The last two decades debates on the future of public life and public spaces have been markedly western-oriented, negativist and raising often questions: does public space still matters for our public life?
To counter these views, I would like to offer a different and non-western perspective for the discussion. Here, I will talk about the case of China, more in particular about the cities of Beijing and Nanning, which I had the opportunity to visit this year in June. This visit made part of a Workshop on “the Quality of public space” in the UK and China, that we, the Bartlett School, were invited. The workshop took place in Nanning, a city in the south of China. There we had numerous opportunities to discuss the design of the city centres and public spaces with the present Chinese professors, planners and architects and it became obvious that not only we have different views in reading public space but also the problems we are dealing with sometimes seem irrelevant in comparison to theirs.
I do not intend to go on in detail on everything of what we discussed but some aspects deserve attention. So I will give some comments as I will go along the pictures below, in the hope that this can help us to understand how different the problematics and challenges of the public spaces of the Chinese cities are.
1. Chinese cities are facing great difficulties to keep the balance between progress (expressed by the accelerating urbanization) and protection of their historical heritage. In this picture of Nanning, it is evident how the old urban fabric is being swallowed and suffocated by massive high-rise buildings and sliced by new urban infrastructure.
2. There is a recent obsession to import European representations of public spaces to their cities. Here we can see an interesting example of that, the Olympic site in Beijing clearly resembles to a big boulevard in Paris.
3. Most Chinese cities are still dominated by small-scale businesses and commerce. It is unbelievable the variety of products you can find in these shops. In western cities, we hardly can find this anymore. This picture is an interesting example of a typical underground shopping street in Nanning; they call it Mouse Street. Off course, there is a danger that progress will soon get rid of them.
4. There is as well a growing informal sector of commerce; street vendors are an indelible feature of Chinese public spaces, as you can see in this picture of Nanning. In the western cities, there is too much regulation for this ever to be possible again.
5. People often sleep in public; this shows how safe streets still are. This contrasts very much with our present western situation.
6. I could go on trying to find more examples but I think it is clear enough how distinct the problematics of Chinese cities public spaces and public life are. To understand that, you do not have to go very far, just immerse in a gastronomic experience and see what they eat. I had a snake and turtle soup that were an absolute gastronomic delight !!!