architecture, planning, peopleA Way of Life
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Beijing - line 13 Beijing's metro line 13 is both a sectional slice through an existing system and an overwriting of the system beneath. The line confronts the diverse urbanism of Beijing's periphery. This area of interest had some initial investigations and a student workshop in Spring 2008, and may lead to an exhibition followed by a book. While some rural migrants find accommodation in tents on construction sites, or basement air raid shelters, the peri-urban environment provides liminal zones where semi-permanent villages with traditional typologies are formed with modern materials. The location gives access to the treadmill of the urban economy, and the rural-urban ambiguity permits intensive farming alongside scrap collection and metalworking. This is where migrants encounter middle class living and their western leisure pursuits. Estates of apartment blocks are home to those on the way up. Golf courses and villas, theme parks and dog training centres make appearances between villages and apartments. Manufacturing, which once occurred in danwei work groups in prime central locations, has largely relocated to designated industrial zones in the suburbs. New commercial and office clusters are also emerging on the fringes; including home furnishing ‘museums’ and software developers linked to the university. The Beijing periphery contains a large percentage of the city's creative industries, artists' villages and gallery compounds. Here they benefit from former industrial sites, migrant labour, and middle class patrons. Line 13 both cuts through and connects this re-organization of urban programme. The general approach with rapid urban expansion is to build expressways linking the city and encouraging further leap-frog sprawl along their lengths. Line 13 generates another rationale of radial connections which ameliorates the existing expressway developments to some extent, and whether intended or not, makes certain parts of the ignored edge of city suddenly more accessible. This opens up possibilities for diverse and ingenious networks and patterns of life. Taken together the emergent local economies around line 13 form a semi-independent city. The economic and social tensions in these urban zones create a strange testing ground for architecture and urbanism where messy vitality meets the Chinese generic. The interim landscape is fractured and changing. and line 13 again acts as a connector for resourceful pedestrians. On occasion the elevated line becomes a convenient shortcut to overcome the barriers on the ground. The liminal spaces give the opportunity for the “general intellect” to manifest itself forming a public realm architecture of accretion. |
                   
what: initial research and workshop when: Spring 2008 where: Bejing with: Bert de Munyck and Monica Carrico movingcities.org |
