Does an Ideal City Really Exist? The Space We Live In May Be Shaping Us | Ideal City ③

曾梦龙 · 2017-08-12 · English translation

We talked with the architect Tang Keyang about the ideal city, urbanization, “alone together,” and how he himself perceives and understands different cities.

Like a lot of people who say they are attached to home, Tang Keyang, 44 this year, still likes his hometown of Wuhu, in Anhui, best, after visiting many cities around the world.

He feels he is “more used to small cities,” and that “the sense of happiness is stronger wherever home is.”

Wuhu is a small city south of the Yangtze, once an important transshipment base for the foreign trade of Huizhou merchants. In modern times, both Britain and Japan set up settlements along its riverfront that amounted to semi-concessions. The Georgian red-brick clock tower the British built by the Yangtze in Wuhu still clangs away 24 hours a day, ringing out the English tune Westminster Quarters.

But what mattered most about Wuhu, for Tang Keyang, is that it gave him his first and most direct experience of a city. In his memory, “market-town life” is probably the best phrase for the atmosphere of this small trading port — the vegetable market that always stank, the wells where gossip pooled. To this day, his sharpest memory of the crowded courtyard compound he grew up in is, of all things, that “with N households in the compound, the number of possible quarrels is N! (every pair of households gets one chance to fight).” His friend Zhu Yimin, an associate professor at the School of Architecture at South China University of Technology, has also said that the actress Zhao Wei's family lived in the same building as Tang Keyang's — neighbors sharing one stairwell.

Wuhu, Anhui. Source: ustcif

In 1991, at 18, Tang Keyang left Wuhu for Changchun. Four years later he graduated from the Changchun Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics (now Changchun University of Science and Technology) with a degree in optical instruments. Then he switched fields entirely, going to Peking University for a master's in comparative literature. Three years after that he left for the United States to keep studying — first the University of Chicago, where he read art history under the well-known scholar Wu Hung, and finally Harvard, where he took a doctorate in design. He jokes that “it was a fairly absurd journey,” then adds, more “seriously”: “We have to realize that we live in an open society, and today it is no longer possible to find a single mission for yourself.”

In Beijing, he finds the city has a “wind-and-dust” character — gray and black, “the spring and autumn sandstorms drowning out the beautiful gold of the red-leaf season, like the grave tone you take in at a glance in a Peredvizhniki painting.” In Boston, he found “conditions rather hard,” the place “too desolate,” with “no one around to keep me company, nothing going smoothly,” and “too many Harvard people, so social circles were scattered.” In New York, changing subway trains at Times Square, he found what made the city distinctive — “people here move at a truly astonishing speed, and every one of them is headed somewhere different.” Though he calls himself someone who has “been all over the world,” he comes back, as at the start, to small cities. “The best scenery I remember in my life is still the shore of Lake Tai, and the loveliest season of my life is spring south of the Yangtze,” Tang Keyang writes.

This life across disciplines and across places may be why Tang Keyang now holds several identities at once — architect, curator, art critic. In 2010 he was chosen as curator of the China Pavilion at the 12th Venice Architecture Biennale. He has also written several books on literature, art and architecture, including From the Ruined Garden to Yenching Garden, New York Transfigured, Ten Lectures on Art Museums, Sketches of Ten Cities and In the Dense Forest of Space, and has translated the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas's classic Delirious New York into Chinese. To create public space, he has pushed his students to build libraries, cafés, galleries and small restaurants.

Most of his work and his talks stress the individual's perception of the city. A city is not only the objective thing that planners, administrators and researchers handle rationally; it is also each person's experience and feeling — a city of the senses.

“A city is essentially a machine for making a life. It helps generate new stories for you,” Tang Keyang told QDaily.

Source: Amazon

Three years later, on July 22, the publisher Shiji Wenjing put on a forum called “What Is the Ideal City?” At 11 the night before, we talked with Tang Keyang about the ideal city. He said that talk on this subject usually slides fast toward what is not ideal — it turns into a discussion of a real-world problem, including the drive to clean cities up, or the conflict between planning and practice.

“But I don't think a static ideal city exists. A goal you can't actually reach is what we call an ideal city; once you reach it, it usually isn't that ideal any more. Because the ideal keeps moving,” Tang Keyang said.

Still, he doesn't dismiss the individual effort to make a city more ideal, or just better. As he sees it, we don't make space; rather, the kind of life we want to create gives us a certain kind of space — and that space then makes us.

