Duanfang Lu

Travelling urban form: the neighbourhood unit in China

First formulated in the USA in the 1920s, the neighbourhood unit schema provides a model layout for an integral residential district. Over the past eight decades, the neighbourhood unit plan has traversed national boundaries and spread widely throughout the world. This article traces the multiple involvements of the schema and its variants in the process of modernization in China. Drawing upon Edward Said’s concept of ‘travelling theory’, the study reveals the complexities surrounding the appropriations, interpretations and reinventions of the neighbourhood schema in a constant flux of historical practices. The article shows that the domestication of the concept in China was a continual process of translating, selecting, combining and reinventing, instead of a direct borrowing of foreign ideas. It is concluded that the neighbourhood unit schema is far more than another sign of globalized repetition; instead, it is constantly tamed into different programmes of modernization in new times and places.

Third World Modernism

Abstract This article explores an intriguing aspect of Third World modernism—the utopianization of modernity—through an investigation into the peoples commune movement launched in China in 1958. Concurrent with sweeping institutional changes, architects and planners boldly experimented with modernist design between 1958 and 1960. By looking into the curious combination of utopian and modernist elements in the commune movement, the study reveals that the mass utopia intensified some of the most tragic contradictions of Chinese modernity. The article argues that the failure of commune design led to a new conceptual distinction between the Modernism of the West and that of the Third World in Chinese architectural discourse.

Moderated effect of value co-creation on project performance

Value co-creation amongst project stakeholders is often necessary for situations where the expertises or resources required are beyond a single stakeholder. Certain project delivery models (PDMs) with strong emphasis on relationships and trust are especially suited to value co-creation approach by encouraging collaborations amongst stakeholders and innovations. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that value co-creation impacts positively on particular types of projects but not on others. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of value co-creation on project performance (PP) and how the effect is moderated by requirements uncertainty (RU).,Based on the data from a cross-sectional survey of 120 Chilean construction project managers, the study validated a conceptual framework on the moderated effects of value co-creation process.,Value co-creation process underpinned through relational engagement, collaboration and innovativeness positively impacts on PP, and project’s RU moderates this relationship.,The findings empirically show that collaborative PDMs are best suited to projects where requirements are uncertain. Identifying the most suitable delivery model for a given context can reduce the project’s risk of failure and help maximise project value. When RU is low, the co-creating value is less critical to PP; whereas, when RU is high, choosing a collaborative PDM is fundamental to superior PP.,This study provides much-needed evidence on the effects of value co-creation process on PP. Additionally, it contributes to the literature by conceptualising and validating the moderated impact on PP by RU.

Urban China’s rural fringes: actors, dimensions and management challenges

the profit share of the top one percent! Sklair’s book is written with an eye on a general public that, thanks to the spread of digital media, is more tuned with the spectacle permeating architecture than the previous generation, who had to struggle digesting the art and architecture of modernism. It remains to be seen, however, how Leslie’s proposed ‘functional/emancipatory city’ might take on the vicious demeanor of a late capitalism that has already produced a subjectivity, in a global scale, that is charged with the desire to want and the pleasure to watch!

Interrogating Asia: SAH-Asia Research Forum

The Society of Architectural Historians of Asia (SAH-Asia), a society modelled on similar organisations in the US, UK and SAHANZ, is a transnational network conceived for our Asia-Pacific neighbourhood.1 It responds to the increasingly robust interdisciplinary discourse on Asia and anticipates a growing membership of architectural and urban scholars who focus on the geopolitical region identified as Asia. The society aims to foster high-quality research on Asian-built environments. It is not located in any institution or national geography and is similar to bilateral or multilateral organisations such as SAHANZ or EAHN (European Architectural History Network), respectively. SAH-Asia’s inaugural workshop, Spaces in transition: globalisation, transnationalism and urban change in the Asia-Pacific, was hosted on 4–5 July 2016, at the Melbourne School of Design at the University of Melbourne, and was followed by a postgraduate student plenary, Rethinking Modern Asia-Pacific Architectures, held on 6 July.2 These two events preceded GOLD: the 33rd Annual Conference of the Society of Architectural Historians, Australia and New Zealand (SAHANZ) also at the Melbourne School of Design, with the blessing of the SAHANZ convenors.3 The SAH-Asia-workshop and Indonesia Forum at the University of Melbourne collaborated with SAHANZ in bringing the keynote, Abidin Kusno to Melbourne. The workshop, funded by a Strategic Initiative Fund Grant from the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, was framed as an inter-Asian forum for Australia-based scholarship on Southeast and East Asian topics. A panel from the Centre for Asian and Middle Eastern Architecture (CAMEA) at the University of Adelaide extended this focus towards other Asian regions. Collaborators from among our membership at Hong Kong University and the National University of Singapore and visitors from North America internationalised the workshop. Its overarching objective was to offer new, innovative insights into architecture and urbanism in the Asia-Pacific region, using “global modernisms” as a conceptual entry-point; to engage with multiple historical processes such as decolonisation, indigenisation, urbanisation, and globalisation within this

Architecture and global imaginations in China

This article examines the changing consciousness of globality in the Chinese discourses of national and modernist architecture between 1949 and 1965. Drawing on recent scholarship concerning knowledge and representation, the study focuses on three crucial moments when Chinese architectural imaginings were decisively shaped by the dynamic relationship between a vexed Chinese situation and a shifting world stage: (1) the search for a ‘Socialist Realist’ architecture in relation to the Soviet Union and Eastern European socialist countries during the early 1950s; (2) the reception of modernist architecture in relation to an expansive internationalist view of the world in the second half of the 1950s; and (3) the re-evaluation of modernist architecture in relation to Third World nations during the early 1960s. The study demonstrates the world in Chinese architectural discourses not as a static one that could be neatly divided into a centre/periphery but a dynamic one constantly being reconstructed. The article reveals the history of modern architecture as a narration of tangled global and local experiences, instead of a linear one bounded within a nationally defined space.