(written Winter 2001-2002, Chongqing, China)
While already vaguely experienced with the traffic and driving conditions of the developing world I wasn’t completely at a loss in crossing the street in China. In fact, I have often thought that the state of the automobile made more sense in the developing world than in the overly adapted West. If you need to pass a slow car, no matter the traffic conditions, proceed—the oncoming traffic realizes it will have to merge into the median. If you need to cross the street, walk—or rather dart across as in some post-adolescent game of Frogger—or you may never get to the other side. If there exists no parking stalls, create your own. If you need to use the sidewalk, let the pedestrians know with a prolonged honk of the horn.
While much of the driving etiquette has broken down in its translation from west to east, I have come to appreciate the automobile in China, as found in most developing countries. Having been prepped with junior high driver’s ed. I had been encultured with the "rules of road" as law—not just American law but an assumed universal behavior inscribed upon this transport vessel. While the West is quick to borrow "ethnic" goods for the creation of the latest Cracker Barrel placemat, one could hardly see the ability to transfer, cross-culturally, the automobile inscribed with a new framework of cultural adaptation. To experience the steel box on wheels in China allowed me to reevaluate the existence of the car both at home and upon the world.
While the United States and other developing countries alike deliberate over the condition of the automobile in the public realm, many underdeveloped country are just beginning to wrestle with the condition. China, a country presently enamored with development, provides a pertinent example of how the automobile and the infrastructure it requires has created a new environment for the public realm. Since my arrival to Chongqing I have been looking at how the recent layering of public space with that of the automobile creates a renewed public realm grounded on the Chinese cultural framework of space and symbol in the dawning automobile-dominated urban condition.
The impact of the automobile has already affected the Chinese urban condition as much as it has the world over. China’s vehicle sales in 1999 rose 12.3 percent. The continuing growth is expecting to output six million vehicles by 2010. The amount of public roads constructed in China has increased three to five percent annually. Over 110,000 kilometers of highways were in place by 2000, sixty percent of new construction that year was located in central and western China. The city of Chongqing has been established as the Gateway City to the "Modernization of the West." In realizing the impact of the automobile on this city I hope to establish a model for the rest of China in offering new perspectives on how the public realm is cognized and utilized.
Auto as Equal
Along my path to work each morning, a grouping of local men congregate within the adjacent trees, I listen to their caged birds repeat traditional Chinese greetings, "ni hao, ni hao!" A gray-haired four-foot woman crosses the twelve-foot wide sidewalk slapping her thighs and hugging herself in repeated patterns, initiating the morning ritual of exercising the body. Early morning grandparents progress faster than their toddling grandchildren, wide-eyed and curious even at this early hour. The morning is filled with the sounds of continuing construction and honking horns of a city that seems to go to bed get up from bed too early.
As I make my way along the tree-lined walk the repetition of a high pitched horn and a whirl of dust breaks my serene morning reverie. A shiny black Santana with tinted windows careens around the statue of Mao, and proceeds along the populated sidewalk disregarding the life-forms populating its path. Its consistent honking and speed prompts the morning inhabitants to gently make way for the larger body with four wheels. I direct my walk to the right, but bitter with morning pessimism, don’t give complete way to this barreling health hazard. The car whizzes past me, stirring my wrinkled dress shirt and rattled emotions. Its speed is discomforting to me in accordance with my spatial comfort zone.
Glaring as it makes its way along the walk and around the corner of which I just came from, I reprimand its actions in my head: "don’t you realize this is a sidewalk; you could of hit the children; that’s just not safe!" My thoughts weren’t consistent with the oblivious crowd around me. They went on with their morning without even noticing the obvious legal and personal disrespect for spatial designation necessary for a safe and efficient urban density of people. It took a couple days of the morning dust showers to accept the discrimination I harbored for the Chinese public realm and the Chinese gentle acceptance of it.
With the automobile being only recently perceivable by the Chinese general public, its acceptance has been that of [an]other on the road and not as a figure of urban dominance. Sharing roadways with the world’s largest population of pedestrians, pull-carts and bicycles, the automobile has been domesticated as an equal partner sharing the public realm. Sidewalks and park paths serve as parking spaces or short-cuts for mid-sized sedans and mopeds, encouraging the relationship to the automobile as one of association and not of intimidation.
Structure as Symbol
Grasping the intensity of this city of thirty-million, I manage to find a Chinese/English Chongqing city map. It diagrams the long slender peninsula city center defined by the Jialing and Yangtze Rivers. Yellow lines of streets, highways and newly completed expressways interconnect the peach colored tones of "development." Intermittent blotches of green declare points within the city where landscaped zones can be found. Upon my explorations of the city, I come to realize that the large highway intersections were expressed in the same manner as public parks and reserves. As I take the 181 bus towards the city center, I note the oncoming SongShuQiao, noted on the map as a perfect clover-leaf intersection filled in with green. In passing I discover that sure enough, this cluster of on-ramps and off-ramps, viaducts and medians are manicured to a park-like perfection. As the city begins to unwind with the setting sun, business men and one-child families (complete with dog) stroll, sit or play Frisbee within this congested intertwining of concrete byways.
As I make my way around the city I note that other points of "green" on the map break the traditional conceptions for an urban park space. But just as reproduced upon the city map, the bridges and infrastructure of China are realized as a symbol of harmonious progress and not as urban hindrance. As I make my way around China, touring the grand cities of Beijing and Wuhan I experience that the ancient grottos of thousand year-old Buddhas are not the only tourist destinations in China.
