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In order to keep within the theme of this session, “Time and Technology (Design and Technique),” the public park (public open space in the green tradition versus the public square) will be discussed as a design idea that has developed over time. As indicated, I will employ the notion of modernity as a theoretical basis for analysis of Chinese parks and park design.

A brief overview of urbanization in twentieth century China follows. This provides a basis for examining socio-cultural and political forces that have influenced the urban park in Chinese cities. This approach is inter-disciplinary and rooted in an intellectual tradition associated with J.B. Jackson (1972), Dolores Hayden (1995), Catharine Ward Thompson (1998) and Marc Treib (1993). It emphasizes interpretation of landscape or place as a cultural product formed by the social, economic and political circumstances of a particular society and period.

The literature on modernity or modernization characteristically has dealt with the end of tradition and the notion of progress in society (Giddens, 1990; AlSayyad, 1989; Jacobs, 2004). There has been a tendency in this work to gauge progress by comparison with advanced societies or the “West”. The 1960’s discussion of the less developed countries or third world typically dealt with places in terms of economic and cultural status and framed the issues by implicit or explicit comparison to Western European societies. More recent thinking about modernity and globalization has looked at the economic and cultural status of a city or nation in terms of its role as an active participant in the global space of flows: where the flow of capital or economic resources is a means of defining the global network and the informational society (Castells, 1989).

“Many foreign observers are captivated by glossy pictures of Shanghai’s gleaming office towers and luxury hotels, images that suggest yet another global metropolis in the making (not only in Shanghai but in other Chinese megacities as well). Such images contribute to the widely held belief that the country is racing to be globalized, to “catch up” with the West. This belief is often reinforced by the Chinese themselves, who are proud to point to these symbols of their country’s modernization. But this picture obscures the socio-cultural processes actually at work in China and deeply embedded. China, it is useful to recall, is more than a nation-state, it is also one of the world’s great civilizations equivalent to Western Europe or India and can be expected to develop in ways and directions that are not part of the Western repertoire of experience.”

Friedman is referring indirectly to the notion of "alternative modernities," a term coined in the mid-l980s by Arjun Appadurai, who used it to discuss modernity in the Asian, African, and Latin American contexts. Appadurai argued that these areas were evolving on their own and that it was not fruitful to examine them through the lens of the “western cultural experience”. He also argued that a critical shift in thinking is required to move away from “trait geographies” to mobile civil forms, with a focus on process geographies that chart a typology of action, interaction and motion.1 It is through this lens of alternative modernity that the evolution of urban parks in China can best be understood.

Modernity in China has typically been seen as part of the nationalist ideology of SunYat Sen’s revolution and the creation of the Republic of China (1911-1949). However, domestic Chinese political historians generally treat modernity as an anti-traditional or anti-imperial, anti-feudal form of nationalism that grew out of the student demonstrations to denounce Japan and foreign imperialism on May 4, 1919. This later became known as the May 4th movement, which subsequently formed the basis for the New Cultural Enlightenment Movement (1917-1923). Political and social historians note that this was a significant milestone in China’s intellectual history; the intelligentsia demanded an end to oppressive domestic policies and emancipation from the cultural conservatism of thousands of years of imperial rule. This reaction fits well the common view that equates modernity with progress and views tradition with contempt. In this view, tradition becomes “something to be left behind in a rage” (Jacobs 2004).

Political, social scientists, and art historians in China claim that the modern nation was born as a result of this movement. However the Republic soon deteriorated in the face of internal strife among warlords, civil war, and the Japanese invasion. This later period of the Republic and the subsequent rise of revolutionary communism created a forty year period of retreat from the nationalist ideology initiated during the early years of the Republic and the May 4th movement.

The Maoist isolation of China ended with the economic reforms and the opening of China initiated by Deng Xiaopeng. This New Era, as it became to be known among the Chinese political and social scientists under Deng, fostered cultural liberation and a renewed sense of modernity and nationalism. The economic reforms under Deng also created the most intense urbanization ever experienced in the world. It is within this economic and socio-political climate that the contemporary park in China has emerged.

