Urban Village - Liu Qingyuan - Urban Village ABCs
Urban Village
December 20, 2017
Urban Village
Liu Qingyuan

Urban Village ABCs

All examined, unanimously agreed, fully understood.

After all, is it urban people's nostalgia, or country people's homesickness about the city?

Strength must be persistent to ensure.

Today, experience is more important than just knowing.

Guangdongism vigor.

The situation cannot be judged right now.

Culture set the stage, economy puts on the show.

The competent man in the village, the villain in the town, the vulgarian in the city.

Slogans are also poetry.

Standard scenery.

Welcome to the secluded areas of urban and rural junctions.

The street is ours... right?

Who is changing our daily life?

What else is worth looking for over and over?

Far away, there is grass, cows, and sheep. There is also blood and sweat.

Hello, we are newsfeeds.

Rural problems are complicated. It is not easy to do anything.

Listen to the words of others, go your own way.

Uh... I can't tell, I'm just a worker.

In the near future, culture and industry will begin to push and block each other.

The Urban Village Is our fun park.

We are the pets of the times.

Time is money, efficiency is iife.

Is now the future of the past?

Ake, the "flee ghost."

After all who has the final say in this world?

×

Urban Village is collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 7th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) within the context of its theme, "Cities, Grow in Difference."

Liu Qingyuan is and artist and associate professor at the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts.

Urban Village
Related
Conversations
Share
More
Urban Village
Juan Du

Beyond Classification

Imagine a corporation of great wealth. It owns land in the most valuable area of the city’s Central Business District. You saw the directors of the corporation at the mayor’s gathering last month. The corporation owns and manages properties while operating subsidiary commercial companies of immense profit. Last year, the corporation’s net profit was ¥250 million. Each member received a dividend of ¥50,000, double that of the national average annual income. Children of corporate members go to...
Feng Yuan

Transcending Geo-culture

Depending on one’s perspective, the concept of geo-culture has two definitions. One is a view from the outside, from where geo-culture can be understood as the characteristics of a place or a region against a greater context. By this definition, geo-culture is a local one, or to be exact, a culture of the “Other,” and therefore indicates hierarchy. The other view, from the inside, understands geo-culture as an expression of identity and self-reflexivity that emphasizes difference, and thus,...
Joshua Bolchover

Palimpsest Urbanism

Baishizhou, one of Shenzhen’s last remaining centrally located urban villages and home to approximately 140,000 people living in an area of just six square kilometers, is slated for demolition. Bulldozers have already erased one section of industrial buildings. Although earmarked for redevelopment since 2012, it bore few signs of this future just three years ago. Like other urban villages, Baishizhou is distinct from the surrounding city in its densely packed physical form and the vibrant...
Nikos Papastergiadis

From Cosmopolis to Cosmopolitan Spaces

The early boom in art biennales coincided with the post-1989 malaise of internationalism and a tentative burst in cosmopolitan thinking. It was also caught in massive rebranding of cities as attractors of global capital and hubs for creative economies. Between the hype and massive investment in arts infrastructure there has been a spectacular growth in contemporary art as an event. Yet both contemporary art and the Biennale phenomenon have had an uneasy relationship to nations and regions....
M. Christine Boyer

The Indifferent City

Contemporary cities, it is argued, are formless, almost like a scrambled egg. They are fragmented collages, transmuting into global or cybercities. Either resilient, sustainable, shrinking, or exploding, they are filled with voids, enclaves, and exclaves. Cities are described as both post-political, entrepreneurial assemblages subjected to managerial authority, and self-organizing complexities, whose vibrant order emerges out of chaos in a dynamic state of mutation, far from equilibrium....
Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen

Non-Lagos

Picking a present for an old friend can be difficult. The perfect gift has the right size (not too small, but not too extravagant either), is highly personal, and should leave a lasting impression. If you really want to impress, it should also be something that took a big effort on your part. Keeping these rules in mind is difficult enough when your old friend is, in fact, a human. Imagine the hassle you’d go through when picking a present for an entire continent! Yet this was exactly...
Saskia Sassen

Deep Inside the Global City

The frontier is a space where actors from different worlds have an encounter for which there are no established rules of engagement. Whereas the “historic” frontier was at the edges of empire, today’s frontier is deep inside large, complex, and mixed global cities. These cities, whether in the Global North or South, have become strategic for the functioning of corporate capital. But they have also become strategic for the disadvantaged, outsiders, discriminated minorities, and those who...
AbdouMaliq Simone

Flickering in the Dark: The Compressed Tissue of the Urban

Andy Merrifield refers to the old architectural notion of the “urban tissue” as a “fine-grained texturing, as a mosaic and fractal form that has some delicate content, some feel to it, something we can touch and manipulate in our own conceptual hands, think feelingly, as it were.” 1 It is the materiality of encounter among things, materials, and bodies that exceed the capacity to map, measure, and account for their oscillating relationships. It is a tissue in the sense that it contains a...
Stephan Petermann

Put down the hoe, pick up the mouse

A strange symphony of ting-tong sounds echoes through Dong Feng in Jiangsu, roughly 450km north-west of Shanghai, when we arrive. In the background, a snaring sound of power tools cutting and sanding wood. Ting-tong. We are in front of a four-story office building owned by Han Sun, one of Dong Feng’s 4,725 villagers. After a visit to IKEA in Shanghai ten years ago, the thirty-six-year-old Sun set up an online shop in the once-sleepy village, combining IKEA’s flat packing efficiency with more...
Liu Qingyuan

Urban Village ABCs

Nick Axel, Hou Hanru, Nikolaus Hirsch, Liu Xiaodu, and Meng Yan

Editorial

Urban Village is collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the 7th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) within the context of its theme, "Cities, Grow in Difference," curated by Hou Hanru, Liu Xiaodu, and Meng Yan, featuring contributions by: Gautam Bhan, Joshua Bolchover, M. Christine Boyer, Abdelkader Damani, Juan Du, Nikos Papastergiadis, Stephan Petermann, Liu Qingyuan, Michiel Hulshof and Daan Roggeveen, Saskia Sassen, AbdouMaliq Simone, and Feng Yuan. For...
Liu Qingyuan
There is nothing related.
Conversations - Urban Village ABCs
Conversations
Join the Conversation

e-flux conversations is a discussion platform for e-flux readers. Click to start a discussion of the article above.

Start the Conversation
Share - Urban Village ABCs
  • Conversations
  • Share
Close
Next

* This consent can be revolked at any time with effect for the future. For more information, please see our privacy policy
If you have any questions regarding data protection, please contact dataprivacy [​at​] e-flux.com

The information you supply will only be used by e-flux.