Instant City Research Articles

Dreams in the New Century: Instant Cities Shattered Hopes and Florida's Turning Point

Dreams in the New Century: Instant Cities Shattered Hopes and Florida's Turning Point

An Interview with Marc Balet: A Lifetime in Design, Fashion, and Film, from Warhol to Scorsese

An Interview with Marc Balet: A Lifetime in Design, Fashion, and Film, from Warhol to Scorsese

The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City by Juan Du

Reviewed by: The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City by Juan Du Susanne Stein (bio) The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City By Juan Du. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Pp. 376. With her equally instructive and highly readable monograph on the urban evolution of Shenzhen, Princeton-educated and Hong Kong-based architect Juan Du aims to dispel a powerful, multilayered myth at the heart of most "rise of China" narratives on the recent past. As the People's Republic of China's original and most prestigious Special Economic Zone (SEZ) and first major window to the outside world after three decades of increasing political and economic self-isolation, Shenzhen has long been stylized as the epitome of the economic reform policies initiated after 1978 by the central leadership under Deng Xiao-ping (1904–97); more recently, it has come to symbolize China's ascent to global power at the turn of the twenty-first century. Forty years after Shenzhen's inception as socioeconomic experimental zone, most of us are still ignorant of the city's complex developments beyond the legendary tale of "former fishing village turned megacity." That is why Du's multifaceted history, written for a "broad intellectual audience," is a welcome addition to existing scholarship on Shenzhen's urban and social landscape (p. 359). By exposing and contextualizing common misconceptions about Shenzhen perpetuated in official versions of the familiar success story, she strives to deliver a "factual account of the city's evolution" (p. 8). This encompasses a thorough reconsideration of Shenzhen's reinvention as SEZ; its purpose and location, neither capitalist enclave nor tabula rasa; the time needed for its development, refuting the notion of an "instant city" founded in 1979; and the various groups and people involved, ranging from Chinese Communist Party leaders, central planners, outside investors, and infrastructure regiments of the People's Liberation Army, to local governments, villagers, and millions of migrants. The four sections in Du's book represent the different scales and foci of [End Page 587] her analysis, proceeding from Shenzhen's National Relevance and Regional History down to the local City Construction and District Transformation levels. In each section the author centers on different (historical) individuals and artifacts entangled with the urban and economic evolution of today's Shenzhen. Drawing on various academic contributions, newspaper articles, local gazetteers, official documents, and her own field research, Du ties the threads of personal histories, experiences, and anecdotes with general developments in the emerging metropolis. Her descriptions are meticulously documented and well-illustrated with relevant maps, photographs, and architectural diagrams. Some readers might wish for a comprehensive theoretical framing of the narratives, including a critical discussion on the sources—as well as their limitations—and a proper bibliography providing easy access to Chinese and Western reference materials alike. Complementing earlier research by Stefan Ai (2014) and Linda Vlassenrood (2016), Du argues that "Shenzhen's growth and development after 1979 should not be attributed solely to the national government's centralized economic policies," but is equally, if not more importantly, rooted in the geography, history, and culture of the Shenzhen region, especially the city's urban form and spatial organization (p. 8). This is a topic she unfolds in her third and fourth sections. Historians of technology, migration, and land use change will be particularly interested in her illuminating sketches of the history of salt and oyster production and the long-term impact of these trades on local infrastructure, architecture, and the natural environment. Du's book also resonates with O'Donnell, Wong, and Bach's (2017) collection on Shenzhen's urban transformation and, more generally, with Peter Herrle, Josefine Fokdal, and Detlev Ipsen's (2015) study on urban(izing) villages in the Pearl River Delta regarding the significance of local negotiations and informal practices alongside national development policies. For planning historians and urban anthropologists, several of Du's observations on the discrepancies between central planning targets and the actual situation may seem prosaic; however, she turns them into a compelling argument against promoting Shenzhen as a "replicable model of city planning and economic development," at home or abroad (p. 9). Du effectively demonstrates that Shenzhen...