Historians (Cheng, 1631 trans. 1988; Graham, 1937; Keswick, 1978; Johnston, 1991) typically suggest that four types of open space design emerged during the long Imperial period from 255 BC to 1911 (the Qin Dynasty 255 BC to the Qing Dynasty):

Imperial Garden
Scenic Park
Temple and Monastic garden,
Scholar Garden

The European classical equivalents would be: royal parks or hunting grounds, sacred gardens, domestic courtyard space or private residential garden.2

The scholar garden or gardens of the literati reached their peak during the mid-Ming (circa 1500’s) to early Qing Dynasties (circa1650’s) with hundreds of private gardens in the eastern region known as Jiangnan – home to Suzhou, Hangzhou, Yangzhou, and Wuxi (Johnston 1991; Graham 1937). The scholar garden is part of the “Shan shui” or “mountain-water” tradition in the Chinese classical arts that also includes painting and poetry. Key principles of this design approach include making small spaces seem large, creating abstractions of nature, the use of architectural elements like the lang, (covered walkway) or ting, (a pavilion to reveal scenery), and making each image a scene that could be a verse in a poem.

Private scholar gardens represented high culture and were designed for and by the literati – in this case, retired government officials – as places for contemplation. Garden design was influenced by Taoism and the yin-yang principles of harmony, where the garden contained the essence of the world with all things standing in proper relationship to each other. Mountains (artificial rockery) represented yang, the active stimulating force, while still water was intended to induce tranquility, representing yin, the passive principle that stands for darkness and mystery. (Johnston 1991; Graham 1937; Keswick 1978).

Several scholar gardens in Suzhou have been designated as World Heritage Sites (WHS) by UNESCO and many of the non-designated gardens are part of a cultural preservation effort by the PRC government. Key elements of this style continue as a garden traditions and this Classical garden form has become the archetypal Chinese garden that is exported around the world.

The earliest known European influence in China occurred during the late imperial period, in the 1740’s. The Italian Jesuit painter, Fr. Giuseppe Castiglione, and his fellow missionaries visited the Imperial Court bringing paintings of the Italian royal hunt and court scenes that impressed Emperor Qianlong. The emperor invited them to stay, and the Italian missionaries lived in part of the Imperial gardens called, Yuanmingyuan (Perfection and Brightness Garden), where they designed and built western-style palaces to serve as a folly for the Emperor. These works by the Jesuits were the first Italian renaissance buildings in China (Barme, 2000). The original garden was destroyed by British and French troops in the 19th century and is being rebuilt as part of tourism development for the Beijing 2008 Olympics.

Later in the Qing dynasty, the Treaty of Nanjing was signed in 1842 ending the Opium Wars. As part of the treaty, Hong Kong was ceded to Great Britain. A key aspect of this agreement was the establishment of five treaty ports along China’s eastern coast: Canton (Guangzhou), Amoy (Xiamen) Foochow (Fuzhou), Ningbo, and Shanghai – with Tianjin, Hankow and others established later. These cities contained concessions or districts that were dominated by foreign powers such as the English, French, and Germans, and they served as sources of international influence for more than a century. Parks built in these foreign concessions were restricted to foreigners; local Chinese residents were excluded (Esherick, Dong, Wasserstrom 2000).

Much of the park development in Western Europe and North America began near the end of the nineteenth century as a response to un-healthful city environments created by the industrial revolution. This was part of a public hygiene movement that spawned the development of the English picturesque parks, Olmsted’s Central Park in New York and the subsequent park-building movement throughout the United States.

This social hygiene movement had an indirect effect on the development of parks in China. The first public park in China was located in Beijing circa 1914 and involved the transformation of an Imperial Garden, similar to the transformation of royal gardens into public parks in Western Europe. This first public park, called Central Park, was built as part of the nationalistic movement of the early years of the Republic of China (Shi, 1998). Shi (1998) provides a detailed description of how the idea of Central Park was imported to China from the west via Ueno Park, Tokyo. Municipal and government officials were clear about their objectives and site selection criteria: it had to be in the center of Beijing and within the walls of the Imperial City. This new public park was intended to be a symbol of modernity and demonstrate to the world that Beijing was an international cosmopolitan place on par with London, Paris, and Tokyo (Shi 1998).

