Page 128 - JCAU-6-4

Journal of Chinese

Architecture and Urbanism

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Socialist urbanism and cultural infrastructure

facilities in China: Cities of the Pearl River Delta
and the Guangzhou cultural infrastructure

facilities plan, 2003–07

Carolyn Cartier*
School of International Studies, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, University of Technology
Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Abstract

The construction of “cultural infrastructure facilities” (wenhua jichu sheshi) in
China – auditoria, exhibition halls, libraries, museums, performance centers – for state
administration of culture and information originated in the 1950s with Sino-Soviet
exchange and has continued throughout the reform era. However, scholarship on
urban development in China, embedded in discourses of capitalism and modern
planning, generally does not recognize this category of infrastructure construction
*Corresponding author: by contemporary city governments. To address the lacunae, this article analyzes the
Carolyn Cartier history of cultural infrastructure facilities in socialist urbanism, their transfer to the
(carolyn.cartier@uts.edu.au)
People’s Republic of China from the Soviet Union, the conditions of socialist realism, and
Citation: Cartier, C. (2024). the continuity of cultural infrastructure construction since the 1980s. Evidence from
Socialist urbanism and cultural
infrastructure facilities in China: the Guangzhou Cultural Infrastructure Facilities Projects Plan (2003 – 07) and cultural
Cities of the Pearl River Delta facilities sites in the new city center projects of Shenzhen, Shunde, and Dongguan
and the Guangzhou cultural demonstrate how the party-state prioritizes the planning and construction of cultural
infrastructure facilities plan, 2003 –
07. Journal of Chinese Architecture infrastructure facilities. Contemporary architectural designs for new cultural buildings
and Urbanism, represent the international aesthetic of reform while cultural facilities continue to
6(4), 1995. house and display party-sanctioned culture and information for the people.
https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.1995
Received: October 9, 2023
Keywords: City centers; Cultural infrastructure facilities; Socialist realism; Socialist
Accepted: March 28, 2024 urbanism; China
Published Online: November 7, 2024
Copyright: © 2024 Author(s).
This is an open-access article
distributed under the terms of the 1. Introduction
Creative Commons Attribution-
Non-Commercial 4.0 International The architecture, built environment, and general space of a city, its layout and forms,
(CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits all represent the nature of its urbanism, and how urbanism evolves with the institutions,
non-commercial use, distribution, principles, and values, both material and symbolic, of the society that conceives and
and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is constructs the city. The idea of Chinese urbanism compels and challenges epistemological
properly cited. organization due to the depth of urban history in China and the tendency in scholarship
Publisher’s Note: AccScience to conform to types of cities and periodization of urbanism based on historical eras.
Publishing remains neutral with An unstated conceit in urban research is that a city belongs to a historical type or
regard to jurisdictional claims in
published maps and institutional category based on the period of the prevailing political economy in which it becomes
affiliations. instantiated and develops. Research practices tend to adopt these conventions rather

Volume 6 Issue 4 (2024) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.1995