Built environment, special economic zone, and housing prices in Shenzhen, China

Shenzhen's meteoric urban growth is unprecedented, and its housing prices position it among the world's top five most expensive cities. Commonly understood as a ‘miracle city,’ ‘instant city,’ and ‘model city’ orchestrated by the central state in modern experimental urban planning, the local context and the role of the SEZ are a neglected spatiality in housing studies focusing on Shenzhen. Drawing on open data (Lianjia.com), we examine Shenzhen's spatial patterns of residential apartment prices and their associated local attributes. Based on a hedonic model, our results affirm a dichotomous spatial structure shaped by the special economic zones' (SEZs') associated unbalanced distribution of both accessibility and public/private service amenities. Inside the original SEZ (INSEZ), cultural amenities, green space, shopping malls, and a central business district significantly affect housing prices. Outside the original SEZ (OUTSEZ), only proximity to metro stations positively affects housing prices. Urban redevelopment should concentrate more on collaborative redevelopment in urban villages and equity in private and public service provision to narrow the inequality between INSEZ and OUTSEZ.

The Shenzhen experiment: the story of China's instant city

The Shenzhen experiment: the story of China's instant city

Review: The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City, by Juan Du

Review: <i>The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City</i>, by Juan Du

Razing Kids: Youth, Environment and the Postwar American West by Jeffrey C. Sanders

Reviewed by: Razing Kids: Youth, Environment and the Postwar American West by Jeffrey C. Sanders Pamela Riney-Kehrberg Razing Kids: Youth, Environment and the Postwar American West. By Jeffrey C. Sanders. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xiii + 285 pp. Paper $29.99. Razing Kids, by Jeffrey C. Sanders, is a collection of accounts about the ways in which children's concerns drove various parts of the environmental movement in the American West. This is not a book about children's concerns as imagined and articulated by children; it is told from the viewpoints of adults and their concerns, as these played out in children's lives. The topics Sanders addresses are diverse. He begins with the concerns generated by the World War II–driven development of west coast instant cities. The communities developed by defense contractors were often slapdash and entirely devoid of amenities that would have made life for their young inhabitants more pleasant. From these communities, Sanders moves to the nuclear West and the health problems generated by nuclear testing. Many of the downwinders' fears originated in the miscarriages, stillbirths, and childhood leukemia cases clustered in areas close to blast sites in Utah and other western states. From there, Sanders jumps to the War on Poverty and the Youth Conservation Corps, which took young men, often minorities, out of degraded urban environments and sent them to work the rural West, an environment that was often unwelcoming. At the other end of the environmental spectrum was Sanders's other story from the 1960s, that of youngsters who ran away from their homes and took over Bay Area neighborhoods, wallowing in dirt, disease, and other environmental conditions that shocked and disturbed their elders. Sanders's final story is of agricultural chemicals, and the damage they did to young farm laborers. Urban Americans, however, became more concerned about the issue, however, when pesticides [End Page 315] and other contaminants made their way into the food supply and especially into foods most often served to children. As mentioned, this is a collection of histories rather than a single, unified narrative. There is no central thread tying together the various stories in this volume other than the shared concept that concerns about youth led adults to think about the quality of various environments, sometimes in new ways. It is also a book about adult anxieties about how the various environmental forces at work in the wartime and postwar America West would adversely shape children's experiences and bodies. The degree to which the majority of people worried, however, was often mediated by race. The answer to environmental degradation in urban environments was not necessarily to improve those environments, but to ship young people out of them to have supposedly healthful experiences in other places. The push to remove potentially dangerous chemicals from food was not the greatest when Latinx children were hurt in the fields, but when middle-class children ingested that food in the form of apple juice and apple sauce. Each of the individual stories is interesting and probably worthy of book-length treatment on its own. The chapters about teenagers and young adults would be strengthened by including more of the perspective of the young participants. In some places, stories would be improved by linking the postwar story to pre-war antecedents. For example, in the discussion of Youth Conservation Corps camps, the author often references the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC), but in somewhat superficial ways. The CCC was far more problematic than Sanders acknowledges, and many of the complications of poorly constructed camps and disgruntled young men existed in the 1930s as well as the 1960s. The discussion of the history of youth and agricultural labor could also be more fully fleshed out. Concerns about child labor in agriculture were not new in the 1960s and 1970s. In the first quarter of the twentieth century, the Children's Bureau and critics of child labor argued, largely unsuccessfully, to get children out of the sugar beet industry and other paid agricultural labor. There, the concern was not pesticides, but labor that bent children's backs and kept them away from school. Although labor laws did eventually come to cover...

