These Soviet town planners and architects, led by M G Barannikov, delivered a report, Proposals on Improving Beijing’s Municipal Administration, which was to largely shape the development of the city to come. They had come to China not only for geopolitical reasons, but, like the Japanese urban theorists who had come in the 1920s and 1930s, and like the western starchitects who come today because of China’s ability to undertake vast projects, to offer planners speed and huge power. The Soviet model city could be realised on Chinese soil, when it could not be in Russia, because there were fewer impediments; Mao was willing to tear down all old buildings, making the Chinese city a tabula rasa. Moreover, Mao combined in one person the radical revolutionary desires of a Lenin with the total power of a Stalin; he both desired to, and was capable of, completely remaking urban society. A “truer, purer” version of the Soviet urban ideology could be materialised in the Chinese urban desert — literally empty fields and illiterate peasants who were being “modernised” — in the historically complex, ideologically overdetermined spaces of Moscow or St Petersburg.
Posted on: Fri, 18 Jul 2014 16:26:09 +0000
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