[DETOURS] TACTICAL APPROACHES TO URBANIZATION IN CHINA

Detours: tactical approaches to urbanization in China focuses on projects by Chinese architects that critically engage urban development in China today. Each approaches this shifting context from a tactical perspective that begins from a close reading of the given social and material situation, setting it apart from strategic initiatives that respond directly to the abstract demands of foreign and local capital or state ideology.

Since the early 1980’s China has been transformed in unprecedented ways: incredible economic growth has created a new middle class, cities have been physically reconstructed, culture has been opened to capitalist markets and industrial workers have been demoted from privileged citizens to precarious migrants. This urban revolution has brought with it many contradictions. Cities and towns have been quickly produced for immediate effect, projecting the image of a quickly modernizing society, while deep divisions between urban and rural spaces and citizens remain unchanged.

This exhibition presents ten tactical propositions for the production of urban space in the context of this transformation. Each project resists tendencies toward contextual erasure and stylistic appropriation commonplace within Chinese architectural design. Faced with these reductive strategies, these projects follow a set of detours in order to negotiate China’s complex histories, spaces, cultures, and social realities.

While these practices have been developed in response to specific circumstances within Chinese society, they also offer strong experiments and models for architects working elsewhere in the world within the traditions of the urban project, rural studio, ecological urbanism and urban acupuncture. To highlight these new possibilities, the exhibition will be accompanied by a book of projects and texts by each participant to be published by Timezone8 in Beijing, and a symposium on alternative approaches to urbanization in China, at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Architecture, Landscape and Design.


www.ald.utoronto.ca

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