Chinese metropolitan areas blanketing the earth

7 thoughts on “Chinese metropolitan areas blanketing the earth”

1. There’s still very few Chinese active in Open Source. Is it natural disinterest? language?

2. Of the Chinese cities I have been to, probably the most attractive, and surprisingly cosmopolitan, is Tianjin. They have done a good job of preserving the Qing era old city centre. Walking around some of the university campuses, foreign students were very much in evidence and looked completely comfortable and adapted. Pity the air is unbreathable (which applies to pretty much all large Chinese cities, but some more than others, and in Tianjin it’s awful).

   Some other cities have been able to retain some heritage sites and older buildings, e.g. Shanghai and Qingdao, but nothing like European cities. Hong Kong has done an awful job of preserving heritage sites; it’s a hot issue now, but it has come too late – too much of genuine architectural merit has already been lost.

   Shenzhen seems weird because literally everything is recent – 30 years ago it didn’t exist; it wasn’t even a village, it was just agricultural fields and duck ponds. It has the same feel as Tangshan, which doesn’t have a single building over 31 years old because every single building in the whole city was destroyed in the 1976 earthquake.

3. Meant to add, Macau has done a much better job of preserving heritage sites, and it had a much longer history of European occupation than Hong Kong, of course. But just a couple of weeks ago it got smashed by an intense typhoon with a pretty big storm surge, and the hardest hit area was the old inner harbour area, which was one of the most historically interesting, so I don’t know what sort of shape it is in now.

4. The figure for Ruhr seems high compared to an estimate of 8.6 million from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruhr Still very large, but not the most populated metro area in Europe.

5. As the resident of a Sun Belt American city… I can relate to the lack of charm and history.

   What old neighborhoods there are, look neat though

   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hutong

6. East Asians have used more perishable materials in construction

   Yes, indeed. I wonder how much of this has to do with repeated experiences of natural disasters (earthquakes and typhoons in particular). Outwardly “flimsy” wooden construction was favored, for example, in Japan, because it was much more earthquake-safe and easier to repair.

   For whatever reason, this tendency has become quite culturally-ingrained among East Asians, so that they tend to constantly engage in demolish-and-rebuild cycles even with modern residential structures (e.g. apartments). On top of that, East Asians hate “used,” so new builds command hefty premiums. Indeed, it’s only in the very recent decades that some East Asians are beginning to appreciate their traditions and associated architecture/artifacts (in the 80’s and 90’s, for example, I saw East Asians throwing away traditional furniture they inherited in favor of Ikea-type furniture!). For a long time, “traditional” (including in architecture) was associated with backward and dirty in East Asia.

   not emphasized the importance of the permanence of great public buildings)

   I think the key operative word there is “public.” The West developed the conception of res publica rather than simply the domain and symbols of a ruling family. Perhaps related is the fact that West also had public works of great religious, that is, Christian, value (e.g. cathedrals) which were central to the society.

   In East Asia, the only buildings of prominence were traditionally associated with the ruling families (palaces, fortresses, courts, city gates) and little else, if any, of prominence was tolerated. Meanwhile, religion was frequently suppressed and never significantly developed centers of worship in urban areas (and even in rural areas, they were ruthlessly crushed if they got a bit too big for their breeches and dared to assert some form of independence or power). So, one finds many beautiful Buddhist temples and monasteries in the countryside (especially in mountains), but little in the cities that come close to anything like the awe-inspiring cathedrals of the West.

7. By the way, I read in a biography of Deng Xiaoping (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23336570-deng-xiaoping?from_search=true) that in the early phase of the cultural revolution, when the campaign against “The four olds” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Olds) was launched, the young people of China enthusiastically and viciously demolished every old building and wall they could lay their hands on, but the old city wall of Nanjing was preserved because Deng was in charge of the region and managed to protect that particular wall. It is thus the ONLY old city wall that still survives mostly intact. The book indicated that large sections of Ching-era walls were present in Beijing and many other cities before that campaign. So one reason Chinese cities have little old architecture is because so much of it was systematically destroyed by the Red Guards.

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