Urban designers should then find an alley in the government to implement industrial plans that are more sustainable, as the logic of the highest productivity does not reflect all the actors in the play. Speaking about the generic city, Koolhaas explains that it “is never elaborated, is not improved but abandoned. The idea of layering, intensification, completion are alien to it: it has no layers. Its next layer takes place somewhere else, either next door – that can be the size of a country – or even elsewhere altogether.”33 This is another aspect of Chinese urbanization that has huge side effects on the environment: buildings and sometimes even cities are planned not to endure but to be replaced as soon as the social and economic conditions change (many have a life of just 10 years). A sustainable design is one that looks for the minimum production of waste and this logic of disposable architecture is incredibly detrimental for the environment. The ability of Landscape Urbanism to generate models that are able to adapt to different conditions in time, seems crucial to propose new sustainable models for the country.
Conclusions Urbanization in China offers a unique combination of problems and opportunities. Resisting the forces that drive such urbanization would be quite a conservative and unproductive approach. We live in a capitalist globalized world and the market is something that architects and urban designers have to deal with. A tactically resistant designer is able to canalise the market to meet the interests of the common citizens. The capitalist logic of profit cannot be denied, but the social and environmental effects of urban design should be put into the picture. If we could evaluate them from an economic point of view, we could probably state that in a long-term a good sustainable urban design brings more economic benefits than a short-term market-driven one.
32 Aldama, China perjudica la salud 33 Koolhaas, The Generic City, p. 1263 125
tactical resistance
for the country’s economy: Communist authorities estimate it to be around 10 percent of China’s GDP.32