China Urban Research Fund Project

At this juncture, China appears to be at a mid-point in its present period of urbanization, with on the order of another 350 million inhabitants likely to become urbanized during the next 25 years or by mid-century. To date, since the opening of China to the outside world in 1978 and its transition into a fuller market economy, modernization and urbanization has been both rapid and considerable in overall scale. Generally for many in China, their physical well-being and opportunities for continued prosperity have been improved, often dramatically. For others this has not so far been the case. Nevertheless, many issues associated with urban development remain unresolved or inadequately addressed. Among them, the likely scales and spatial distributions of future development are not well understood, nor are more specific patterns of urban settlement and particularly those in and around the urban-rural interface. Urban management is undergoing substantial review and potential realignment in conjunction with broad shifts in policy, such as under the 11th Five-year Plan, and with regard to emerging regulation and changes in local practices. Urban environmental sustainability remains perilously unresolved, with mounting resource consumption, often egregious lags in environmental remediation, and a paucity of demonstrably viable initiatives and practices. Adequate housing and related service provision, especially among lower-income groups, as elsewhere in rapidly developing and relatively poor circumstances, also remains an important issue.

Clearly, resolution of any one of these issues lies well beyond this or any other singular research effort. Rather, here the aim will be to focus on a four-part topical agenda of urban formation, urban management, urban-environmental sustainability and urban housing, for the purposes of: 1) gathering pertinent background information about phenomena under consideration, 2) highlighting what appear to be specific issues and trends, 3) identifying and describing reasonable practices, and 4) generally serving as a source of well-qualified information about China’s urbanization for use in educational and other research exercises.

Territorialization in the Region of Romagna, Italy

In large measure, territorialization is an old and venerable process by which land is settled, converted to productive use, preserved and conserved in some cases, and a geography is made. It almost goes without saying, for instance, that urbanization takes place in a broader territory. Terms and phrases like "urban region" or "urban areas and their hinterlands" certainly imply a broader terrain than the cities and towns involved and signal ideas of economic and other interaction, as well as building, across an area more extensive than the cities and towns themselves. Also, recognizable gradients, from central and inner urban zones to peripheries and per-peripheries, turn the idea of a territory inward by suggesting ways in which its urban landscape can be spatially qualified. Conversely, territories are also often the sites of non-urban production, of agriculture, forestry, coastal activity and natural preservation, inscribing different patterns of use across a landscape and placing other demands on land and its margins. Moreover, the concept of a territory is rarely fixed, changing in both predictable and unpredictable ways, as the scheme of urban and non-urban use, influencing its character, matures under the auspices of different technological, political and other circumstantial regimes. Nevertheless, in spite of these vagaries and intellectually compartmentalized depictions, the territory itself is of significance as both a registry and component in urban and non-urban development processes and, ultimately, because of how it must be considered and made.

An essential aim of the study is to develop a comprehensive and temporally longitudinal understanding of the cultural process, or processes, by which the territory in Romagna, Italy, has been and continues to be made, shaped and produced. It does not aim to yield planning proposals, specific designs, nor political blueprints. Rather, it attempts to contribute to an academic understanding of territorialization as an important contemporary phenomenon and explore various scenarios of possible spatial reconsideration and development, under varying assumptions, in a manner that allows them to qualify most closely with practices that might be inferred to as belonging to the culture production of territorial space.

The study is conducted at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, under the direction of Professor Peter G. Rowe, in collaboration with the University of Bologna's School of Architecture in Cesena, under the direction of Professor Gianni Braghieri, with support from a grant from the Regional Government of Emilia-Romagna and the Provence of Forlì-Cesena.

Urbanization in China and North-East Asia Region

According to some estimates, China's gross domestic product seems likely to increase substantially during the next decade or so, with a concomitant fifty percent rise in urban population. With changes in political climate, similar trends might also be found in other areas of the North-East Asian region like North Korea. In effect, this economic growth means that somewhere on the order of 300 to 400 million people will migrate into existing or newly-formed cities and urbanizing areas. Even in relative terms, this magnitude of growth and redistribution of urban population is unparalleled even among other rapidly growing and developing areas within East Asia, or historically among nations of the so-called 'new world.' To investigate these emerging urban phenomena, and to help provide answers to these pressing questions, a two-stage collaborative research project is being conducted among participants from the Hanssem Research Institute and its affiliates in Korea, Tsinghua University in China, and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University in the United States. This collaboration provides the joint advantages of local familiarity, recent experience with rapid urbanization, as well as methodological and analytical sophistication. The first phase will be concerned primarily with definition and elaboration of the magnitude and type of urbanization impacts based on existing data and analyses, as well as with identification of needed areas of future research and preliminary recommendations. Specific regions of study within China and the North-East Asian Region will include the Changjiang delta region centering on Shanghai and the Seoul metropolitan region in Korea. The second phase will focus on research and the formulation of specific proposals and recommendations required to extend substantially the initial research. An international symposium will be conducted at the conclusion of phase one in order to help formulate initial findings, recommendations and the specification of future work.

Modern Urban Housing in China

A collaborative joint research project is being conducted by the Housing Research Institute at Tsinghua University in Beijing and the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University aimed at documenting the major stages of housing development in modern China from 1911 to the present. At present it is divided into three parts. The first considers modern housing development in the early stage of development of industrialization in China, from the fall of the Qing Dynasty in 1911 until the end of the civil war in 1949. The second considers the rise and fall of the welfare housing system in China, during the period of Mao Zedong, from 1949 until 1978. The third considers recent reforms and housing developments since China's historic opening to the west under Deng Xiaoping, followed by the present regime of Jiang Zemin, covering the period from 1978 to date. Key examples of housing from these periods are drawn from field research and documentation, as well as from archival records. The research, scheduled to be completed in 1999, will culminate in a bilingual monograph. The principal investigators for the project are professors L Junhua and Zhang Jie at Tsinghua and Professor Peter Rowe at Harvard.