After the Pearl River Delta: Exporting the PRD - A View from the Ground

摘要

Rem Koolhaas' 2001 book Great Leap Forward, based on fieldwork undertaken with the Harvard Graduate School of Design in the Pearl River Delta (PRD) in 1996, has proved seminal. It has defined the way in which China's rapid transformation and ensuing urban chaos has been disseminated to the world. Most significantly, in this book Koolhaas advocated 'a new form of urban coexistence'. On identifying this wholly new phenomenon, Koolhaas also invented 'a number of copyrighted terms' to analyse it and describe it to the world. What exactly could this new form be that he alluded to in his reference to the hundreds of years of Western urbanisation or China's 'one hundred years without change'? When these very different urban conditions from very different moments of history suddenly conjoined and simultaneously confronted the West, the impact was one of 'the suddenness of a comet'. China's long absence from the world stage made the impact of this exported knowledge of the PRD's urban chaos and its rapid flux all the greater on the West, given the general 'cloud of unknowing'.