There was little industry in Beijing at this time, and the urban pollution of industrial cities like London and New York had not yet developed. Parks created during this period in China were part of a program of modernization that brought public infrastructure improvements such as road construction, pavement, street lighting and sewer systems to major Chinese cities like Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou. (Esherick, Dong, Wasserstrom 2000). During this time, Chinese students also went overseas to study art and architecture, and returned with western ideas to teach and establish new art academies and architecture schools (Xiaodong 2003). The movement toward urban and parks development during this period was driven more by the desire to modernize along European lines than by the type of social concerns about hygiene that drove the development of Central Park in New York.
As noted previously, the Republican period was not a particularly stable period. This era was dominated by internal battles among warlords and the invasion of the Japanese. Political and civil instability soon interrupted China’s overall modernization efforts and created a hiatus in park development.

The Communist revolution and establishment of the People’s Republic of China by Mao Zedong in 1949 marked a major transition in the role of parks and a radical movement away from the earlier modern approach to public open space. After the revolution, parks acquired a distinctly utilitarian identity. As Cranz (1979:4) describes it from her visit in the late 70’s, park design in the communist era had six major goals: 1) to contribute to economic productivity, 2) to provide a place for workers to rest, 3) to raise political consciousness, 4) to popularize science, 5) to show special exhibits, and 6) to beautify China.

A strong anti-urban sentiment prevailed in the Chinese government under Mao, particularly in the years of the Cultural Revolution when city dwellers were sent to the countryside for re-education (Chen, 1995). Natural disasters, famine and poverty, and failed economic policies did not foster new park development. Few large scale urban parks were built, and existing parkland often doubled as a base for agricultural production.

In the 1960’s and 1970’s, the cold war – along with poverty, economic decline, and the Cultural Revolution – stripped away any emphasis on individual expression or art for aesthetic purposes. Architectural design was denounced during this period (Xiaodong 2003).

The 1980’s witnessed another major transformation in Chinese society. Faced by economic crisis, the Chinese government instituted a program of economic reform known as the Open Door Policy under the direction of Deng Xiaopeng. Beginning in the late 1970’s, Deng’s reforms revolutionized the economy and society, creating what is referred to as the “New Era”, a time of radical decentralization of economic and political control in the process. The explosive growth of new “township and village enterprises” that were controlled by local municipal governments turned small and mid-sized cities into one of the most dynamic sectors of the economy. This new wealth and autonomy spurred local efforts to increase the visibility of secondary cities and attract the attention of foreign investors (Logan 2002).

New attitudes toward leisure emerged together with this shift in economic and political power. The Maoist principle that leisure must serve to promote political harmony and social hygiene was relaxed and spare time became the property of individuals. Under Deng Xiaopeng, leisure time could be used as people pleased, as long as it did not threaten public order (Wang 1995).

It was during the New Era of Deng’s economic reforms that urbanization intensified. An increase occurred in the percentage growth rate of people living in urban areas between 1978 and 2004 and more than 35% of the population now lives in cities. This translates to 376 million urban dwellers in 668 cities out of 1.4 billion national population (Sit, 1985; Friedman 2005). China as a whole evolved from a rural peasant society in the 1950’s to a highly industrialized nation by the 1990’s.

It was the hope of the artists and intellectuals in this period that after nearly 40 years of repression and cultural isolation, the primacy of politics over the arts would end. However, while Deng did promote cultural liberalization, it soon became clear that the arts were to continue playing their part in the endorsement of government policies and consolidation of national identity. A noteworthy difference under Deng’s program was that local cultural heritage – which was banned under Mao as elitist and feudal – was rehabilitated to support the emergence of a new sense of national identity (Minglu, 1998). This became the basis for a campaign to restore the private scholar gardens in the Jiangnan region.

Several cultural trends in the arts and literature have emerged in China during the last two decades. Art historians and critics (Minglu, 1998; Noth, 1993; Wu, 2000) describe these trends as follows:

Searching for cultural roots
Initially, after the “opening of China”, artists and writers were investigating ways to express ideas about national identity.

