Hybrid Modernity

The Public Park in Late 20th Century China

Mary Padua

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317119289
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

This book provides a detailed historical and design analysis of the development of parks and modern landscape architecture in late 20th century China. It questions whether the fusion of international influences with the local Chinese design vocabulary in late 20th century China has created a distinctive and novel approach to the design of public parks.

Hybrid Modernity proposes a new theory for examining the design of public parks built in post-Mao China since the reforms and sets the various processes for China's late 20th century socio-cultural context. Drawing on modernization theory, research on China's modernity, local and global cultural trends, it illustrates through a range of case studies ways hybrid modernity defines a new design genre and language for the spatial forms of parks that emerged in China's secondary cities. Featured case studies include the Living Water Park in Chengdu, Sichuan province, Zhongshan Shipyard Park in Guangdong Province, Jinji Lake Landscape Master Plan in Suzhou, Jiangsu province, and the West Lake Southern Scenic Area Master Plan in Hangzhou, Zhejiang province. This book argues that these forms represent a new stage in China's history of landscape architecture. The work reveals that as a new profession, landscape architecture has greatly contributed to China's massive urban experiment.

This book is an ideal read for students enrolled in landscape architecture, architecture, fine arts and urban planning programs who are engaged in learning the arts and international design education.

1 Introducing hybrid modernity

The tremendous post-Mao late 20th century nation-building effort in the People’s Republic of China (China) has been and continues to be a complex topic of study among cultural theorists, art critics and historians, urban scholars and social scientists operating in both China and western nations. The post-Mao period commenced with the 1976 demise of Chairman Mao Zedong, China’s highly revered revolutionary communist leader, and subsequent rise of Deng Xiaoping, paramount leader and father of post-Mao revolutionary reforms. Also known as “Reform and Opening-up, Gaige Kaifang”, Deng’s late 1970s open door policy evolved from the “Four Modernizations, Sige Xiandaihua”, a nation-building policy that targeted four sectors: agriculture, industry, national defense, and science and technology. Deng shifted China from Mao’s hardline socialist approach to a market economy open to foreign investment. The ensuing post-Mao China experience involved a vast transformation with the fastest and most extensive urbanization in world history. As the architectural critic Ouroussoff (2008) argued, historical cycles that took a century or more to unfold in Europe or North America can be compressed into less than a decade in China.

While scholarly work has examined aspects of China’s late 20th century built environment, limited work has examined the design history and theoretical evolution of post-Mao public parks, especially their spatial forms. This book intends to fill this knowledge gap through an investigation of the public park, one of two archetypal spatial forms within the discipline of landscape architecture – the private garden is the companion archetype. It builds the multivalent theory, “hybrid modernity” and related socio-cultural theory, “hybrid modernization” through the case study analysis of four late 20th century purpose-built parks. This theoretical synthesis suggests these parks emerged as part of China’s tremendous urban experiment and symbolized notions of local identity and nation-building through the fusion of international design influences and the Chinese Picturesque garden tradition. It also suggests broader transformations in the post-Mao period caused a competitive milieu for local government leaders and the rise of the secondary city – a vehicle for entrepreneurial activities and design innovation.

The public park, generally, is a designated tract of land and open space in a city, usually a vegetated and designed outdoor environment, set aside for the general public’s recreational and leisure activities. Within this urban context, a public park is intended for non-productive agricultural purposes. Purpose-built public parks historically emerged as part of 19th century modernization and city-making practices in Europe and North America, and especially as a public health response to industrialization. In the same period, royal gardens on private land for royal use only, located in or around rapidly growing western cities, were transformed and adapted for public use. Public parks also fall under the broader umbrella of public space – accessible outdoor open space where people can gather for leisure and social activities. This category of public space typically includes parks, squares, plazas, commons, markets, waterfront promenades and the connecting spaces, streets, boulevards and related pedestrian paths or sidewalks. While the design and study of public parks fall largely within the domain of landscape architecture praxis and research, scholars and professionals operating within the realm of city planning and urban design consider the public park an important community health component, as well as fundamental to the physical form and socio-cultural fabric of the modern city. It is widely accepted that scholarly investigations of the public park fall neatly within the broader literature on the built environment and urbanism.

