Demolition, Part 1

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Del curso dictado por University of Zurich

Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition

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University of Zurich

Asian Environmental Humanities: Landscapes in Transition

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In this course, featuring many researchers from the University of Zurich and international institutions, we will introduce you to some of the most vibrant cultural trends addressing landscape appreciation, degradation, protection, and rehabilitation that currently circulate in the Asian hemisphere. You will learn about concepts of landscape in Asian religions, philosophy, social sciences, history and the arts and their reverberation in selected environmental projects in China, India and Japan. Furthermore, we will discuss how they are critically reflected upon in the context of the environmental humanities, and observe how an interdisciplinary approach towards regional ecosystems past and present reaches out beyond pragmatic technological solutions to mitigate environmental damage. Following us on our different paths and trajectories through the five modules of the course, you will encounter many of the reasons why environmental humanities study projects which strive to change people’s prevalent attitudes, values and behavioural patterns in order to redeem the rapidly globalizing crisis, and how they go about it. Having acquainted yourself with the stories Asia’s landscapes – and landscape representations – tell about actual and possible human-nature relationships, you can compare and evaluate their potential to bring about the desired change and define your own range of actions as an informed stakeholder for creating a sustainable future. What is arguably no less intriguing: you will learn how to appreciate a broad range of eco-aesthetic forms that re-enchant our lives by creatively interacting with the more-than-human world. You can follow the five modules of the course consecutively or just study the modules that interest you the most. If you want to earn a certificate, you need to complete all of the modules including the quizzes at the end of each module. THESE ARE THE TOPICS OF THE 5 MODULES OF THIS COURSE: Module 1: Concepts of landscape past and present and their cosmological underpinnings. Module 2: Entangled landscapes comprising cultural flows of concepts and forms, contemporary gardens on the move, nostalgic elegies of demolished sites and rural reconstruction projects. Module 3: Discussion of two religious communities in India (the Parsi-Zoroastrians and the Auroville community) and their relationship with the environment. Module 4: Environmental debates tackling religious concepts and social practices and the problem of waste disposal in India. Module 5: Environmental movements and the impact of Fukushima on attitudes towards nuclear energy in Japan, creative activism including arts projects and documentaries to protest against pollution and landscape degradation and raise environmental awareness in the Sinosphere, and emergent concepts for sustainable community life on the planet.

De la lección

Entangled Landscapes - Chinese Garden Concepts and Global Environments

Having assessed China’s ancient and modern conceptions of landscapes, and how they moved between cultures, social groups and societies, we will turn to the concept of entangled landscapes in the second module. Here, we will evaluate representations and narratives that explore the agency, conundrums and possibilities of applied transcultural aesthetic (and functional) paradigms in national politics of garden and park design. In a first step, the traveling concept of the Chinese garden will help us to evaluate the cultural and geopolitical affordances of gardens between Asia and Europe that are very often intimately connected to utopian visions of the ideal community. Next, we will encounter two different examples of a Chinese garden that bespeak their original sociopolitical functionality and conceptual underpinnings as much as the changes of these same when travelling across time and space. Our third theme of hometown nostalgia will study the turn of artists and intellectuals towards imaginary gardens of the past in view of large-scale heritage demolition in China. Finally, we will probe into the history of rural reconstruction and encounter two successful approaches towards the re-/creation of sustainable landscapes.

Demolition, Part 18:41

Demolition, Part 28:05

Hometown Nostalgia14:00

Conoce a los instructores

Andrea Riemenschnitter
Prof.
Institute of Asian and Oriental Studies

In this and the next video,

the subject matter of demolition will be addressed.

Demolition has become an important theme in China’s contemporary art and literature,

because the toll for the country's rapid economic growth is large-scale demolition,

no matter whether it is for urban reconstruction,

rural development, or infrastructure projects.

Even more importantly, it is a phenomenon with

highly disturbing visual and environmental effects.

It has been argued that

the state’s extraordinary tolerance vis-à-vis the demolition of historical buildings

and whole villages across the country led to the rise of

predominantly faceless, urban high-profit constructions.

What used to be organic neighborhoods with narrow alleys and small courtyard houses in

cities, or simple farmhouses surrounded by fields and pastures in the countryside,

was rapidly turned into

metropolitan satellite towns with apartment houses, shopping malls,

business centers and industrial plants since Deng Xiaoping

implemented his economic reforms during the 1980s.

A similar phenomenon can be observed not only in the People’s Republic of China,

but also in Taiwan,

Hong Kong under the British regime,

Singapore, and indeed all Asian metropoles.

In the People’s Republic, however,

the speed of demolition and reconstruction was arguably

even higher, and the effects more shocking, than elsewhere.