Cultural reflections
Artists were dealing with a number of overlapping issues: the impact of the New Era and the crisis of economic reforms and opening to the west. A significant concern was cultural hybridity, an issue that became pervasive as a result of China becoming part of the global space of flows and resulting issues of losing “Chineseness”, or sense of identity.

Cultural fever
An avant-garde movement started in response to the June 4, 1989 Tiananmen Square incident that exhibited a more radical tone of social and cultural criticism. Themes of cynical realism and political parody that included Mao fever emerged. Chinese artists who fled or went into self exile as a result of Tiananmen Square incident began to grapple with their trans-national identity as Chinese citizens living outside of China

Cultural experimentation and environmentalism in the late 1990’s
A trend that was a reaction to rapid industrialization and urbanization and subsequent environmental degradation: poor air and water quality, and dramatic shifts in watershed management

Materialism, consumerism, globalization, and exploitation of Chinese identity.
In parallel with cultural experimentation and environmentalism, this is a current trend among materialistic younger artists who have chosen to be artists as a path to making money. Their art often involves exploitation of Chinese identity as a means of promoting their work in the international art market.

In the middle of the1990’s, American environmental artist Betsy Damon was in Chengdu organizing a series of performance art events. In one of her public performances, she symbolically cleaned the highly polluted water of the local Fu-Nan river. Damon was approached by the Mayor of Chengdu after the performance and asked to work on a project to commemorate a large-scale revitalization project that was under way for the Fu-Nan. This infrastructure and modernization project was a major effort to clean the river by eliminating riverfront shanty housing, industrial plants and re-aligning the river. Damon teamed up with American landscape architect Margie Ruddick and Huang Shi Da, a local wetlands designer, to create a park that demonstrates cleaning polluted water. Native materials were employed throughout the project, including plants and stone. Damon used sculptural forms for aerating the water and a series of water treatment areas (anaerobic, aerobic, constructed wetlands, ponds) to create an urban park that acts as a place for both leisure and environmental education. Although Damon’s project is similar to artist Lorna Jordan’s Waterworks Garden in Renton, Washington, it also differs in some important ways. The Waterworks Garden is a storm water treatment project that is located some distance away from the general residential population and not readily accessible for use as a park. The Living Water Garden is located near the center of Chengdu in an urban area that is highly utilized. The Living Water Garden is unusual in being one of the first modern Chinese parks that brings environmental education, ecological awareness, and a high standard of design to an urban park that serves the daily needs of the local population (Amidon, 2001; Padua, 2004).

This project is one of the largest urban redevelopment efforts ever undertaken. The design is being led by EDAW, and their client is a joint venture project between Suzhou and Singapore. The scope of the project includes master planning a community around a twenty square kilometer lake.

The design team reinterpreted elements of the Scholar garden and integrated them with western design concepts in the park. Suzhou is famous as a center for classical garden design and has one of the greatest collections of Scholar gardens in China. At the same time, modern Suzhou is a rapidly-growing industrial city with a population of more than four million. EDAW responded to this duality by creating a park that offers symbolic deference to the Scholar garden while incorporating design features and concepts that are found in well-known developments in the United States.

The design includes both traditional elements such as the lang or covered walkway found in nearby Scholar gardens and features like large expanses of lawn inspired by the Marina Green, a prominent green space in an up-market residential community adjacent to San Francisco Bay. These open green spaces can be used freely by the public for casual recreation – a notion familiar to European societies but largely absent in China, where parks typically ban public use of green spaces and often charge admission fees.

This is a breakthrough project by Kongjian Yu and his firm Turenscape. The project is located on the site of an old state-owned shipyard in Zhongshan, a city along the western edge of the Pearl River Delta. “Zhongshan” is a transliteration of the Putonghua version of the name of Sun Yatsen, one of China’s most revered national heroes and a native son of the city. The park was inspired by the site’s industrial history as a shipyard, state-owned enterprise, factory and commune. The mayor of Zhongshan wanted to revitalize the central part of the city and decided that building a park as a landmark would help market the city for foreign investment and attract Chinese tourists.

