no knowledge basis from which to construct progressive and oppositional alternatives.

What is interesting is that through capitalism and associated consumer power, China represents the future. The rise of China’s consumer and global capital dominance is not dissimilar to the lament of Japanese General Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, who executed the attack on Pearl Harbor and reflected in his diary writing: “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” This is to say that for the last eighty years, America has enjoyed the power associated with being the world’s only remaining manufacturing powerhouse after WW2 and, consequently, the world’s largest consumer. Although contrary to the America idea of capitalism and democracy as interchangeable, the truth is capitalism benefits any with the greatest power to purchase. Thus whoever has the highest degree of purchasing power i.e. the largest market, capitalism will mold itself to fit. Capitalism has no political allegiance nor moral code and as China becomes the world’s largest consumer, global capitalism will inevitably mold itself to China’s agenda.

With just under 20% of the world’s population, as compared to America’s 4.25%, with the world’s largest and fastest-growing middle class, and the greatest number of people pulled out of abject poverty in the history of the world, China represents the worlds most extensive consumer base, and in a globalized capitalist market that equates to power. China represents the consumers of the future. If China represents and embodies the future of the global capital marketplace, therefore, as a country controlled by capitalism, America’s future is also intertwined with China’s. To not attempt to understand China is tantamount to denying the future. Giving equal validity to a public realm that does not conform to America’s dubious ‘democratic’ values limits the ability to navigate the future. To deny the fact that China, Chinese social values, and Chinese state-controlled capitalism will be the dominant global force of this century is to deny reality. Thus apart from attempting to reform the definition of the public realm, which can function in accordance with ‘Chinese values,’ one of the major contributing factors in understanding the Chinese urban realm is the condition of rapid change. It is to understand the physical dimension of change and how change cultivates associated psychology and expectation for more change.

When we talk about the speed of change in China today, we tend to focus on its rapidly changing physical landscape-and the difference there are dramatic.  But in doing so we neglect change in the mental landscape of China’s people.  Looking at the exhibit, or at side-by-side picture of Shanghai in 1989 and today, you might ask yourself how living through that sort of change would shape your expectation for progress and your sense of what government, technology, and commerce can do.³⁶

The Chinese urban landscape is not a static realm. It is not only a cultural realm where mythologic practice and leisure exist, but it is also fundamentally a changing realm. The massive urbanization of China since 1978 has created a culture in which change is constant. The public realm discussed now will be different in a year or two or ten. The urban realm in China is fluid and malleable, not only because it is viewed as a cultural realm where expressions of culture through design, art, and self-cultivation are inherent but also because constant change is not only a reality but by now, an expectation.

China’s rapid change is commonly attributed to totalitarianism; while not untrue, it is an oversimplification that precludes the Chinese capacity and desire to absorb and adopt new and different conditions. Dychtwald’s argument for China as the world leader in innovative technologies is not based upon the western model of individual creative genius, which glorifies the invention of technologies. Instead, the redefinition of technological innovation is focused on the rapid adoption and absorption of technologies as the paramount characteristic in evaluating societal, technological advance. The degree of technological advancement in a society should not necessarily be measured by who first invents a technology but by the degree to which that technology is adopted and absorbed by the general population.

In 2014 Apple Pay was launched in the U.S., followed a year later by Samsung Pay and Android Pay, and Ali pay and WeChat Pay were launched in China. In timing and tech the innovations were all but equal, but their adoption rates have differed dramatically. In early 2019 Apple announced with much fanfare that 383 million phones around the world had activated Apple Pay- but at that point only 24% of U.S. iPhone owners had ever actually used the technology. And not until that year did Apple Pay surpass the Starbucks mobile app used only in Starbucks stores-as the most-used mobile-payment app in the United States. Things have unfolded very differently in China, where WeChat Pay has won 84% market penetration among smartphone users. (The app is available to users of Tencent’s super-app WeChat, which has 1.2 billion monthly active users.) That kind of penetration explains why in 2018 WeChat Pay did 1.2 billion transactions a day, whereas Apple Pay did one billion a month. And it’s why in 2019 the total gross expenditure in China via mobile app (347 trillion yuan, or roughly $54 trillion) was 551 times greater than the total expenditure in the United States ($98 billion).³⁷

