Impacts Of U.S.-style Urbanization

"The desire to modernize in the American way has created a pandemic of placelessness in China. People from rural areas are pouring into the cities at a rate that is difficult for Westerners to comprehend. Speaking at the recent Banff Sessions on Architecture, the Vancouver architect Bing Thom indicated that when the urban population of China increases to 50 per cent from 30, there would be 500 cities with populations of one million and more. One of the problems, he says, is that public space in China typically comes in the form of walled parks that charge a fee to enter. Without a heightened sense of the importance of public space, the new Chinese city is merely a holding tank where people are stored in facsimiles of the American tall tower... But don't nail the Chinese or the Americans, for that matter, for creating particularly soulless urban and ex-urban centres. In Canada, we're contributing nicely to the new world order of placelessness."

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