The mayor commissioned Turenscape to do the project. Turenscape began by presenting the concept of the park to the community in a series of public workshops. Turenscape’s approach took into account the “genius of the place” or genius loci, as Treib describes it.2 This is an approach where designers investigate the site’s history as a means of rooting landscape design to a particular locale (Treib, 1995). Turenscape’s design uses a landscape narrative to celebrate the site’s heritage which, in many ways, represents the last fifty years of China’s history. The designers re-used the steel sheds, water towers, and preserved existing plant materials wherever possible. Turenscape made the water’s edge accessible to the public and used native plant materials throughout the project. Yu worked with the flood control engineers to find a way to meet growing urban needs for water without destroying the existing ecology. The solution involved creating an island in the newly widened river alignment where a stand of old-growth trees could be preserved.

The most important breakthrough in the park design is its public acknowledgement of the Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution remains largely taboo as a subject, and its commemoration in Zhongshan Shipyard Park probably is the first public memorial to the era. Turenscape designed a twelve foot high painted steel red box as a symbol of the Cultural Revolution and located it at a strategic point along major pedestrian pathways in the park. The red box is open to the sky and has a sign prominently displayed at the entry that links it to the Cultural Revolution (Padua, 2003).

This project covers hundreds of hectares along the western edge of China’s famous West Lake in Hangzhou. The project was designed by the Hangzhou Design Institute (HDI) as part of a larger urban regeneration strategy for the city of Hangzhou In this project, HDI re-articulates the western edge of the lake. The project entails relocating hundreds of residents and carrying out major dredging and reconstruction of the lake.

HDI’s design is driven by the ecological and cultural heritage of the site. It is an attempt to recreate an articulated lakefront edge that represents the area’s ecology and landform as it existed centuries ago. The resulting new lakefront consists of parklands that weave together classical gardens and contemporary park spaces, newly constructed wetlands and riparian areas (Beijing Ministry of Construction 2002).

The four projects discussed offer a brief illustration of the types of avant-garde park development that are emerging as a consequence of modernization in China. These projects provide a snapshot of the diversity of the profession and the range of projects that are being built in China today. The Living Water Garden is an intimate scale urban park inspired by the local mythology of river worship and the artist’s personal commitment to environmentalism. Its organic, jewel-like environment creates a new form of environmental aesthetic that is readily accessible to the urban population. Jinji Lake represents a global corporate signature for one of the largest new planned new communities in the world. Within that context, EDAW manages to create a variety of park spaces that are simultaneously international in design and function and symbolic of their Suzhou locality. Turenscape’s Zhonghshan Shipyard Park courageously celebrates the Cultural Revolution and the site and nation’s fifty year revolutionary history. And the Hangzhou Design Institute draws from local ecological and cultural heritage to help rejuvenate West Lake as part of a larger urban regeneration strategy for Hangzhou.

One of the driving forces behind these projects was the shift in governance from centralized control to the local municipalities. Because of this decentralization, local officials began to look to the world outside the region and nation for new ideas. Municipal officials now often travel outside China, and a growing number of professional designers have been educated overseas, primarily in North America and Europe. Ecological concerns also have gained importance as the Chinese people recognize the toll that rapid industrialization and explosive urban growth are taking on the environment. The confluence of these different factors – growing local power, increasing global exposure, the internationalization of design, changing attitudes toward leisure, and escalating ecological concerns – has helped to spawn this movement toward creating new landmark urban parks. At the same time, the influences of local government and deeply entrenched Chinese social and cultural nationalism are helping to make the resulting work a hybrid form of “global design with a Chinese face.” The tensions among these different forces – globalization, nationalism, local needs and functions, and changing views of the society and natural environment – are creating a new form of modernization in China and in Chinese park design that is neither European nor traditionally Chinese.

(1 Appardurai’s so-called trait geographies are those studies which assume that certain enduring properties (such as values, languages, material practices, and traditions) are tied to specific bounded socio-spatial units (such as the locality, the region, and the nation).

(2) For a detailed explanation of the genius loci, see Treib’s (1995) Must Landscapes Mean?

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