Crafting the future: Spatial production experiments on the aesthetics, aspirations and anxieties of urban life in contemporary China
How to deal with the present, the future, and possibly the past, is an integral aspect of the practice of building. Therefore, urban construction cannot escape the tangle of temporality. Within the project “Constructing Urban Futures in Asia”, my research explores the future-making practices of city builders and how they are deeply intertwined with pervasive social concerns in contemporary China.
The transformation of housing vividly illustrates the entanglement of individual lives, state power, and the capital market, allowing us to glimpse dynamic changes in intergenerational relations, gender and family values, social hierarchy and exclusion, struggles for rights and justice, and much more. As a socialist country that has also embraced the market economy, China has seen complex interventions by both the government and global capital that have had a huge impact on the built environment and people's attitudes, choices, and rights to housing. From the predominance of housing centred on the work unit (danwei) during Mao’s socialist era, to mushrooming commercial housing since the economic reforms of 1978, to contemporary forms of mixed-use real estate projects, housing has reflected the changing urban landscape as well as the social, economic, and political forces driving this change. Meanwhile, increasing family atomization, low birth rates, property market turbulence, and concerns about mobility are combining to challenge existing housing forms as symbols of stability and security.
In order to unravel the political economy behind urban construction and its potential to shape the future, I locate my research within the world of real estate developers and its avant-garde of architectural design. In this process, I want to explore how the engaged city-builders are producing new aesthetics, aspirations, and anxieties for different social classes by using “housing” as leverage for a speculative future. How do real estate developers and architects deal with rising pessimistic attitudes towards the future among ordinary people and the increasingly inconsistent and unpredictable policy landscape brought about by both the COVID-19 pandemic and the slowing economy? How do they navigate between the now and the future? Can the future be commodified for the sake of the present or vice versa?
To address these questions, my fieldwork currently focuses on a real estate developer that is targeting the middle class and experimenting with futuristic urban fantasy by artfully integrating cultural events, commercial spectacles, and social media into the construction of both stylish architecture and community life. I have chosen to focus on city builders rather than ordinary residents in order to reverse the usual direction of the research gaze and to delve into how key stakeholders deal with complexity and actively use their power and agency to “build the future”. This research thus aims to make two main contributions, one analytical, the other methodological. First, by adopting the perspective of city builders, this study will throw new light on contemporary processes of spatial transformation in China. Second, it will seek to enrich discussions on studying up and sideways and explore new possibilities for collaborative anthropological research.