Damian Holmes

Last week I went to Shenzhen to meet with some potential clients for some urban design and landscape architecture projects. All went well and should hear some news soon. I saw some parts of Shenzhen on my trips to and from the airport and whilst sitting in my hotel room looking over Shenzhen. I lived in Shenzhen for 18 months in 2006-2007 and I with this visit I saw that the city had changed, not greatly(well probably more than most cities in the world) but it still had changed with new elevated train lines and shell like train stations sitting above the road. I also saw large amounts of road works with new flyovers.

So what did I learn about the city and China from the trip?
I actually had a realisation when looking out over Shenzhen that was reinforced by a recent comments by government officials and that realisation is that China is still modernising and still has a long way to go and it’s current level of modernisation cannot be measured by large cities such as Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen. Although Shenzhen is a young(barely 30 years old) and modern city, it is still modernising and improving especially in the areas of transport, culture, and infrastructure.

During my 5 years of living in China I have had the opportunity to live in Shanghai most of my stay. Shanghai is a city that has remade itself and some of this remaking/modernising was for 2010 Expo and other pieces are part of the city’s 2020 plan. Living in Shanghai can often make you become lost in the new modernised city and forget that the rest of China is still modernising or beginning to plan to modernise. Large areas of China are modernising at a great pace with high-speed rail and new highways linking cities but it is not just these elements that make a modern nation. People’s lives and cities they live in are still in need of modernisation whether this is new roads, housing, parks, greenways or bicycle infrastructure. The other realisation is that there are still many millions of people who will move from rural areas to new cities that have not even been planned yet. For those who live in China, this may seem as obvious, however I think as an urban designer and landscape architect, I have to keep a good macro perspective that large areas of China are still in need of good planning and modernisation. How to best service these areas is through current practices but also education of the new graduates entering the profession from small technical colleges to large research based universities.

Modernising of China is not just designing for existing cities but also developing new design theories and tools for future cities.