In this image from NASA,

you see the sprawl of the city of Chengdu in the year 1990 in yellow

and the buildings that were added in the following ten years in orange.

Especially the recent development of cities without people, in expectation of

the 250 million or so peasants that

the Chinese state intends to relocate during the coming decade,

alarms citizens and foreign observers alike.

Fully built, empty cities awaiting residents are a new phenomenon;

their lack of history and organic growth

raises many questions concerning their future livability.

Is there a way to feel at home in these neighborhoods?

Will people living there be able to connect and

interact meaningfully with the space they inhabit?

One wonders about what was there before the construction. Old courtyard houses,

temples, gardens, rice fields, meandering paths?

In many places, the ruins or traces of former buildings are still visible,

although it is clear that they will not be around for much longer.

The overwhelming presence of ruins,

rubble and debris provokes

strong affective reactions ranging from grief and depression to anxiety.

In a recently published special issue of

the journal “Frontiers in Literary Studies in China”,

which focuses on the concept of ruins in contemporary Chinese culture,

Deborah Tze-lan Sang defines ruins as

“embodiments of transience and decay.”

As such, “ruins provoke

strong affective responses while inviting musings on the underlying historical,

economic, and sociopolitical forces that have led to

disuse, depopulation, or peripheralization.”

Furthermore, “Ruins are also a rich reservoir of symbolic and allegorical possibilities,

often mined by artists and writers to signify moral decay,

the crumbling of value and belief systems,

spiritual desolation, and nostalgia,” she argues.

Evidently, the growing fascination with

the symbolism of ruins among China’s intellectuals

is a result of contemporary material culture and its materialistic ideology.

Behind the visible changes in landscapes and urban design,

there's a complex reality of

municipal land seizures and property demolition, which negatively affects the population.

Wade Shepard reports in his book,

“Ghost Cities of China: The Story of Cities without People in the

World’s Most Populated Country” that within the past decade,

up to four million rural people were relocated each year.

According to statistics provided by Beijing’s Renmin University and others,

only a minority among them received access to

the new urban infrastructure in compensation for their lost homes.

Similarly disturbing is the lack of balance between property seizures and

the dislocated people’s access to adequate compensation in land and new homes.

Since the beginning of China’s economic boom period,

more than 64 million people had their homes demolished and/or land requisitioned.

Thirteen million people or twenty percent of these property seizures went without

compensation, according to a survey by members of Beijing’s Tsinghua University.

A Tianjin University research project provided

statistical figures on the vanishing of villages:

during one decade, between the years 2000 and 2010,

the number of China’s villages dropped from 3.7 million villages to 2.6 million.

That means that over one million villages disappeared,

which equals a rate of approximately 300 villages per

day that have vanished within the ten years of observation.

Naturally, such large scale demolition produces

negative side effects, such as psychological distress,

social turmoil, cultural loss,

and huge amounts of waste.

Moreover, many less tangible problems are currently relegated to the future,

for instance, the question of what will happen when

the property rights of these new houses will expire, or when houses

deteriorate to the point of uninhabitability

long before the expiration of the 70-year legal ownership period.

Another issue, the problem of construction waste,

has already become huge.

“With respect to the more than two billion tons of

construction waste that was produced in China in 2011,

only five per cent were recycled,”

reports a study conducted by members of the University of Hong Kong.

Besides the health risks of

dust and toxic substance emissions from randomly amassed demolition debris,

there is an acute danger of landslides.

On December 21, 2015,

a man-made hill of construction debris with a storage capacity of 95 meters with

actual stacking height of 160 meters

collapsed in the city of Shenzhen, province of Guangzhou.

It buried alive 73 people and toppled dozens of buildings.

The major political reason for a phenomenon that Wade calls an “orgy of

destruction” was that municipal land sales had

become the main revenue of municipal governments.

Georgie E. Peterson, in his “World Bank Policy

Research Working Paper” dating from November 2006,

shows that beginning from the 1990s,

booming cities such as Shanghai or Shenzhen could

yield up to 80 per cent of their total revenue through land leasing.

New research reveals that the negative impact of

this urbanization movement is currently addressed by the central government.

Experiments with green gross domestic product comprising

compensation and award schemes for sustainable development are already underway.

When China first published the results of GDP loss calculations due to pollution in 2006,

it was estimated that in 2004,

511.8 billion Yuan, or three per cent, were to be deducted on account of air,

soil, and water pollution

as well as environmental accidents.

After several years of green GDP research in the country’s leading think tanks,

a model of measuring 26 indicators and rewarding local governments for

their shift towards sustainability is currently

tested in Shanghai and other pioneering communities.

Meanwhile, artists, writers, and media workers contributed their own responses to

what they perceived and visualized as a cultural crisis since the late 1980s.

This is going to be the subject of the next video.

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