|1| The Chinese Dream |

I purchased this book "The Chinese Dream: a society under construction" to use as inspiration and provide me with ideas towards what a future city may have to account for. Asia is the fastest growing region in the world and to be able to read over the issues that they will face over the next 100 years are both dramatic and unbelievable. Population growth alone is going to create serious issues which as designers need to be accounted for. Other problems include energy, food, resources at the various urban scales. 


Whilst Australia may not be under as much pressure as China these problems and issues remain and need to be accounted for. I believe that this should form a core response to my personal architecture this semester. I want to develop a solution that addresses these issues in a real world and professional manner. If we don't start to change our mind-set now what future do we have. 


The blurb read as follows:


"WHAT IF YOU BUILT THE WHOLE MASS OF WESTERN EUROPE IN 20 YEARS?

WHAT IF 400 MILLION FARMERS THEN MOVED IN?

WHAT WOULD IT LOOK LIKE? HOW WOULD IT WORK?

WOULD YOU BE ABLE TO GO TO SLEEP AT NIGHT?

AND IF YOU DID, WOULD YOU DREAM OF SOMEWHERE ELSE …?

China is in the midst of breakneck transformation. The last 30 years of astonishing economic growth and political and cultural reform have been driven by the world’s biggest ever urban boom. The new China is now halfway built: within the next 30 years the world’s most populous nation will most likely take centre-stage as a global superpower, with hundreds of millions of new urbanites flooding into the rapidly swelling cities. But this process — presenting no less than the construction of a new society — is taking place almost without time to think. The present is so all-consuming that fast realities threaten to eclipse the slow dream of tomorrow.

Taking as its starting point the goal announced in China in 2001 to build 400 new cities of 1 million inhabitants each by 2020, or 20 new cities a year for 20 years, the book explores the hopes and hazards of dreaming on such a scale. The question being asked is in fact no less than how to build a new utopia. But is China mortgaging its present for a promised future, and doing so at the same time that current speeds of construction eclipse any real forward planning?

The Chinese Dream is a visual tour de force, both encyclopaedic in scope and holistic in approach. Cutting across all levels of scale — from individual to nation — and backed by a truly multi-disciplinary team (encompassing architecture & urban planning, politics, economics, arts & culture, environmental concerns, and sociology) the book synthesizes a vast body of research to tackle the big questions of today, and to unpack the paradoxes at the heart of China’s struggle for change.

Assembled over a four year continuous presence in China, the book lays aside over-exposed starchitect projects, and looks instead at the enormous wave of anonymous buildings currently reshaping the landscape and fabric of China itself. Bold texts, self-critical design proposals, exploratory photoessays, a unique glossary, and an innovative survey of China’s young middle class, reveal China in all its astonishing diversity: from the glitziest megamalls to the gloomiest slums, and from the rural fringe to the mushrooming village. Featuring thousands of photographs, drawings and computer graphics, this is space as you have never seen it before: brash, outlandish, and very Chinese."

Mitch