Built as Rain. Film Analysis of Unbuildable Architectural Speculations – a Case Study of „Instant City” (dir. Peter Cook and Ron Herron, 1968) and „The Zero Theorem” (dir. Terry Gilliam, 2013)

The introduction of time-based media into the design stage opened up a new understanding of architectural and represented space as a dematerialized, dynamic, and user-dependent concept. Unbuildable architectural projects always relied on specific techniques and media. Their radical nature usually channelled innovative artistic currents and visualization tools, like collage and pop art aesthetics in the works of Archigram. Cinema is yet another ground for such deliberations. With Instant City (Archigram’s Peter Cook and Ron Herron) and The Zero Theorem (Terry Gilliam) the problem of dematerialization is being channelled by architectural/spatial proposals that involve a range of literary tropes, cultural texts, and filmic intertexts, in order to create a rich embroidery of references that forward a new look upon architectural production as a practice of creating protocols for dynamic and all the more elusive imagery. This article’s central objective lies in the task of reframing a discussion on iconicity, media facades, and mutative building skins, so as to include modes of cinematic portrayal that are not just contents of architectural “messages”, but also their “media”.

ARQUITECTURA HINCHABLE CONTEMPORÁNEA. LA FUNCIONALIDAD DE LO EFÍMERO

Architecture as a discipline is no longer what it was; With the artistic changes experienced since the second half of the 20th century, everything has mutated into new paradigms in which novel ways of doing and building are conceived. An example of this is the appearance of inflatable architecture in the 1960s with projects such as the Instant City of Ibiza by the architect José Miguel de Prada Poole. In this article we will see some current projects that continue to reinvent the way of building.

Review: San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land, by Michael Johns

Book Review| February 01 2019 Review: San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land, by Michael Johns Michael Johns. San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land. London: Reaktion Books, 2018. 230 pages with 107 illustrations, 62 in color. $19.80. Lindsey Passenger Wieck Lindsey Passenger Wieck St. Mary's University lindsey passenger wieck is Public History Graduate Program Director, St. Mary's University. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar California History (2019) 96 (1): 154–155. https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2019.96.1.154 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Lindsey Passenger Wieck; Review: San Francisco: Instant City, Promised Land, by Michael Johns. California History 1 February 2019; 96 (1): 154–155. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/ch.2019.96.1.154 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentCalifornia History Search This content is only available via PDF. © 2019 by the Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.2019 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Cushicle/Suitaloon

