THE CHINESE PERSPECTIVE: POSSIBILITIES TO RETHINK URBAN PRACTICE AND THEORY

In China urban transformations are producing overwhelming changes in the city structure and image, with an unprecedented rapidity. This reality certainly overcomes the dichotomy proposed by Secchi of Modern City and Contemporary City: it appears to be simultaneously made of both of them, not only because of the impossibility of defining before and after (Di Biagi, 2017), but even because of their co-existence in completely different phenomena such as new town planning and historical/industrial districts restoration. Nevertheless, differently to what happened in Europe during the XX century - and namely at the time of La Sarraz Declaration - deep transformations are not concomitant to an inner open critical debate involving architects and urbanists. While Secchi underlines the importance of the urban planning to be focused on a long-term vision building slowly the city of/for the future (Secchi, 2000), this reality seems to propose a shortening of temporal horizons, where the growth machine – the weave of State, Party and market – is not deeply questioned: nor this condition, nor its physical outcomes (Harvey, 2005). The result is an urban boom void of articulated experimentations, rather an application of existing models and practices adapted to the peculiar Chinese condition of cooperation of market and planning to achieve urban and economic growth (Wu 2015). The contribution questions if this reality characterized by dramatic and rapid transitions is able or not – and for which reasons – to push for a disciplinary re-foundation of urban practice and theoretical discourse: this unique moment re-introduces huge potentials to carry on the debate about how the role of the architect-planner is evolving not only in China but, as a reflection, in our reality, translating heterogeneous social-political-economic values into space and processes production.