In our interview, Tang Keyang talked at length about urbanization, the ideal city, city life, and his own sense of cities on the level of feeling. What follows is our edited transcript, the third set of questions in the Ideal City series.

Tang Keyang. Source: provided by Shiji Wenjing

16. Beijing, Chicago, Boston, Wuhu — Which City Gives You the Strongest Sense of Happiness?

I think it's stronger wherever home is. When you're out on your own, it comes down to the state of your life; it doesn't have all that much to do with the city itself.

Comparatively, Boston was simply too desolate for me. I was in Boston mainly to study, so conditions were rather hard. Some of it was subjective, some objective. The subjective part is that you feel bad there, no one is around to keep you company, nothing goes smoothly. The objective part is Boston itself — or at least the college town where I lived. Most people there are drifting through; they don't treat the place as home, so the atmosphere is fairly poor. There are too many Harvard people, so everyone's social patterns are scattered too. It doesn't have that cohesive feeling.

But at the University of Chicago — honestly, I hardly ever went into Chicago itself. It was a bit of a distance away. Within that small college town, though, people knew each other well and saw each other every day. So it's hard to say; both factors are at work. No place is perfect, but relatively speaking, some places are easier to settle into.

For me, I prefer small cities. That has to do with your genes. It isn't really that small cities or big cities are better or worse — I'm just more used to small cities. Look at the United States: its cities are certainly far more specialized than China's. So many factors work together, in a complicated mix.

If you're lucky in a place, you feel more at ease.

Boston. Source: Wikipedia

17. Why Are Small Cities Like Qingdao, Dali and Lijiang the Ideal City for Some People?

Unless a city is in some very unusual situation, I don't think any of them is entirely without merit; most are pretty good. I prefer small cities, and there are good ones. It's the same principle: if you don't set the bar too high, there are places that people would pick, in certain respects, as a fairly ideal place to live — Suzhou, a few small cities in Zhejiang, probably some in Hunan too.

The problem is that it isn't an ideal city, just a place you happen to like better. Take Qingdao — I think it feels pretty good. As long as you don't stay too long, Qingdao, Dali and Lijiang are all fine.

So a truly perfect place doesn't exist either. What has to be true for a place to be good? That you actually have money, say, or that you no longer have to worry about money. Some Beijingers I know are like that: they gave up their hutong house in Beijing, sold it, took the large sum of money, and now rent places all over and live happily. Most people won't do that. There aren't many people like that in China.

Dali. Source: Wikipedia

18. Why Does Choosing a Big City Mean Choosing a Life of “Being Alone Together”?

To a large extent, in a country as big as the United States, urbanization hasn't developed to the same level everywhere. The overall level is high, but most of the land isn't urban, and many people come from small towns. When these people come to the city, their main purpose isn't to seek some one-size-fits-all way of life. It is an experience, and it inevitably produces strangers, forming two extremes of living pattern against the one you came from.

One is staying in your native place: born there, raised there, dying there, the same set of people around you from childhood on. But in big cities, strangers turn up far more often. Social bonds are no longer based on blood; external ties hold people together.

(The modern big city) produces abstract systems. Society is held together by invisible hands. Say you work at a company. Beyond being a kind of independent state, it is also a new economic tie that binds these people together. And these people are colleagues — it's both a relationship of shared public life and, at the same time, one of mutual competition. It's different from being tied by blood: theirs is a relationship close and distant at once.

“Alone together” is something people choose willingly, because their purpose in coming here is to have more choices. On the other hand, there's also the possibility of losing yourself. Immerse yourself too deeply in the collective and you turn into something out of 1984. Once you're too far inside the collective, you lose your self and become a puppet to be worked, a pawn.

Most people actually want a balance somewhere in between. They want a wider field of view — to see, in Beijing, things they could never see back home. On the other hand, you don't want to drift with no anchor either; you need an identity. It's a peculiar phenomenon you only find in big cities.

Many people in China's big cities are in the same state, because there's a force of market economics at work. Judging by how capital operates, it wants you standardized inside this game, making a certain contribution. Only once you've made that contribution are you willing to buy what it sells. Using WeChat, drinking a certain beverage, watching a certain TV series — these are a common bond. But on the other hand, everyone also feels that even while being assimilated, they want to keep their own individuality, their own identity, inside it.

