“Don’t tell anyone,” Rem Koolhaassaid to me several years ago as we headed down the F.D.R. Drive in NewYork, “but the 20th-century city is over. It has nothing new to teachus anymore. Our job is simply to maintain it.” Koolhaas’s viewpoint iswidely shared by close observers of the evolution of cities. But noteven Koolhaas, it seems, was completely prepared for what would comenext.In both China and the Persian Gulf, cities comparable in size to NewYork have sprouted up almost overnight. Only 30 years ago, Shenzhen wasa small fishing village of a few thousand people, and Dubai had merelya quarter million people. Today Shenzhen has a population of eightmillion, and Dubai’s glittering towers, rising out of the desert indisorderly rows, have become playgrounds for wealthy expatriates fromRiyadh and Moscow. Long-established cities like Beijing and Guangzhouhave more than doubled in size in a few decades, their originaloutlines swallowed by rings of new development. Built at phenomenalspeeds, these generic or instant cities, as they have been called, haveno recognizable center, no single identity. It is sometimes hard tothink of them as cities at all. Dubai, which lays claim to some of theworld’s most expensive private islands, the tallest building and soonthe largest theme park, has been derided as an urban tomb where therich live walled off from the poor migrant workers who serve them.Shenzhen is often criticized as a product of unregulated development,better suited to the speculators that first spurred its growth than tothe workers housed in huge complexes of factory-run barracks. Yet forarchitects these cities have also become vast fields of urbanexperimentation, on a scale that not even the early Modernists, whofirst envisioned the city as a field of gleaming towers, could havedreamed of.
www.nytimes.com/2008/06/08/magazine/08shenzhen-t.html?_r=1&partner=rssyahoo&emc=rss&oref=slogin