Global Schindler Award

Subject

The City is So Young: Interview with Yan Meng

Progressive ideas and research place Shenzhen-based urban design and architecture

practice URBANUS at the forefront of both local and global practice. Yan Meng, one of its

three principals, shared his insider view and insights with the Global Schindler Award,

highlighting the unique characteristics of Shenzhen and the potential for collective student

participation to contribute to today’s challenges in planning for the cities of tomorrow. Mr.

Meng will be a member of the jury for the Global Schindler Award.

GSA: A certain density and certain development pressures and a unique history in

the Chinese context characterize Shenzhen. How do you, as an urban designer and

as an architect, engage with the city?

Yan Meng: Shenzhen is unique in terms of the development speed and strategy, and it’s

very artificial in a way. It was fabricated as experimental ground in the late 1970s and

early 1980s. A lot of people would say that Shenzhen as a city doesn’t have a history, but

actually that’s wrong. It has a unique history that we, a lot of the time, intentionally or

unintentionally ignore. In order to approach and understand a city, you need to do

thorough research. You have to be grounded in the city and really dig into it. We call this

strategy ‘research-lead design’. Especially in a globalized world where everybody is

working globally somehow, in unfamiliar areas, you have to try your best to understand

the problem at the very beginning – what is really the problem of a particular city, whether

it’s Shenzhen or somewhere in Brazil or the US. If you can define the essential problem

better, then possibly you can come up with a better solution. We have so many solutions

proposed without clearly defining the problems. We want to target and be more specific in

our research about Shenzhen.

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GSA: What are some of the most important problems that you either have been

involved in - or want to be involved in - as an office?

YM: One of the most urgent urban problems, I would say, is the so-called urban

regeneration or urban renewal project, especially in a city like this, which only has thirty-

some years of history. Right now there’s a big campaign from the city level to redevelop

because the city now has very limited land resources; it cannot sprawl over an unlimited

amount of space. People have to reexamine places – like its center – which have already

been developed, redeveloped, sometimes at a very high density already, as possible sites

for redevelopment. It is a tricky situation, because it has already been built, it already has

a very delicate complex social network and community life;it is pretty much mature. If you

have to redevelop, the problem is that a lot of times most of the people have to be driven

out. Then they are replaced by, for example, the inhabitants of super-luxury apartments,

which, of course, only sell to the super-rich. Instead of getting more diverse, the city is

getting extreme and monolithic. Of course, this is not a unique issue in Shenzhen – it is

everywhere – but, in Shenzhen, because the city is so young, it doesn’t have a lot of

layers of historic development. Everything was packed into less than forty years, so the

issue is more severe.

GSA: Is it almost that a process of ‘urban editing’ is needed, that you have to

decide where to renew things, where to take things out entirely? Or would you say

that it’s more looking at how to redensify? What are some of the approaches?

YM: Redensification, I think, from the spatial, physical point of view, but on the other hand,

I think that how – after this, another wave of urban redevelopment – the social aspects of

the city can especially nurture very positive and healthier urban life. I think this is always

the big challenge for a city like this, because everything happens so fast. We don’t have

much time to digest and there are not many lessons that we can learn, or precedents that

come, from other countries. At this point, we think it is really important to engage the

government, the developer, architects, social scholars, and all these people – maybe

there should be some kind of a platform. We are trying to go beyond the traditional role of

the architect as a service provider. We think that architects can play a much more

significant role as collaborators or coordinators, to balance the needs of different parties

because everybody has their own agenda. For example, last week, we held a symposium

in our E-6 gallery. We engaged people from the government, developers, even some of

the residents of the urban village clusters, and also other architects working on the urban

redevelopment projects. Everybody came together, shared ideas and expressed what

they think this is important, what they want to get from the redevelopment. It was quite a

good occasion. But most of the time things like this are usually organized back-to-back, so

there is no chance to share.

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We also do a lot of independent research, sometimes sponsored by government planning

institutions, sometimes by developers. We try to find a strategy even before the

architecture design and urban design, about how to redevelop some of the sites.

To just give some of the background, the things that go beyond the typical architect’s

work. URBANUS is unique in this aspect.

GSA: So would you say that you’re kind of defining a new mode of practice?

YM: I think so, yes. Especially in China and in this type of city, because there are so many

problems around us, we, as architects, cannot really escape to somewhere else and then

try to do some ‘fancy’ architecture. A lot of times you really need to engage with the city

more; I think this is really one of the most unique aspects of URBANUS – we actively

engage and sometimes we promote ourselves not only as architects but also as strategic

coordinators and maybe as the urban curators that we sometimes call ourselves. We try

to do more.

GSA: For students of urban design, given these pressures, for instance in the

Chinese context, in the context of Shenzhen, how can they begin to help to address

these things, through these new modes of practice and through research?

YM: I think the platform is important. The student alone cannot really achieve a whole lot.

But I think the university, and a group of students lead by professors and specialists, can

work together with local architects and researchers, all in collaboration is much more

interesting, can do more. We have so many real problems facing us; we don’t have to do

just theoretical projects. Of course we have the theoretical background, but on the other

hand we have some real problems, real sites, so I think a good strategy is to collaborate

with the local knowledge-holders.

GSA: Through the Global Schindler Award we’re trying to engage students

worldwide in questions of globalization, urbanization through mobility, accessibility

to different services and opportunities in the city. Do you think that students

worldwide can begin to approach these problems collaboratively?

YM: I think so. The global aspect of these kinds of projects is quite interesting to me.

People can really share a lot of their experiences and diverse ideas from different parts of

the world. This could be an interesting thing to explore, to work with the locals and also

with people from the universities and other fields, who have a deeper understanding and

more of a global viewpoint. There is the potential there for interesting and productive

collaboration.