An informational web-site out of Tongji University devotes its pages to the numerous bridges of China. The author states on the opening page: "When you wander over the bridge world, you may highly praise: how great the bridges in China, how beautiful the bridge in China." From ancient to modern this site records the entire anthology of bridge construction in China from Cable-stayed Bridges to Over-crossings and Pedestrian Overpasses. And its no wonder emphasis is given to transportation infrastructure. China boasts the world’s largest concrete arch bridge (as well as the third and fourth largest) and the third, fourth and fifth largest cable-stayed bridges. No stranger to grand infrastructural feats, the earth's most populous country already has two man-made creations visible from space: the Great Wall and the Three Gorges Dam Reservoir.
The millions of tourist flowing through China aren’t oblivious to the massive constructions of this Asian building powerhouse. Promotional films and advertisements for television and tourist agencies gallantly deliver fly-over glimpses of the major intersections and bridges of Chinas most famous cities. For a country touted as have a history of 3000 years, they are not reserved in promoting their modern cultural landmarks. The little known town of SanDouPing has amassed a new collection of tourists with its location of the controversial Three Gorges Dam which spans two kilometers, adequate fodder for the those dam photo enthusiast. But it’s hardly a domestic enthusiasm that propels the desire for immense concrete structures. Len Schwer, a recent American vacationer to China posts within his galleries of China vacation pics. a special section entitled: "Damns, Locks and Bridges." The explicit nature of this site is complete with pictures of wife Becky fronting the many bridges that China so highly dignifies.
Symbols permeate within a cultural framework in diverse forms. For China, the highly engineered bridge, a landscaped cloverleaf intersection or the world’s largest dam (Three Gorges Dam Reservoir) represents a precious sense of accomplishment and progress. While indiscriminate to the impending dangers of urban segregation these engineering feats might bring, the Chinese cultural framework accepts these new concrete perversions, and indeed takes pride in them. Many a tourist brochure, promotional film or tour group will take time to pay homage.
Layering of Social/Transport Space
The ladies all show up around seven, plug their stereo into the hard cold concrete of the Yubei viaduct and line up. Quick flashes of light, like from a hundred aimed cameras, exposes for an instant the transfixed expressions of 24 middle-aged ladies armed and ready to dance. The evening highway traffic rushing along Yubei Road 15 feet overhead is mimicked in this median with delicate red lace fans, floating and flopping to the rhythm of a traditional Sichuan melody. The grassed median space at the interchange of Yuchang Express Highway at the center of the Shapingba district is the evening’s community performance hall. This exhibition occurs nightly within the intertwining cluster of bridges, highways and exit ramps while people congregate in the medians or dine on Gongbao jiding at the fronting median food stand. I frequent the area known as Yanggongqiao often for its surreal appeal of massive concrete defined space as much as its local community culture.
Located further on the southern side of this massive intersection a small teahouse culture is found. With its kitchen defined by the breaks between the leaping structural supports of the fly-over above, the set up appears impromptu. But everyday, protected from the natural elements, the local community congregates within the web of transportation routes to play Majong and sip on green tea. At night the space is lit by strands of misplaced Christmas lights creating an ambiance of vagrancy—The Chinese version of the underground catacombs of the Phantom of the Opera. Through a dank tunnel, the sub-community explodes in an array of food stalls abundant with fruits, vegetables and animal parts. Overhead the roar of trucks and cars is muffled by the blue and red tarps stretched over the majority of the space, capturing the incessant dust, and casting an antiquated glow upon the vendors below.
From these three main centers of activity a succession of tunnels and bridges twists within this urban seam connecting the urban fabric of Chongqing. Under the western branch of Yubei road, heavy canvas blankets and massive load-bearing bridge supports section off a half a dozen TV-screen movie houses. Men congregate in silence around the flashes of blue light and tinny shrieks of Chinese cinema reverberating out of the concrete hallows. Further down, the sale of Mao Zedong and Manchester United footballer David Beckham posters line the congested halls.
Taking direct examples from the American highway system, China has introduced broad six-lane highways, viaducts and long exit ramps into the compact city. But instead of pronouncing them a menace to urban connectivity, the public has layered new cultural adaptations within them. Grand nodes of transport routes are layered with a labyrinth of markets, teahouses, gardens and shops. In a culture of little personal space, the use of highly landscaped cloverleaf intersections as public parks provides breathing room , despite exhausting traffic on every side.
China has no perceivable plans in suspending the "age of modernization." What can be learned within the borders of China is how an awareness of the cultural values associated with urban forms can allow architects to begin to rethink the "treatment" of bettering the city. We as architects must be mindful not only of the designs we render upon the public, but the culture that we instill within it. The automobile and its infrastructure have fertilized generations of auto-dependent Americans and at the same time, instilled irreverence to the thought of it. By understanding the cultural frameworks of China, the designer can better prepare for impending outcomes and impacts—whether big or small, cultural or emotional—on the developed and developing world alike.
What cultural frameworks serve to undermine the architects’ intentions for a successful public realm? What is really infecting our public spaces—the built form or the socio-cultural image of the built form? How might we begin to rethink the fusion of the automobile and public space for developing and developed countries of the world? Perhaps understanding in China the automobile as symbol, the built form can empower the functions of spaces thus becoming enriched, layered and ultimately successful. I will continue to look at the automobile and its infrastructure in the public realm. And, as can be seen with the China example, how the cultural framework of space and symbol can transform the environment of every-day life into actualized realms of public utilization.
