GREAT LEAP FORWARD
Harvard Design School Project on the City
Edited by CHUIHUA JUDY CHUNG, JEFFREY INABA, REM KOOLHAAS, and SZE TSUNG LEONG
London: Taschen, 2001. 720 pages, $50

reviewed by Shana J. Brown

On June 16, 2002, a tragic fire broke out in an internet café near Beijing University, killing twenty-four people. The disaster highlighted how quickly China's technology boom has raced ahead of its urban infrastructure, which is nevertheless undergoing almost constant reconstruction in an attempt to keep pace. Visitors to southeast China may recognize the prototype of this hectic cityscape in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) of Shenzhen, designated by Deng Xiaoping in 1980 as an experimental site for market reform. Facing Hong Kong across the Pearl River Delta, the fenced-in Shenzhen became Mainland China's first gateway to the modern capitalist world, a point of entry for new technologies, management strategies, and capital investment. Two decades later, the Pearl River Delta has lost some of its sheen as Shanghai reemerges as China's business capital, but Shenzhen remains the forerunner of New China. Its dense tangle of high-rise apartment buildings, shopping centers, discos, and computer assembly plants is now being replicated throughout the country, notably in northern SEZs like the technology corridor in Beijing's university district. This bewildering topography may appear to defy urban design, but Great Leap Forward, a recent book on Shenzhen, tries to explain the "revolutionary" forces that are shaping the region's growth. Mao Zedong's disastrous Great Leap Forward campaign in the 1950s tried to find national strength through decentralized growth. Now Great Leap Forward finds unique order in the seeming chaos of the contemporary Chinese city.

The essays in Great Leap Forward were researched by Harvard Design School students during local internships in the mid-1990s. (The trips were inspired partly by Great Leap Forward co-editor Rem Koolhaas, winner of the Pritzker Architecture Prize and the designer of Guggenheim Las Vegas, who has said that Western architects should "learn from China.") Following a useful chronology which opens the book, the first essay in Great Leap Forward discusses the historical consequences of Mao's de-urbanization policies and describes how the rejection of traditional city forms has made radically new configurations of urban space possible. Entitled "Ideology," the article also shows how the decision to plan Shenzhen around linear infrastructure arteries has contributed to the popularity of all-in-one projects, with factory, retail, and housing spaces combined. The following essay, "Architecture," explains how international curtain-wall building styles have been adapted to local needs. Multicolored glass panels are propped open for laundry and ventilation, mimicking the function of the small balconies found on every Chinese apartment building. An essay called "Money" includes a fascinating diary of a summer spent working with a team of local developers and architects, telling us as much about the social customs of the city's entrepreneurial class as about the economics of speculative construction. The planning of golf courses and coastal resorts is detailed in "Landscape," while "Politics" discusses how the concerns of local communities are generally subservient to national development priorities. The final section, a photo-essay called "Infrastructure," presents highways, bridges, ferries, and airports as sites of architectural design and as the conduits for all elements of Pearl River Delta lifemoney, goods, and people.

The articles are enriched by an almost overwhelming number of striking photographs (many taken by the authors themselves), supplemented by charts, reproductions of development advertisements, and propaganda posters. These images speak their own eloquent story. They foreground the human consequences of Shenzhen's rapid development for the millions of inland migrants who now crowd its factories, often living in substandard conditions while the lucky few who have struck it rich in the capitalist concession gaze down from their penthouses. Several of the essays offer particularly compelling accounts drawn from Chinese-language sources; other pieces, unfortunately, occasionally resort to stereotypes of Chinese culture and are marred by simplistic statements like "money cannot be quantified in China." The densely packed book is almost as decentralized and chaotic as the geography it analyzes, but just like Shenzhen, it offers a series of dynamic impressions that gradually form a coherent picture. Despite the richness of its contents, the text suffers from a number of cutsie details, in particular the jarring use of familiar terms"architecture," "corruption," "feng shui"in supposedly radical new ways that merit copyrighting. These stylistic quirks may increase the appeal of a project like Great Leap Forward for design theorists, but they might also obscure the book's original insights for many readers. This is a pity, since Great Leap Forward is a refreshing attempt to portray Shenzhen in a new way, not as a postmodern jungle, but as a human community coping as best it can with the strain of being China's liberalization petri dish. The book should engage anyone who is interested in the new urban China, and who wonders what its future holds.