There may be no answer to this. On one side, this new urban pattern is, for many people, a happy thing. Plenty of people genuinely like this way of life. On the other side, at a certain point you feel you have to step outside it.

Tedium (in cities) is universal. People's hearts change; they tire of the old and want the new. But today's society produces a strong sense of tedium, because people know they have more choices. Some of these problems you could call a modern disease — mostly manufactured by modernity itself.

Statistically speaking, (choosing a big city meaning choosing the condition of “being alone together”) is fate, or an unavoidable situation. Because most people are serving others. They're in what you'd call the silent majority, and they can never get the kind of individuality they'd like. What's interesting is that in different countries and different cities, the way out that people find is a bit like a film: at this stage the script is much the same everywhere, the plot alike wherever you are. Only the starting point and the ending point differ.

Source: Amazon

19. Beijing Has Every Kind of Urban Form From Around the World — Does That Mean a Higher Standard of City Life?

Broadly, this is probably a memory everyone born in the 1970s shares. By the time you were a child old enough to take things in, it was probably before 1980. Cities back then were basically in a half-agricultural state, the big ones included. Beijing was the largest urban village in the world; its scale was huge, but its level of urbanization was very low. The city existed, but inside it, the social relations, the level of production, the level of commerce — none of it was really high. Then all of a sudden you watch the buildings shoot up and the city's area expand enormously. It is a very rare thing in world history: Britain's industrialization and America's urbanization never expanded at this speed.

All of this is open to debate, and our greatest regret is that before you've even worked it out, before it has reached a certain depth, it has all been done. From my research, I think urbanization in most cities may still not be enough. On the whole it's insufficient, and a good share of the population still lives in the countryside. But from the sensory side, some things are already in excess. Many places are very crowded; many others are actually left empty. That can't be called an efficient urban district.

This is because people haven't recognized how complex and varied urban problems are. The face of a city, or the types of city, can be extremely varied. Chinese tradition has plenty of examples — the mountain towns of southern Anhui, say. Their built-up area is small, and the villages there also carry some of the character of a city. Think about it: isn't that a real possibility? Cities don't all have to be concentrated. What we see now are cities defined by concentration, spreading outward like a pancake. That's two kinds of urban disease piled on top of each other.

What we want to imagine is another kind of city, built on strong small towns — towns, not cities — which is also a model of urbanization. But now they've all turned into central cities. Places like Wuxi were small when we were children, and now they've grown tall and huge. I don't think that's a particularly ideal model either. Why does Suzhou need to be so big?

Suzhou. Source: Wikipedia

It isn't only New York; some big Western European cities get treated as models too. (So) what matters more is getting people to see how many possibilities a city has on the level of feeling. What kind of city do you live in? In China people tend to follow the herd — it has to be this one model. I think it comes down to whether you can imagine anything else. Some cities are a single street, and that can still be a very good city. Many cities, each small in area, forming a denser network — like Japan's many small towns, where the quality of life is also very high. But right now we're split at two poles: the big cities are crowded and housing prices are soaring, while other places have nobody going to them at all. In the end that creates a lot of social problems.

(Contemporary Chinese cities are inheriting every material form of life in human history, in a disorderly but ferocious way. But) the way we assemble it is collage. If China could really find every kind of urban form in the world, genuine variety, that would be a good thing — but in fact it's only collage. You lift a slice of Paris and drop it in, then a small piece of somewhere else. In Beijing today you can eat food from every country, but does that mean everyone eats better?

This is the state the whole culture is in. Since the 20th century began, everyone has been running and simply can't stop. All sorts of problems come from that. And for certain cultural reasons, people still aren't very tolerant; they need you to “unify your thinking.” When someone has no better method, they like the one that shows results fastest.

Source: Douban

20. If a City Is Like a Human Body, What Happens If You Make It Take Medicine Every Day?

From the standpoint of urban development, this kind of control (referring to the recent run of urban clean-up campaigns in Beijing and Shanghai) overriding free development is everywhere. It's neither the first time nor the last. But it is certainly bad for the city.

If I were the one making policy for this city, I'd say you should trust it the way you trust a human body: it gets better on its own, without help. Make it take medicine every day and it won't fall ill for now, but its resistance will be poor, and the person won't look healthy either. Don't manage things so tightly. This approach is too harsh. In effect it kicks out the good parts along with the dirty and chaotic ones — that's certainly how I see it.