Since formally starting this research in 2005, the English-language literature on China’s public park evolution, generally, or how it contributed to the built form of cities in the post-Mao 20th century period has been limited. This is still the case nearly fifteen years later. Dong (1999) and Esherick (1999) discuss the introduction of public parks in Republican China as part of their transformation of imperial urban spaces and modern city-making practices circa 1912–1916. Cranz (1979) reflects on the function and consumption of parks in socialist China as conveyed to her by government officials during her visit there. Friedmann’s (2005) book presented the first deep investigation into China’s late 20th century process of urbanization and its multi-layered meaning with public space only mentioned in a footnote. Yu and Padua’s (2006) edited book introduces concepts and challenges facing landscape architecture in China at the turn of the new millennium, and projects by Turenscape, the Beijing-based private design and planning firm established by Yu Kongjian, a native-born Chinese educated at Harvard University who has developed an international reputation. Urban fever and China’s post-Mao cosmetic cities are framed in terms of the production of superficial, mimetic and ornamental neo-classical parks (Yu & Padua 2007). Padua (2007) synthesizes a post-traditional design identity for designed outdoor public spaces in Hong Kong’s designated redevelopment projects. Campanella’s (2008) expansive book on China’s urbanization discusses theme parks and landscapes of consumption in suburban post-Mao China. Lu (2006) examines China’s urban geography and built environment in the period spanning 1949–2005 and weaves a discursive narrative around scarcity and modernity within a socialist space. Rinaldi (2011) discusses the influence of traditional Chinese gardens on China’s contemporary landscape architecture. Wu and Gaubatz (2013) provide an exhaustive account of the evolution of the Chinese city and touched on the function of public parks. Padua (2003, 2004a, 2004b, 2006, 2008, 2012, 2013a, 2013b, 2014) reviewed award-winning designed landscapes completed during China’s late 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century.

Where the aforementioned publications offer an understanding of Mao and post-Mao urban contexts, this book examines and interrogates more closely the design, spatial forms and meaning of urban public parks in late 20th century mainland China. It also introduces the first English language account of modern China’s history of the public park, especially as part of city-making and cultural production. It reveals the awakening of modern landscape architecture praxis as significant actors for post-Mao cultural production and the making of late 20th century China’s built environment. It brings to light park design innovations in China’s secondary cities by the late 1990s. The book acknowledges that China’s primary cities, Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton), have their own colonial heritage of park-making for foreign consumption and international reputations when China was a world player in international trade and cultural production (textiles, porcelain, tea, 18th century Chinoiserie, art and antiquities, and other commodities). Shanghai’s urban heritage is recognized as an international and cosmopolitan place of modernity in the years before the 1937 Japanese occupation for both Chinese and foreign expatriates. China’s late 20th century opening to the world gave rise to its secondary cities as vessels for innovation and experimentation in the making of purpose-built public parks.

The author’s early research on public parks in post-Mao urban China was based on the premise that landscape architecture praxis is a design discipline. Hence, it was conceptualized as an exercise in design inquiry and history – interpreting the designed landscape or outdoor designed environment as a cultural product formed by the social, economic and political circumstances of a particular society or period. This follows the intellectual tradition associated with the author’s former professors, J.B. Jackson (1970), Charles Jencks (1978), Dolores Hayden (1995) and Catharine Ward Thompson (1998). Following this trajectory, studying parks as cultural by-products of post-Mao China necessitated the formulation of a theoretical and analytical framework for understanding the social, economic and political situation of that period. However, early on it became clear this complex post-Mao multi-dimensional construct for examining urban parks was not elucidated for the landscape architecture audience. Furthermore, the author discovered the public park’s evolution in the Mao or pre-Mao periods and complexity of modern China’s 19th and 20th centuries had not been made available to this same English-speaking audience. This book offers a transdisciplinary and interpretative narrative for the ideological context and evolution of public parks in modern China. It introduces the Chinese Picturesque design genre, especially as an element of cultural identity, and discusses international influences from the late 20th century western world. In this context, the synthesis of the theory, hybrid modernity, posits purpose-built parks as intertwined with the fusion of local and international design influences, modern nation-building, and the search for local cultural identity during China’s post-Mao late 20th century period.

