The ‘People’s City’

The mid-20th-century communist ideal was for cities that were ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’. Wang Jun , an editor at Outlook Weekly magazine and author of a best-selling book on the planning of Beijing, describes how the ambition to accommodate public life in urban space is a relatively modern phenomenon that goes against the grain of a long tradition of landownership in China. Given this background, can the original notion of the ‘People's City’ ultimately survive the current wave of property privatisation? Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Inventing the Rural: A Brief History of Modern Architecture in the Countryside

The rural has long occupied a valuable, if under-theorised position in modern architectural history. Here, Cole Roskam , Assistant Professor of Architectural History at the University of Hong Kong, highlights key moments in this history and, in doing so, illuminates a central paradox at the heart of architecture's various turns to the countryside; namely, can architects maintain the physical and social integrity of the rural when they are themselves a fundamental vector of its changing character?     

String Block Vs Superblock Patterns of Dispersal in China

The superblock in China has become the dominant unit of urban planning, allowing for rapid urban growth while also meeting the needs of state and property developer alike. Kjersti Monson explains the conditions that have given rise to the superblock, while challenging it by proposing an alternative ‘stringblock’ approach, rooted more in collective culture and addressing the demands of the market-driven economy. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Notes on Villages as a Global Condition

It may seem that rural villages – the basic units of settlement for millennia since humankind first began to tend the land – have been thoroughly usurped by the massive rise in urbanisation over the last centuries. But is this really the case? Tracing the emergence of urbanism and its perception from Aristotle to today, lecturer and writer David Grahame Shane reveals the role that the village model continues to play in both the developing and the developed world – including within the much discussed phenomenon of megacities.