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What can we learn from China? - February 2008
What can be learned from China? During the past decades China became the main attraction for architects and urban planners. As if in fast forward, and seemingly out-of-the-blue, urban environments are planned and build, all depending and feeding extensive cash flows and population migrations. But beyond these analyses of “unprecedent development of the Chinese city”, lays a reality; the city. How are cities made in China? What can be learned from this? Is it producing models of urban forms, programs or architectures that can be applied globally? Is it possible that the Chinese condition is so singular that it cannot be reproduced elsewhere? The workshop will in two phases engage with and question the notion of comparison. To what extend can we learn from China? The city we will be dealing with in the workshop is the coastal city; it will connect Tel Aviv with some of the coastal cities in China, understand its development and strategies behind it. Coastal cities are of prime importance for the Chinese economical development; they connect with the foreign land, as well mean a barrier to the innerland. The workshop will deal with this fringe-condition; the one with the iconic front to the water and the ever-expanding urban back to the hinterland. The first will be a projection of the knowledge we have on coastal cities in China on the territory, that is, pushing the Tel Aviv metropolitan area to an extreme state of development according to the precedents of the archipelago described above. After the introduction we will immediately look for the end image. The second will be the introducing of the archipelago methodology: operating within the generic field of urban mass and introducing difference and quality into the system through certain types of operations that will be defined by the workshop leaders or the students with a specific focus.One condition will be the edge between the city and the water, the other edge will be the one between the urban and the rural. Maybe we can then envision a future of urban environments that is not yet fully explored.

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