UC#33 Creative China | on the book shelves

UC#33 Creative China | cover

Urban China#33 is out! The special ‘Creative China: Counter-Mapping the Creative Industries’ issue was guest-edited by Mónica Carriço, Bert de Muynck and Ned Rossiter; and designed by Hendrik-Jan Grievink.

The magazine is in Chinese (with select texts published in English). An overview, including all texts in English, is available at our project website: OrgNets.net. Also visit the Urban China#33-page on MovingCities for a summary of the content and background to this issue.

It may be possible to request copies throughout China and abroad, though the issue has sold rapidly and is in limited supply. For detailed information on how to order this issue, see UC#33 OrgNets ordering page.

Counter-Mapping Creative Industries | UC#33 network of contributors

Recent news from Urban China Magazine include the establishment of a mirror version of their website, iURBANCHINA, and an upcoming exhibition, called “Urban China: Informal Cities” (February-March 2009), at the New Museum (New York):

Urban China: Informal Cities is a multifaceted exploration of the groundbreaking and influential magazine Urban China. The exhibition brings together a retrospective of the publication with a space transformed into a physical manifestation of its pages.

LINKS

• Urban China #33 | MovingCities summaryUC#33 out on the news stands
• How Foreign Architects became International Architects: A Case Study of China’s Creative Construction Agenda | by Bert de Muynck
• Urban China Magazine
• OrgNets
• Transdisciplinary Research on Creative Industries in Beijing (2007)
• Archinect: Urban China, Crisis, and the Bootlegging of a Magazine (June 2009)

http://movingcities.org/

Urban China #33 | Creative China

UC#33 | Creative China

During the past month MovingCities, Ned Rossiter and the Urban China team compiled, edited, discussed, translated and re-edited content and graphics for the 33rd issue of Urban China Magazine.

Entitled “Creative China – Counter-Mapping the Creative Industries”, this guest-edited publication is based on preliminary research during May-July 2007, when Ned Rossiter, Bert de Muynck and Mónica Carriço, coordinated the ‘Transdisciplinary Research on Creative Industries in Beijing – Mobile Research Laboratory’ (orgnets.net).

Production got underway in early 2008, and Hendrik-Jan Grievink was invited on board to provide a critical grammar of design.

UC#33 will be available from mid-December 2008 on, and will be partly bi-lingual CN/EN for international readership.

2007年5－6月，奈德·罗斯特、伯德孟与莫妮卡·卡瑞苏协作组织了“北京地区创意产业跨学科研究－移动研究实验室”（详见www.orgnets.net） 。本期的客座编辑工作从2008年年初启动，并邀请亨德里克－扬·格里芬克为此设计一套独特视觉语言。

Organised Networks | Beijing

bei-CI | Mobile Research Laboratory | May-July 2007

The “Urban China: Counter-Mapping Creative Industries Issue” text on orgnets.net gives a full background to the topic:

This issue of Urban China sets out to critique and redefine the idea and practice of ‘mapping’ the creative industries. Foregrounding the experimental process of collaborative constitution, we are interested in the multiple idioms of expression that make creative industries intelligible beyond the blandness of policy discourse. Activist researchers, artists and writers in Europe, Brazil and India have been particularly inventive in combining collaborative techniques of production with social-political critique via media of communication. We see this work as part of the prehistory and global dialogue around how to create new spaces and transdisciplinary knowledges able to negotiate the complexities and politics that attend the economization of culture.

In bringing the idea of counter-mapping to the creative industries in Beijing, the question and problematic of translation is quickly established. Understood as a social practice rather than search for linguistic equivalence, translation registers the conflictual dynamics of the encounter between different knowledge and social systems. Rather than adopting a defeatist logic, we instead see the conflictual processes of translation as constitutive of new social assemblages and knowledge systems.

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More than 30 contributors have each in their own way visualized and written about their experience, research, work and vision on what the Creative Industries still mean today in China and outside. Contributors include Shveta Sarda, