2006 Traveling Fellowship for Architecture, Design, and Urban Design
Reciprocity: Displayed City and Discussed City

The contemporary city requires sustainability and self-sufficiency for various reasons. Understanding the city as a “reciprocal spontaneous constitution” would be able to resolve those demands. Since contemporary society has been evolving with exchanges of matter, material and immaterial, within various man-made systems—social, political, economic, or technical—established throughout human history, living in the contemporary city entails simultaneously experiencing as well as engendering a multiplicity of these exchanges. An intricate multiplicity of contemporary society is evolving, progressing, and reproducing through mutual communication. It impacts the physical structures of a city; from small houses to huge urban infrastructures; from individual gardens to public spaces. Therefore, the contemporary city should be understood through reciprocal relations among multiplicities beyond multiplicity itself. In general, the phenomenon of reciprocity defines a potential property from which entirely new individuals with new characters can be created when various individuals with different attributes relate to each other comprehensively and elastically. For instance, on a smaller scale, a deformed root of a tree along a sidewalk disrupts the pavers and creates a new pattern. Or an abandoned structure transformed by gravity and a long period of neglect on a larger scale. Those conditions can be found everywhere in the city. Understanding the concept of reciprocity begins with accepting the dialectical nature of every single existence. By embracing the dialectical nature of beings, i.e., natural and artificial; matter and nonmatter; majority and minority, plural interdisciplinary networks begin and at last, a new paradigm can be conceptualized beyond duality and plurality. The reciprocity would characterize a city, the field of everyday life, and make the city alive and sustainable.

The purpose of my trip was not only to explore reciprocal phenomena in the contemporary metropolis by traveling through two representative cities, Berlin and Shanghai, but also to verify the reciprocity for developing a contemporary city and its architecture. Although Berlin and Shanghai are contradictory cities in terms of their sociocultural, economic, and political backgrounds, both cities hit a great turning point after major political changes in the 1990s. The cities have been redeveloping their urban fabrics so far on their own demands. It had been aimed not only to express the cities’ new optimistic paradigm for the future but also to reflect people’s new daily routines, which had been directly impacted by those sociopolitical changes. In the case of Berlin, the city’s main interest was how the city’s original structure, with its great history, could be restored and reborn as one capital city of Germany. With the dramatic history of modern Germany, the city and cityscape had been changing continuously and radically, furthermore, after the historic and symbolic reunification of Germany, around 45 km of long empty fields between the former Berlin walls have been filled with new buildings and landscapes. As a result, almost half of the city has been replaced with new ones based on the city’s master plan for 2020. The contemplative efforts to restore Berlin have been achieved by multiple parties such as architects, planners, the government, and even small local committees, and they are still arguing and working together to modify the city’s master plan for a better solution. On the other hand, developing Shanghai has been led by a strong central municipal policy. Funded by foreign investments and encouraged by local and central government, it has been moving forward without any barriers. New buildings, infrastructures, and public spaces in Shanghai comprise the second largest period of urban transformation in China’s history after the Qing Dynasty, affecting the country’s social, political, cultural, and economic spheres. While Berlin has focused on restoring the city and complying with its original character, Shanghai’s major issue was to expand the city not only to maintain the significant increase in population but to create a showcase of China’s symbolic future. The city also required redevelopment of underdeveloped areas in the city. Although both cities have different backgrounds and developing stories, both have been challenged to develop while incorporating existing urban fabrics in a reciprocal way.

Every snapshot in this report is a record of reciprocal phenomena in both cities. They show unique strategies for redeveloping the city within its traditional and historical legacy and shaping new paradigms for the city’s future and for the lives of its residents.

Epilogue

The purpose of my trip was to apply the reciprocity for further development to a contemporary city and architecture through exploring reciprocal phenomena in two contradictory cities, Berlin and Shanghai. The cities have been redeveloping their urban fabrics to be able to express their new optimistic paradigm for the future and also to be able to reflect people’s new daily routines impacted by sociopolitical changes. Each city has different developing stories and issues but most importantly, both have been challenged to develop while incorporating existing urban fabrics. The evidence that I gathered from approximately one-month visits to both cities shows that sometimes it was successful; sometimes it wasn’t if new development was not adequately related to its existing environment in a reciprocal way.

Berlin has been making great efforts to restore the city’s original structure while developing new buildings. The huge empty fields between the former Berlin walls have been filled with new buildings and almost half of the existing buildings in the city have been replaced with new ones in just sixty years. The city’s master plan is still in the investigation and modification process, which was made possible by continuous discussion among the multiple parties who are developing the city, such as architects, planners, the government, and even small local committees. These negotiatory efforts made the entire city reveal its own accumulated history within the city fabric; from the personal to the national; from anonymous small alleys to famous monumental buildings. As a result, the city maintains the reciprocal network of history. Meanwhile, filling the field between the former Berlin walls required new landscape design strategies. The symbol of the Cold War became a new field of recreation as well as a new part of the green network of the city. New buildings and public spaces communicating with the existing environment and activating another development in reciprocal ways.

Without a doubt, Shanghai is the symbol of the new China, what had been a closed, centrally controlled economy just twenty-five years ago has emerged as one of the world’s fastest growing. Funded by foreign investments and encouraged by local and central government, Shanghai has been moving forward to expand its city as well as to redevelop the city center. The city has been expanded to Pudong and several new districts to reflect the monumental growth in population. Large pieces of urban fabric unraveling in the city have been repaired including the Xintiandi and the Bund. Although the city has a great historical and architectural tradition, it has lost the benefit of the original urban fabric. Small-scale courtyard buildings have been replaced by tall ones with huge open spaces and infrastructures under the name of modernization. Enormous changes in city’s skyline seem to bring environmental degradation; rapid development imperils the rich social and historic fabric of city neighborhoods. Since most of these developments have been designed by foreign architects, even though they studied Shanghai and tried to reflect the Shanghai-style in their design, the city has been filled with neutral global-style buildings except in a few cases: the famous Xintiandi district has been redeveloped in a reciprocal way and some undeveloped residential areas are keeping the “Shanghainess” in the city. The city displays the entire new world of globalization.

Both Berlin and Shanghai show what is important to develop in a city, something between vision and reality. The current design trends in contemporary architecture and urban planning are being broadened by cross-pollination with other fields. While most buildings are confined within a site plot, they communicate with the surrounding environment beyond. Architects often put a premium on the methodology for generating building design, yet architecture is incomplete if it fails to communicate. A completed building does not mean completion of the architecture. The physical construction is only a part of the architecture’s fulfillment. Architecture is not an austere practice of ideas and aesthetics in a vacuum; architecture is an essential part of a complex system integral to the city. A building that refuses to engage the surrounding area will fail to adapt to the contemporary city of multiplicity and changes. Architecture should contribute as a reciprocal medium to represent everyday life with pliancy. Architecture should remain alive long after leaving the architect’s hand. It would be completion without completion. Therefore, reciprocal urban planning should be an ephemeral plan rather than a master plan; a procedural vision rather than a declarative vision; a modularity rather than a centrality; and produced by accumulable and acclimatable processes. Finally, it would be accepting much more unpredictable possibilities for future generations.