But on the other hand, you have to see — because I'm someone who has studied urban history — that it has its origins too. Why does this happen? Here's a simple example. Hutongs, without question, were not commercial space in the past. What's developing now is also a special phenomenon. Originally, hutongs had courtyard houses on both sides. In the ecology, or social setting, of the traditional Chinese city, free trade wasn't encouraged. Cities had markets, and once they existed, trade took place in fixed spots. Trading inside a hutong generally wasn't encouraged. So what does trading in a hutong mean? It means stripping out the life that was there. Not every household ran a business. Some Beijing hutongs are a special case, because, one, they're in the capital, and two, they're in tourist areas: the commercial element outweighs the residential one. Is that an unambiguously good thing? I think there's room to argue about that too. At the extreme, everyone is in business and every city block turns into a tourist site.

But these two questions should be kept apart. One is: if you let it develop freely, will it turn into commerce everywhere? In the end that should still be decided by the market, or by a city's own choices. You shouldn't intervene too much. When everyone is in business, some will sell well and some won't, and the ones that don't will close.

There's no need for blanket policies. A city has its own set of rules. Some blocks in Beijing are not blocks where things are sold, not traditional commercial streets. They can keep a relatively refined environment — that's something you can shape. But you don't have to turn every place into the same thing. I think that's a fairly dangerous idea.

Source: Douban

21. Does an Ideal City Really Exist?

I don't think a static ideal city exists. A goal you can't actually reach is what we call an ideal city; once you reach it, it usually isn't that ideal any more. Because the ideal keeps moving. If everyone has walked all the way to the end, what do you do next?

It has been the same in every era and every culture; people just set the bar at different places. Some think a certain point is ideal enough. Venice, Bruges, Florence — tourist destinations above all — can really look like dreamlike places to live. But no one actually lives there; they've been hollowed out, the residents have all moved away. A truly ideal city, in fact, has little to do with living. Washington, Astana and Brasília are all planned cities, and if anything the quality of life in those places isn't that high.

(But) a city that grows on its own will always end up a little disordered; that's how it goes. It really can't be as (ideal) as we imagine. It's a choice: either you choose a more real living environment, or you choose a goal you can't reach, like a phantom city.

I think you only get that ideal state when you're writing a novel or making a film, when the state vanishes in a moment. Especially now, at this stage of life, I feel it (the ideal city) probably doesn't exist. Because there is so much that isn't ideal, and very, very little that is. Rather than the ideal city itself, I'd rather understand why this expectation arises at all.

So we need to separate two ideas. If you ask me what a good city is, everyone still has a somewhat better city in mind. But the ideal city doesn't exist in reality. Good exists — but good isn't the ideal we mean when we talk about idealism.

22. What, in the End, Is a City?

I'm fond of Italo Calvino. For a while I even named my laptop Calvino. His imagination isn't the kind that hands you a story you can sum up at once; he usually tells several stories, layered one inside another. He isn't writing about a young man in a studio apartment; he's writing a whole open-plan house. What he's after is always a complicated principle, one you can't put in a single sentence.

That fits how I see cities too — full of complexity and possibility. A city is essentially a machine for making a life, helping generate new stories for you.

23. Without Even a Shared Past, How Can We Talk About a Shared Future?

What happened in the past is past, but it has a tendency to keep reinforcing itself. If you're content to watch some blockbuster-style scenic film about China, you'll always think China is exactly like that. Once you go abroad, people tell you about the landscapes of Guilin over and over, and you get sick of it. I want to take the labels off myself, and stop bringing up the old ones.

(The bigger problem is that) right now we really have no past everyone agrees on; people may be reading it in entirely different ways. So what about the future? That depends on how you understand this past.

(But) culture itself can be shaped — otherwise there'd be no point in trying at all. It takes changing people's patterns of behavior, and that's a goal we're working toward now. Whatever you think is good, go find a way right now, work out how to change it. Don't keep waiting for someone else to help you. I'm not going to sit and wait to be changed; inside my own small community I'm still willing to push things along. Before I started teaching in Beijing, I had already pushed students to open a gallery, a small library, a café, and most recently a small restaurant. We don't run them ourselves, but I feel more and more that this kind of thing can't be left to other people to change.

One of the biggest traits of Chinese people — which of course has a lot to do with historical circumstance — is that they're happy to watch other people jump around, let others do the work first, shed the blood, spend the effort, and then hitch a ride. That's really not something to admire.

Tang Keyang. Source: archcy