An invitation from the editors of the JAE to revisit a project executed over fifty years ago may reflect a nostalgia for an imagined golden age when architects, in truth just a handful, dedicated themselves to the wholesale rethinking of the built environment. For this happy few the prospect of servitude in an architect's office endlessly reworking the client-funded classic one-off building did not exactly inspire; so, armed with a conviction that change needed to happen on the scale of the city, they coalesced into groups like Archigram to produce the clientless Plug-in City, Walking City, Instant City, Living City, Dream City and Rok Plug/Log Plug. All of them unrealizable except perhaps for Instant City, which was a sort of modernized traveling circus. And in 1969 Instant City actually happened when a cow pasture in Bethel, NY turned into a city pop. 400,000 for four days at the end of which the cows got their pasture back.My solo offering was the 1966 Cushicle/Suitaloon, a project whose genesis was a photograph I found of a man wearing a warm suit (manufactured, apparently, by the Frankenstein company[!]). Add an air cushion vehicle (abbreviated to Cushicle) type hovercraft, a few inflatables and some items from NASA and you were on the way to making a living environment…….or so went the hype.The JAE-requested revisitation, as might be expected, changed the project1 not so much in terms of its appearance but in the way it gets explained. It allowed the project to develop into a less gee whiz and more thoughtful study, I would like to believe, of the concentric skins surrounding us that help compensate for the fact that rarely is the local meteorology what you might call Garden-of-Eden quality—i.e. blue sky, temps. 80°F, humidity 52%, no bugs.2

Salvage Archaeology in Melbourne’s CBD: Reflections upon Documentary Sources and the Role of Prefabricated Buildings in Construction of the “Instant City” of Gold-Rush-Era Melbourne

Salvage excavation and monitoring of a site in Melbourne’s CBD was undertaken in early 2015, ahead of construction of an apartment tower with a basement carpark. The site at the northeast corner of Elizabeth and Franklin Streets is situated to the north of the original plan of Melbourne, within an extension of the urban grid where allotments were sold during 1851, the year gold was officially discovered in the Colony of Victoria. Demolition of brick buildings from ca. 1905, then removal of rubble and fill revealed the substantially intact footings of three much earlier buildings, together with their yards and outbuildings. This excavation has provided an opportunity to review the usefulness of the pictorial and mapped record of nineteenth-century Melbourne as tools for archaeological modelling and interpretation. In particular, contemporary photographic images enabled the identification of two of the main structures archaeologically present as having been of prefabricated iron erected before 1856. The consequent focus upon prefabricated iron buildings led to analysis of building fabric recorded within a detailed plan of the city ca. 1856 and the confirmation that such structures made a significant contribution to the phenomenal growth of Melbourne during the 1850s gold rush.

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia: Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MIJune 19–October 9, 2016Walker Art Center, MinneapolisOctober 24, 2015–February 28, 2016University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ArchiveFebruary 8–May 21, 2017CatalogueHippie Modernism: The Struggle for UtopiaEdited by Andrew BlauveltMinneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015.448 pp.; 200 color and 80 b/w ills.Paper $55ISBN 9781935963097

Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia: Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, MIJune 19–October 9, 2016Walker Art Center, MinneapolisOctober 24, 2015–February 28, 2016University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film ArchiveFebruary 8–May 21, 2017Catalogue<i>Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia</i>Edited by Andrew BlauveltMinneapolis: Walker Art Center, 2015.448 pp.; 200 color and 80 b/w ills.Paper $55ISBN 9781935963097

The Orange Feeling. Mood and Atmosphere at Roskilde Festival

This article investigates the relationship between instant architecture, art installations and the audience at Roskilde Festival, and it raises the question of how instant architecture, art installations and modes of social interaction can enhance the design of a genuine experience. It is based on analyses of a specific case, Roskilde Festival 2008 - 2012. The festival brands itself as an instant city with a specific atmosphere, ‘The Orange Feeling’, which is a very abstract term that encompasses the whole festival. The paper focuses on this term, and on important elements which constitute the environment and the conditions for the constructed situation in which this special atmosphere actually occurs. The main approach to the analysis of the atmosphere is an investigation of how the audience engages with the instant architecture and the art installations. The article provides general conclusions on the specific atmosphere and on how the designs support this. It concludes that the culture of laughter is the atmospheric glue that keeps Roskilde Festival together, and it is the performative and relational designs together with the culture of laughter that create the basis for ‘The Orange Feeling’.

