A Society under Construction
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DCF, Neville Mars and Adrian Hornsby Designed by DCF English/Chinese 784 pp / 250 x 200 mm / hardcover originally € 49.50 now € 19.50 ISBN 978 90 6450 652 9 published 2008, special offer |
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from the press | back |
| For more information: www.burb.tv. Watch the commercial: youtube.com/watch?v=byYVPLII-_A Look inside the book: click here. |
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| What if you built the whole mass of western europe in 20 years? What if 400 million farmers then moved in? What would it look like? How would it work? Would you be able to go to sleep at night? And if you did, would you dream of somewhere else …? China is in the midst of breakneck transformation. The last 30 years of astonishing economic growth and political and cultural reform have been driven by the world’s biggest ever urban boom. The new China is now halfway built. Within the next 30 years China will most likely take centre-stage as a global superpower, with hundreds of millions of new urbanites flooding into the rapidly swelling cities. But this process - presenting no less than the construction of a new society - is taking place almost without time to think. Taking as its starting point the goal announced in China in 2001 to build 400 new cities of 1 million inhabitants each by 2020, or 20 new cities a year for 20 years, the book explores the hopes and hazards of dreaming on such a scale. The question being asked is in fact no less than how to build a new utopia. But is China mortgaging its present for a promised future, and doing so at the same time that current speeds of construction eclipse any real forward planning? The Chinese Dream is a visual tour de force, both encyclopedic in scope and holistic in approach. Cutting across all levels of scale - from individual to nation - and backed by a truly multi-disciplinary team (encompassing architecture & urban planning, politics, economics, arts & culture, environmental concerns, and sociology) the book synthesizes a vast body of research to tackle the big contemporary questions, and to unpack the paradoxes at the heart of China’s struggle for change. Bold texts, self-critical design proposals, and thousands of graphics reveal China in all its raucous diversity. This is space as you have never seen it before: brash, outlandish, and very Chinese. |
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| Silver Medal Most Outstanding Book Design IPPY Awards 2009 Made possible by the Netherlands Architecture Fund. |
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| A manifesto for architecture to reassert its role amid forces that have seemingly pushed it to its margins. | ||
| Guy Horton in Architectural Record, August 2008 | ||
| This exhaustive and dazzling book can impress even those now jaded by the familiar cliches of Chinese hyper-urbanism. This book manages to encapsulate the essence of the Chinese city not just through its content but in its very form. | ||
| Gabriel Coxhead in Icon, March 2009 | ||
| Exciting when the book gets under the skin of the seemingly incomprehensible processes driving the transformation of urban China, and is able to offer propositional insights that could inform the future direction of these processes. In some places the book is good, occasionally even brilliant. |
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| Eleanor Fawcett in Architects’ Journal, 19 January 2009 | ||
| If you have to get your hand on just one book about urban China, make it this one. It is the result of several years of works by experts. It is also great 'value for money', not just because the price is surprisingly affordable for a book that counts 700 pages but because once you open it you realize that it's almost a work of art. | ||
| Regine Debatty at we-make-money-not-art.com | ||
| The introduction, like an excellent editorial, catapults the reader into the extraordinary context of China. The subject matter is fascinating and the technique appropriate. The Chinese Dream embodies the bold and heady reality of an emerging superpower. | ||
| Mike Tonkin and Anna Liu in Architecture Today, September 2008 | ||
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