The psychology of rapid change, societal adoption, and absorption is not only present in consumer electronics but in all aspects of Chinese urban life.  Given that China most certainly represents the future of capital markets and with national psychology primed for change, an examination of the Chinese public realm must not only look in hindsight as an anthropological pursuit but also as a speculative examination in which the Chinese urban realm provides insight in the form of alternative and potential futures.  Investigating the Chinese public and associated markets can help elucidate future trends, conditions, and realities, which will inevitably have global repercussions. “It’s that aspect of China’s innovation ecosystem- Its hundreds of millions of hyper-adoptive and hyper adaptive consumers-that make China so globally competitive today.  In the end, innovations must be judged by people’s willingness to use them. And on that front China has no peer.”³⁸ For better or worse, Chinese will rapidly, wholeheartedly, and almost ubiquitously adopt and absorb new ideas and modalities, which will shape the public realm in ways currently unimaginable to American socio-urban discourse.

When examining the public realm in China, What it is now and what it has been must also be accompanied by what it is imaged to become, which in the end,  is not only the most exciting question but the purview of design.  One of the newest trends in Chinese urban governance is the creation of Metaverses.  Cities like Beijing are investing heavily in creating one-to-one Metaverse replicas of the city.  Whether this is considered to be a dumb or a great idea is of no consequence because the impulse alone illustrates a fundamental aspiration and understanding that all technologies need to be utilized concurrently, often without a clear understanding of purpose, which has the benefit of potentially producing serendipitous results.  Unfortunately, the push to place one-to-one replicas of the Chinese city into the Metaverse also has a very dark reality.

The way in which the Chinese Metaverse is envisioned is as a real-time replica of the city in digital space. This is where ideas of ‘smart-city’ begin to collide with the Metaverse. The extolled purpose of such a linkage between smart city and Metaverse is essentially a real-time database to assist in the daily functioning and flows of people, automobiles, metro lines, storm water management, utilities, and other forms of infrastructure which are all stored, simulated, and managed through the Metaverse. Light, electrical, and telecommunications poles scan all cars and people on the road, making real-time replicas in the urban Metaverse. People’s magnetic ID cards are scanned when entering businesses or stores, and a digital scan of that person is then linked to their ID; through further extrapolation, it becomes quite dark and is intentionally excluded from any open discussion. Government officials cheerfully exclaim how easy it will be to commute, shop, and go about daily life with the supreme level of convenience provided by having one’s digital doppelganger simulate every real-world move in the Chinese Metaverse. Clearly, such a mechanism is a thinly veiled move towards unprecedented levels of state surveillance of individuals and the general public. To that effect, anyone sensitive to the changes and developments in the Chinese urban form would also note the incorporation and construction of large data centers as predominant features of police stations as a growing trend.

This dark reality of the Chinese Metaverse inherently reformulates future readings of the Chinese public realm. Not only will the Chinese digital public realm come into existence faster and be more all-encompassing, but its characteristics will likely be very unfamiliar and even uncomfortable for the United States. The dualism of technological progress and adoption means that the state surveillance dimensions of the Chinese Metaverse will also create its own form of resistance or cultural flourishing, which will be entirely unique to China.

When you invent the ship, you also invent the shipwreck; when you invent the plane you also invent the plane crash; and when you invent electricity, you invent electrocution… Every technology carries its own negativity, which is invented at the same time as technical progress.³⁹

This statement by French philosopher Paul Virilio is conceptually palindromic and functions both forward and backward. This is to say that attempting to invent something for ‘morally’ correct reasons will inevitably create an unintended negative outcome; conversely, intentionally creating ‘evil’ inevitably produces good outcomes. Thus, although scanning every Chinese person in China and monitoring them through their digital replicas is undoubtedly an atrocity, something good and unexpected will inevitably arise from it. When it comes to the technological future of the public realm, it will be pioneered and explored most thoroughly in China. Moreover, while China may never be able to claim the competitive advantage over the United States in terms of inventing cutting-edge technologies, through rapid and mass adoption, China will ultimately define and shape the relationship of technology to not only its own population and the public realm, but through its enormous consumer pull, also shape the world.

Apart from China’s bizarre interpretation of the Metaverse, one of the more widely understood characteristics of a public realm shaped through digital media is the ubiquity and power of the digital image. Photos, videos, GIFs, boomerangs, deep fakes, and face augmenting filters are a visual language that defines the forms of communication of our time. Through social media, advertising, and consumer culture ‘gone wild,’ digital images become more tangible, omnipresent, and diffuse, pervading all aspects of life. While this bolstered focus on the image is godsent for media and fields focused on creating and manipulating images, it is a bane for the professions focused on or charged with creating and defining the physical world. When the image of a place on social media becomes more important than the physical reality of that place, not only is the practice of landscape and architectural design perverted but the definition of the public realm is also reformulated. What such reformulation looks like will fundamentally be determined by those who most prodigiously consume and produce images.

