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Chinese Exceptionalism in Architecture and Urban Design Wong

The City After Chinese New Towns: Spaces and Imaginaries from Contemporary Urban China. By
Michele Bonino, Francesca Governa, Maria Paola Repellino, Angelo Sampieri (Eds.). Basel, Birkhauser.
2019, 240 pp. ISBN 9783035617658

The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City. By Juan Du. Cambridge, Harvard University
Press. 2020, 384 pp. ISBN 9780674242227

Designing Reform: Architecture in the People’s Republic of China, 1970-1992. By Cole Roskam. New
Haven, Yale University Press. 2021, 296 pp. ISBN 9780300235951

1. INTRODUCTION 2.1 Spaces in Zhaoqing, Zhengdong, and
David Harvey famously uses “Neoliberalism Tongzhou
‘with Chinese Characteristics’” to describe Architect and professor Michele Bonino, and
China’s economy under Deng Xiaoping’s editors Francesca Governa, Maria Paola
leadership in the late 1970s. The post-Mao Repellino, and Angelo Sampieri believe that
movement broadly known as Reform and by rejecting the conformity to a Western
Opening-up, manifests in “the construction of category, one could free impressions of urban
a particular kind of market economy that China of Western preconceptions of what
increasingly incorporates neoliberal elements constituted a city, and question every element
interdigitated with authoritarian centralized that made the city. This “Chinese
control” (p. 120). Harvey understands China exceptionalism” applied to urbanization thus
as embarking “its own peculiar path” (p. 122), constitutes a “third space” worthy of its own
seeking to reconcile a socialist banner with analytic apparatus (p. 20) [2] , warranting a
capitalist class power, while being part of a new set of lexicons for describing and
[1]
global history of Western-led neoliberalism . designing urban spaces in a Western-
These three publications are chosen as they dominated discourse, much of which lie
expand on this Chinese peculiarity through within their analysis of Chinese new towns.
geographical and architectural observations, For Governa, Chinese New Towns are
and argue for a third path beyond the the spatial embodiment of such
outmoded Cold War binary of Western exceptionalism. Governa noted that they were
capitalism and Soviet socialism. Echoing the “relational spatialities.” “They cannot be
title of the article, Chinese exceptionalism is delimited; they are neither close nor static;
a lens that spreads across all the books they continually shift the fine line of
concerned. This paper expands on how this distinction between urban and rural” (p. 224)
theme is explored using disciplinary evidence, [2] . Governa identifies the ability of Chinese
while having interdisciplinary evidence on New Towns to challenge rigid binaries of the
contemporary Chinese scholarship. This Western urbanization discourse. As Brenner
review is done through close readings of texts and Schmid seminally argue, one of the most
and referencing other seminal literature in this delimiting binaries to talk about development
field. are that between the urban and the rural; they
instead propose a planetary urbanism model
2. SPACE that views urbanization not as a category but
[3]
This section examines how the three books a process . As evident in the title, The City
frame spatial transformations as defining the After Chinese New Towns, the editors were
expression of Chinese exceptionalism. Spaces clearly searching for insights from these new
are defined as both naturally occurring spaces for the larger discussion on China. The
(natural and historical landscapes) and as contributors were tasked to examine three
designed (authored and unauthored case studies, namely Zhaoqing, Zhengdong,
architectural transformations). and Tongzhou. This selection is emblematic

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