Reforming gated communities. Shanghai, towards a productive megacity

The State Council of the People’s Republic of China has on February 21, 2016 issued the guideline in an effort to treat the problems associated with the country’s urbanization and the growth of city sprawl. The rules, which include a ban on “bizarre or odd-shaped architecture” as well, are the product of the country’s first Central Urban Work Conference in nearly four decades and they take into account also the emerging problems related to the overspread of the gated communities around China. The guideline stated that the roads in the newly established communities will be open to the public, becoming part of the urban road system. That is to better utilize the urban land and optimize the urban road network. In addition, no new gated communities can be built in the future. The paradigm of urbanization based on fast speed, development of huge scale, and speculative real estate is under serious criticism, while the demand for a model or philosophy of urbanization is requested urgently by Chinese government. This can represent the opportunity for a total rethinking of the developmental city, aiming to the recuperation of the idea of the city by offering an alternative to its ideological premise. The developmental city is conceived and constructed through megaplots and it used primarily as a developmental tool driven by speculative capital. The urbanization of these megaplots results in the dissolution of the city as a legible artifact: it is bereft of civic dimension or public sphere. This ensuing sea of enclave urbanism does not constitute the idea of the city, either in the European tradition, as a space of partnership or coexistence, or in the Chinese tradition, as a framework with a clear and legible deep structure that regulates spaces and social relations - the idea of the city as a common space is lost. The first part of this essay argues that a critical reading of the history and tradition of city making in China has the potential to counter this imbalance in development. It does not aspire to a re-creation of the city form or urban fabric of ancient China. Rather, it proposes a recuperation of the cultural and philosophical ideas that have underpinned the political, artistic, and aesthetic production of the city as a total work of art - a collective artifact. By this historical investigation, the project proposes the identification of a common framework as the new paradigm of urbanization to dissolute the megaplot and realize an open community without total reconstruction, accommodating housing, work space, outdoor space, retails and leisure space and related civic functions. A common framework is the deep structure of the city, the structure that embodies the space of coexistence. Such an accommodative framework promotes inclusivity through exacerbating difference, it insists that the city is first and foremost a space of plurality, able to frame, absorb, sequence, mark, enclose, layer, limit, separate, compress, and imprint. China is nowadays facing a turning point in its history: after the economic miracle it is now defining and consolidating its position as a world power. Chinese Industrial revolution is considered the most important economic and geopolitical phenomena since the original Industrial Revolution 250 years ago. Since the founding of New China, and especially following the reform and opening up period, China’s manufacturing sector has supported China’s position as a economic power. Compared with the advanced economies, China’s manufacturing sector is large but not strong, with obvious gaps in innovation capacity, efficiency of resource utilization, quality of industrial infrastructure and degree of digitalization. The production that China accounts for in many of these industries is still very much low value add and energy intensive, not to mention highly polluting, which is a source of increasing social discontent. In 2015, China has charted out a $300 billion plan to become nearly self-sufficient by 2025 in a range of important industries, from planes to computer chips to electric cars, as it looks to kick-start its next stage of economic development. The goal of ”Made in China 2025” is to comprehensively upgrade Chinese industry, making it more efficient and integrated so that it can occupy the highest parts of global production chains. The plan identifies the goal of raising domestic content of core components and materials to 40% by 2020 and 70% by 2025. At present, we find ourselves at the beginning of the fourth industrial revolution, which is characterized by so-called “Cyber-Physical Systems”. These systems are a consequence of the far-reaching integration of production, sustainability and customer-satisfaction forming the basis of intelligent network systems and processes. Factory floors are already teeming with 2Internet of Things”. It is becoming easier to connect appliances, machines, things, complete factories and other industrial environments and processes to the Internet. Architects and urbanists have the opportunity to proactively challenge the assumptions of the global factory and rethink the idea of the heterotopic urban factory and workers’ conditions in general. Considering contemporary definitions of industry - post bubble and beyond oil economics - there are opportunities for the factory to establish a new paradigm, with nascent potential in design challenges similar to those of the early Modern era, when architects, urbanists, and engineers responded to the novel technologies of their time. Today we can ask - with a flexible, new economy, as well as cleaner, smaller-scaled production processes made possible by advanced, real-time manufacturing techniques - what ways can urban manufacturing reenvision, both ecologically and economically, the factory in newly sustainable cities?