Although the relationship of a Metaverse to the physical city may, at first mention, induce a sentiment of critical disbelief, there exists a currently functioning and widespread pretext in the relationship of digital media to architectural practices, which illustrates a trajectory toward the integration of the digital and physical urban realm.  In a culture primed for rapid change with a development-oriented, technocratic, centrally planned capitalist market, the potential for the convergence of the digital and physical public realm should not be considered a far-flung, sci-fi, alternate future scenario but a genuine and fast-approaching condition. Regardless of whether one agrees or disagrees with the pretext and societal construct under which this new Chinese digital public realm is created, to ignore its development and potential for global impact is to forfeit agency in shaping it. Catalyzed by the rise of social media, one of the trends which have come to dominate the practices of architecture, landscape, and urban design, is the paramount importance of digital representation in the form of photorealistic renderings.

Photorealistic renderings of projects, from interiors to buildings and entire new cities, have become interchangeable with the physical ‘real world’ constructed result. Digital rendering is a powerful tool that can look as ‘real’ as the physical reality yet has the added benefit of being aspirational in which undesirable aspects of context are subdued, blurred out, or replaced with luscious greenery. There is often a pride associated with the final built result looking indistinguishable from the renderings which preceded it. This relatively new condition presents an unfortunate trajectory for architectural practice focused on the physical world in which the built result is not only dogmatically tied to its digital predecessor, but the digitally produced image eventually becomes more important than physical reality.

Not only is the digital image of a project set to overtake the importance of the physically real condition, the importance of architectural design, in many cases, is now aimed at producing an imageable backdrop or vantage point for a photo, from which the general public can create social media posts. In fact, in China, ‘Internet Famous’ wanghong (网红) is now a common requirement among developers and business owners when managing designers and the design process. Not only must a project be imageable, as demonstrated through photorealistic renderings and videos, but moments and places within the physical design must be considered for their attractiveness and marketability as locations intended to solicit internet celebrity via images made for social media. This process is a self-reinforcing feedback loop that in fact reinforces the state agenda of producing globally imageable cities as part of, and dominating in, a network of capital flows that has come to define the global city. The more imageable the urban and public realm is in digital media and social networks, the greater the leverage in a global capital market, increasing the capacity and capability of deploying more capital to create more imageable conditions.

Thus, while a metaverse-public-realm may seem farfetched, the primordial components are already at play in the Chinese society and urban realm, although they have yet to recognize the eventual mediums through which they will most effectively be conducted. While western academic and even professional socio-urban discourse hems and haws about the problematic relationship between the presumed unlikely virtual realm to the city’s physical spaces, elsewhere, new unavoidable territories are not only being explored but defined according to value systems unrecognizable to America’s Anglo-Saxon imperialist global outlook.

As the saying goes, “if you haven’t been to China in the past six months, you haven’t been to today’s China.⁴⁰

CONCLUSION

This article addresses some key elements that construct an entirely different reading and definition of the public realm, which attempts to move beyond the framing of the American discourse. Chinese national psychology and place in the world can be understood largely through the disintegration of dynastic rule and modernization resulting in a territory of continuous war and how war has invisibly informed the public realm. We see how the topic of face pervades Chinese culture and therefore is also reflected in the urban landscape. The critical takeaway with regard to the idea of face is that identity is not only relational but more communal; an audience, community, society or public play a role in its construction. This presents a fundamentally different foundation for understanding the public realm, which is inherently difficult for western discourse to grasp fully. Even for myself, after living in China for 13 years, while comprehending face and how it functions is well understood, its importance in constructing one’s own identity is always amiss. This is also to say that some aspects exist in the Chinese public realm that will always be impossible for an ‘outsider’ to feel or understand. Thus face constructs an entirely different kind of public because it constructs an entirely different kind of self. If the self in China is constructed differently in relation to society and the public, this means the physical spaces of the public play a more integral role in the construction of identity, and this is no more evident than in the types of activities and leisure that are culturally enacted in the urban landscape.   

