The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City

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Juan Du (2017). Documenting Urban Villages (pp. 182-185); Massive Change: Centuries of Shenzhen’s Transformation (pp. 186-191); Co-Design: Long-Term Community Engagement Through Small-Scale Home Improvements (pp. 228-229). In Cities Grow in Difference (2017 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture), Urbanism + Architecture Chapter. Juan Du (2008), City Recognition, In Fondazione La Biennale di Venezia (Ed.), Out There: Architecture Beyond Building Catalo, Volume 4 (p. 169). Aaron Betsky, Venice: Marsilio Editori s.p.a.

As a result of Shenzhen's extraordinary economic success, the city was viewed as a land of opportunity. There was mass rural migration to the SEZ, and Shenzhen experienced immense population growth. By 2000, 20 million people lived in the Shenzhen SEZ. Despite Urban Villages having a negative stereotype (through 2016) because they didn't fit into the image of a well-planned city, the 300 urban villages - aka, peasant houses and villages in the city (6-7 floor "towers" & "nail houses") supplied half of the residential floor area, and provided affordable housing to its growing population. Additionally, within these communities, township and village enterprises (TVE) sprouted and became the industrial engine of Shenzhen's economy during the SEZ's first decade. Juan Du and Janette Kim (2013). Safari SZHK: Hong Kong Base Camp. In Travis Bunt (Ed.), Beyond the Urban Edge: The Ideal City? (pp. 48-49). Hong Kong: HKIA, HKIP, HKDA. The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City". China City Planning Review. 29 (2): 86–87. 2020. – Translated and edited by Li Caige and Liu Jinxin, while Liu Jiayan and Liang Sisi are the proofreaders. Juan Du (2016). Intervention into Hong Kong’s Urban Informality, Special Issue on Modernology Research in China, Urban Flux, 51 (5), 60-65. Is it true that Shenzhen has no meaningful history? That the city was planned on a tabula rasa? Where the rural past has had no significant impact on the urban present? This book unravels the myth of Shenzhen, showing how the success of this modern “miracle” depended as much on its indigenous farmers and migrant workers as on central policy makers. Drawing on a range of cultural, social, political and economic perspectives, the book uncovers a surprising history—filled with ancient forts, oyster fields, urban villages, a secret informal housing system—and personal narratives of individual contributors to the city. The Shenzhen Experiment is an important story for all rapidly urbanizing and industrializing nations around the world seeking to replicate China’s economic success in the twenty-first century.Juan Du (2008). City Recognition. In Culture Fabricate: Hong Kong in Venice, Hong Kong Arts Development Council and the Hong Kong Institute of Architects (p. 74). N.p.: n.p. McDonogh, Gary W. (2021). "The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City. Juan Du, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020, 384 pp". City & Society. 33 (1). doi: 10.1111/ciso.12370. S2CID 233924593. PF: Shenzhen was so important to the early decades of Deng Xiaoping’s Reform and Opening Up movement, but now with so many cities being designated Special Economic Zone (SEZ), what, if anything, remains unique and important about Shenzhen?

Juan Du (2018). How I. M. Pei’s Bank of China Tower Changed Hong Kong’s Skyline. CNN. http://edition.cnn.com/style/article/100-years-of-i-m-pei-bank-of-china/index.html (4 Jan, 2018). Juan Du points out in her book that no other SEZ has been able to match Shenzhen's economic success. She attributes this to the fact that Shenzhen, a complex and unique city, has a variety of specific features that have contributed to its meteoric growth. In particular, Shenzhen's local, decentralized governance, its bottom-up responsiveness, local negotiations and practices, local geography, history, and culture (before 1979) are all factors that were just as essential to the mega city's evolution and success as the national Chinese Central Government's economic policies and plans. From long-established agricultural, fishery, and sea-faring activities, to the industrial, commercial, and cultural enterprises of the past century, the existence of a productive population with deep connections to an extensive regional and international network absolutely impacted Shenzhen’s urbanisation into the city as we know it today. For more than half a year, headlines have been crowded with reports of popular protests and police repression taking place in the most famous city in China’s Pearl River Delta, the former British colony of Hong Kong. For even longer, Western journalists have chronicled the area’s staggeringly ambitious local infrastructure projects, from impressive new high-speed rail lines to a bridge of record-setting length that runs from Hong Kong to the former Portuguese colony of Macau and from that casino-filled island to the city of Zhuhai in Guangdong Province.There isn't really an argumentative point to the book, besides describing this miracle of transformation. The author kind of highlights the role of individual actors, including of the mayor Liang Xiang and his role in encouraging long term investments in education, schools, and hospitals. She also sort of takes a stance on the urban villages within Shenzhen such as Baishizhou, talking about how important they, and the illegal peasant housing built within them, were to the development and growth of the city as a whole, but there really aren't any strong claims made. Which makes sense because the title is just "The story of China's instant city". Blending the personal and the historical, this is an outstanding primer on the fascinating fortunes of a city. The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China’s Instant City, Juan Du (Harvard University Press, January 2020) Du, Juan (2020-01-07). The Shenzhen Experiment: The Story of China's Instant City. Harvard University Press. doi: 10.2307/j.ctv2d8qwz7. ISBN 978-0-674-24222-7. JSTOR j.ctv2d8qwz7. Later sections examine the modern urban development of the city, and the tension between lucrative redevelopment and the preservation of Shenzhen’s urban villages, which provide essential housing to newcomers to the city as well as being fortresses of vibrancy and diversity in a city which is becoming increasingly homogenized, at least in architectural terms. At all times the individual experience of the city is foregrounded, ensuring the reader retains a sense of the personal within the urban.

Juan Du (2018). Shenzhen: Urban Informality in a Formal City, IASTE 2018: The Politics of Tradition, 16th Biennial Conference of the International Association for the Study of Traditional Environments, Portugal, October 2018. Juan Du (2018). Beyond Classification. e-flux, architecture. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/urban-village/169804/beyond-classification/ (December 2018) Yung Ho Chang, Shaoxiong Cheng, & Juan Du (2007). ‘Urban Tools,’&‘Micro-Urbanism.’ In Hanru Hou et al. (Eds.), Beyond: An Extraordinary Space of Experimentation for Modernization, The Second Guangzhou Triennial (Exhibition Catalogue) (pp. 86-88). Guangzhou: Ling-Nan Arts Publishing House.JD: While it has gone through many reincarnations throughout the past centuries, Shenzhen was certainly not a small fishing village, at least not during its past millennium of history. Denise Y. Ho: traditional Chinese: 何若書; simplified Chinese: 何若书; Jyutping: ho4 joek6 syu1; pinyin: Hé Ruòshū In Shenzhen, ‘urban villages’ like Baishizhou have been lost to the megacity myth.” South China Morning Post, February 16, 2020 ( https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/3050428/shenzhen-urban-villages-baishizhou-have-been).