With the limited English language literature on the design history of China’s late 20th century public parks, the author drew from scholarly works on modernization theory, and China’s modernity as a multivalent phenomenon embedded with socio-cultural, political and economic dimensions. This transdisciplinary approach looked “inside” China or scholarly work discussing major themes during its late 20th century cultural development, as well as the broader international English language literature on cultural trends “outside” China or the postmodern West. The convergence of ideas espoused by social scientists, cultural theorists and art and design historians investigating late 20th century China, and broader international cultural trends, inform the narrative to characterize China’s late 20th century period.

The concept of modernization in itself originally emerged out of the domain of sociology and has been attributed to the iconic social theorist, Max Weber, and one of his followers, Jürgen Habermas (White 1989). Their intellectual roots stemmed from the Frankfurt School, a social research institute that existed in pre-World War II Germany. However, social theory and the social sciences, like all scholarly fields, evolve over time. Hence, aspects of research in this book expand from the Frankfurt School’s earlier thinking on modernization theory, especially later work espoused by theorists operating within the realm of post-colonial cultural studies and the globalization discourse (Appadurai 1990; Bhabba 1994; Dirlik 2002).

Appadurai (1990), Bhabba (1994) and others argue that social and economic change can be simultaneously influenced by global forces and remain culturally idiosyncratic. In their perspective, the process of change is embedded within culture; but the societies in which change is taking place are not isolated from the larger world. In the opposing position, globalization can be a major force for change without compromising the uniqueness of local cultures. The results of change are not determined solely by global forces, they also reflect local culture. The process of modernization and the form that modernity takes thus may be specific to individual societies. This book builds from this premise, particularly China as a world civilization with its own unique societal evolution.

Concepts of nation-building, consumerism and identity, experienced among the cultural intelligentsia in China during the 1980s and 1990s, are elucidated in the available literature on post-Mao cultural development. This book explores these concepts and themes as a way to orient the reader to post-Mao late 20th century China; and these also inform the foundation for hybrid modernity and hybrid modernization. In the normative language of social science, cultural studies, humanities and design research, epistemologically this study is qualitative, interpretative and transdisciplinary. The goal is to cast light on the meaning of purpose-built public parks in China’s late 20th century through a theoretical framework that represents the convergence of scholarly thought beyond the discipline-specific perspectives.

Some research questions below guided earlier thinking on late 20th century parks in urban China. Are the spatial forms represented in these parks new? Do they reflect larger social and cultural transformations that have taken place since China opened to the world? How and when did public parks evolve in China and what did they mean? In what ways do they reflect the profession of landscape architecture and education for landscape architects in China? The answers to these questions provided a means for addressing the larger question that lies at the heart of this book: has the fusion of international influences with a local Chinese design tradition created a distinctive approach to the design of public parks that is novel in the post-Mao context? How has this taken place, and what does it mean for landscape architecture during China’s late 20th century period of hyper-rapid urbanization?

The process of hybrid modernization creates a crucible for answering these questions about late 20th century urban China, and its synthesis will be discussed more deeply and expl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Preface
• 1  Introducing hybrid modernity
• 2  Navigating modern(s) and the park in modern China
• 3  Pre-modern China: Nature, cosmology, mythology and the Chinese Picturesque
• 4  Looking “inside” and “outside” post-Mao China
• 5  Revealing late 20th century hybrid modernity: Four purpose-built parks
• 6  Transforming from “hybrid” to “ecological” modernization in China’s 21st century
• Index