Economies of Architecture

Abstract

East Asia’s economic growth in the recent decades is paralleled by a shift in its urban development strategies. In the initial phase of economic transition, Chinese municipal authorities have been extremely facile and adaptive in response to liberalization and global integration. With the rapid depletion of historic urban structures and the push for economic transition to a post-industrial, knowledge-based service economy in the second phase of transition, especially in the context of regional and global competition between cities, the municipal authorities are increasingly promoting developments of ‘culture-led urban regeneration’ projects. With specific focus on Shanghai, dubbed the ‘head of the Dragon’ in 1992, this presentation will consist of two parts, “urban loopholes” and the “contemporary art ecologies,” that examine urban spatial production mechanisms that have enabled the city’s rapid economic re-globalization. The first part of the talk will outline the concept, developed for Ying’s dissertation, of the “urban loophole,” a larger concept for the mechanism that has mediated the evolving institutions of the transitional economy through spatial production. Taking cases from the until-now little-analyzed un-demolished remains of city center neighborhoods in Shanghai, the dissertation will unpack the seemingly anarchic and opportunistic urban spatial production system of the contemporary Chinese city. The second part of the talk will highlight some of the key events and moments of ‘culture-led’ urban spatial productions for contemporary art. It will look at how the proliferations of spaces for contemporary art since the mid-2000s, both bottom-up and top-down, are realizing the city’s cultural aspirations in the growing of ‘contemporary arts ecologies.’ Despite the Chinese ‘museum boom’ that projects an image of progressive liberalization and global integration to the outside world, the appropriation, commercialization, gentrification, on the one hand, and the closure of bottom-up art clusters and demolition of artists studios, on the other, seem to show that cultural ambition in service of economic growth privileges state neoliberalism, while discriminating against endogenous, autonomous, and often unsanctioned and critical practices. The presentation will examine the urban potentials that are embedded in the equilibrium between the endogenous, or bottom-up, processes and the state-steered urban developments.

Ying Zhou: http://www.fcl.ethz.ch/person/ying-zhou/. Ying Zhou is an architect researching contemporary cities at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH Zurich). She is based in Singapore at the Future Cities Laboratory (FCL) of the Singapore-ETH Centre since 2011, and is part of an urban research project looking at urban transformation processes in Shanghai and Singapore. She was a lecturer and researcher with ETH Studio Basel 2007-2011, where she taught urban research on Kolkata, Damascus and Cairo and produced a comic book about Metrobasel. She was part of an exhibition about the contemporary urban developments in the Middle East at Haus der Kunst in Munich in 2010. She has also published in Critical Planning, Monu, and Urban China, amongst others. Born in Shanghai, Ying holds a B.S.E. in Architecture and Engineering from Princeton, a M.Arch. from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard, a Ph.D. from the ETH Zurich, and was a Fulbright fellow at the University of Stuttgart. She has taught and practiced in New York, Shanghai, Detroit, Boston and Basel. She is heading to Hong Kong to become an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong’s department of architecture.