Leisure activities are diverse, unique forms of culture with few to no corollaries in western society. The leisure activities in the Chinese urban landscape, through ‘self-cultivation,’ are also the cultivation of a public which intern reinforces the self. This not only creates a unique realm for study, exploration, and design, it creates a public realm, a milieu, a ganjue (感觉), in which joy and fun are essential not only to the self, but to the community and the public realm at large.

As the world’s dominant force in the aftermath of WW2, America has had the luxury of establishing a global order and pedagogical structures. The pedagogical dimension is aimed at leveling the discourse of landscape and the public realm regarding the relationship between the United States and China. Since China’s opening up in the late 70s early 80s there has been a significant effort not only to ‘catch up’ but also to surpass the west in terms of urbanization, industrialization, and capital development. As was initially true for the post-war Japanese economy, copying was a critical first step. In Japan, everything from products to the constitution was modeled from and often molded by America. In China’s rise to global prominence and rapid urbanization, importing methodologies, practices, and pedagogies was an essential step. This is not to say that China and associated cultures had no agency in formulating unique practices and educational methods, yet as it pertains to the fields related to the design of the public realm, there seems to be little recognition in either China or the United States that the practice is vastly different from one place to the other, especially as it pertains to landscape which is typically viewed primarily through an ecological lens.

The pedagogical dimension is aimed at leveling the discourse of landscape and public realm as it pertains to the relationship of the United States and China. As the world dominant force in the aftermath of WW2, America has had the luxury of establishing not only a global order, but also pedagogical structures. Since China’s opening up in the late 70s early 80s there has been a significant effort not only to ‘catch up’ but also to surpass the west in terms of urbanization, industrialization, and capital development. As was initially true for the post war Japanese economy copying was a critical first step. Everything from products to the constitution were modeled from and indeed molded by America. In China rise to global prominence and rapid urbanization, the importation of methodologies, practices and pedagogies was a key step. This is not to say that China and associated cultures had no agency in formulating unique practices and educational methods, yet as it pertains to the fields related to the design of the public realm there seems to be little recognition on both sides that the practice is vastly different, especially as it pertains to landscape which is typically viewed primarily through an ecological lens.

China’s decades of importing western knowhow and sending students abroad has resulted in a very comprehensive and worldly outlook. It should also be noted that China is bordered by 14 countries: Afghanistan, Bhutan, India, Kazakhstan, North Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Laos, Mongolia, Myanmar (Burma), Nepal, Pakistan, Russia, Tajikistan, Vietnam and shares maritime borders with Brunei, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia, and the Philippines. America by contrast borders two countries or relatively similar cultural origin, in conjunction with a cocktail comprising of globally dominant elite educational institutions, a stiff helping exceptionalism, and a dash of historically verifiable isolationism, does not lend itself to a pedagogical stance receptive to being reformulated according to other cultural systems. To put it frankly, Chinese students in the west are not exposed to methodologies or pedagogies which allow them to actively address the Chinese condition, because it is framed through an American lens. In a time of growing global tensions between America and China it is important American educational pedagogies take steps attempt to frame and understand the Chinese urban landscape and public realm not through a politicized lens but according to its own unique cultural, social, and economic condition and constructs. This is not to say that criticism does not have a place, but that it must come from a position of not only greater understanding but conceptual elasticity.

Academic discourse is inherently retroactive. One must wait for someone to write or build something to respond to, and even for those researching in the field and examining firsthand through observation, the observed events are in the past by the time the scholarly work is produced. However, engaging the future through design, particularly practice, is actively engaging in future outcomes. While examining the past is important and likely more relevant for a cyclical participatory process, the Chinese condition should be primarily addressed through its capacity for dynamic change. What does it mean for a public and associated public realm in which change is real and the idea that “progress” does not need to be qualified? While firsthand knowledge of China allows for an in-depth reading and comparison to the United States and their different definitions of ‘the public,’ which arise from distinct cultural underpinnings, a broader underlying message is present. If justice, equity, and participation are the pillars of the framework through which the definition of the public realm ought to be constructed, as participants in an elite academic institution within a nation defined by its global exceptionalism prompted by unparalleled economic and military power there exists a responsibility to not only be uncompromisingly self-critical but to recognize that the discourse of architecture, landscape, urbanism, and the public realm should be less introverted and find greater intrigue in the unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and contradictory, which will produce not only a more relevant discourse but also a more fun one.