Instant Cities on the Wet Coastal Zones-Tunisia

Since the early 2000's, the Tunisian wet coastal zones are much sought-after from Global Real Estate Developers, to develop on it several mega project of Instant Cities. As a contractor teacher for 17 years at ENAU, National Higher School of Architecture and Urbanism, I had had opportunity to lead numerous workshops and research projects with my graduating students on this theme. Based on extensive documentation and context analysis of these several projects, the research work had consisted in proposing alternative project that would insure the objective of economical profit, while preserving the role of these sites as important natural water storage and as natural protection against flooding. The Panel we are submitting is a presentation of a selection of the most significant and creative proposals of my students.

Global Village Media: Coming Together in the Early 1970s at Whiz Bang Quick City

Felicity D Scott, Associate Professor of Architecture at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), describes here the instant city events of the early 1970s. These foreshadowed current global village media practices in what now seems a quaintly material manner: communication between sites involved the physical mailing of videotapes and ‘wire photos’ through the postal service. The sites themselves – in the US and elsewhere – were transformed into ‘instant cities’ through the erection of physical geodesic domes, teepees and inflatables in seas of mud. The true antecedents of today's instant networking, these pioneers embraced the newest technology available at the time and the most innovative forms of temporary architecture.

The Feeling of ‘Silverland’

This is a discussion of the group of journalists working in and around Virginia City during the 1860s and 1870s, when the area became the world centre of the silver mining industry. The so-called Sagebrush writers reported on mining prospects for readerships locally and internationally, as well as writing anecdotes and stories about the life of the highly transient local communities generated by the search for silver. Theirs is writing characterised both by caution in responding to the mining industry and by an aggressive humour in depicting the local life of a cosmopolitan instant city. These newspaper writers have been considered in the local context of the Nevadan frontier. Here, I discuss their engagement with a complex and internationally networked industry, and also their address to the collectivities of the local population.

Research Note—The "Instant City" Coming of Age: Production of Spaces in China's Shenzhen Special Economic Zone

Shenzhen, China's first special economic zone (SEZ), not only heralds the essence and evolution of the PRC's earlier domestic reform and global integration, but also demonstrates how urban spaces are rapidly produced in a socialist economy undergoing market transformation. This note identifies three such spaces: an economic space of globalization; a social space of exclusion and contestation; and a political space of governance.

Painting the city red: Chinese cinema and the urban contract

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi Introduction: Film and the Urban Contract 1 1. New China, New Beijing: Staging the Socialist City of the Future 27 2. A Big Dyeing Vat: The Rise of Proletarian Shanghai and the Fall of Nanjing Road 56 3. Mansions of Uneven Rhyme: Beijing Courtyards and the Instant City 95 4. The First Precinct Under Heaven: State Symbolism and Unplanned Urbanism at Tiananmen Square 151 5. Angel Sanctuaries: Taipei's Gentrification and the Erasure of Veterans' Villages 187 6. This is the Story of Our Street: Urban Preservation and the Post-Maoist Politics of Memory 224 7. The Day Trip of Your Dreams: Globalizing Beijing and the Postspatial City 281 Notes 311 Filmography 341 Stage Plays 351 Bibliography 353 Index 383

City of Youth: Shenzhen, China

Since ancient times, people have dreamed of a City of Youth, where the population never ages, and where any outsider who comes to live there will remain forever young. They probably did not have in mind, however, the "agelessness" of today's Shenzhen, China. Lying just over the border from Hong Kong, this "instant city" has grown in just over twenty-five years from a small fishing village to a sprawling metropolitan region approaching ten million people. As the first Special Economic Zone in China, it was a model for the capitalistic "market reforms" and "opening to the world" initiated in the late 1970s by Deng Xiaoping. One of its most striking aspects is the low average age of its residents, which has hovered for years at around twenty-seven. This stands in ever sharper contrast to China as a whole, where the population is rapidly aging.This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.