L A N D |S L I D E Pos s ible F utur es at t he 5t h S henzen Bi- C it y Biennale o f U rba nis m\Ar chit ect ure YAN W U
In December 2013, less than two months after Land|Slide: Possible Futures concluded its ambitious manifestation at the Markham Museum and Heritage Village, the project and its organizers were invited to participate in the 5th Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB). It was recreated in the Canada Pavilion as one of the nine National Pavilions presented at Venue B Border Warehouse—one of two main exhibition venues dedicated to a massive survey of documentaries and case studies collected both locally and internationally under the theme of Urban Border. UABB recontextualized the critical urban issues that emerged from the development of the City of Markham in a cross-cultural setting and drew a compelling comparative case study on the scale and speed of urbanization between Markham and the host city of the Biennale—Shenzhen. Shenzhen is a city built upon experimentation. It was the starting point of the Chinese economic reform in 1979, a place where communism first shook the hands of capitalism. Shenzhen was singled out to be the first of the five Special Economic Zones (SEZ) in China. It was formally established in 1979 due to its proximity to Hong Kong. The SEZ was created to be an experimental ground for the practice of market capitalism within a community guided by the ideals of “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” In his article “Shenzhen – Topology of a Neoliberal City,” Adrian Blackwell illustrates the intensity of the famous Shenzhen Speed that has been driving the development in the region: Estimates in 2010 place the population of Shenzhen at 15,250,000 people. Not only is it one of the most populous cities in the world, it is also the largest municipality in the world’s biggest urban agglomeration, the Pearl River Delta (PRD), whose population of just over 50,000,000 lives in one contiguous band of urbanization, a horseshoe-shaped megalopolis. Even more astonishing than its world-historical scale is the speed with which it was constructed. In China, the term, ‘Shenzhen tempo’ once referred to its unprecedented speed of construction— one floor of an office building every 2.5 days—but it can equally be applied to the pace of urbanization itself. Shenzhen grew from an urban and rural population of 300,000 living in fishing villages and small towns to its current population in just over 30 years; this amounts to an influx of approximately half-a-million new