Different Roads to Urbanization

摘要

Two excellent new books, Beyond the City, by Felipe Correa, director of the Urban Design Degree Program at Harvard University, and Dragons In Diamond Village, by David Bandurski, editor of the China Media Project at the University of Hong Kong, offer contrasting but fascinatingly connected analyses of resource-extraction urbanism. In Correa's case, the extraction is literal: his work describes a series of ex novo urban and regional projects in South America sited and designed to facilitate the mining or harvesting of natural resources. This arresting group of incarnated dreams offers a vivid alternative-or critically supplementary-history of the modern city, embodying an aspirational possibility in which both creating an urban design and realizing it can be imaginative and literal all at once.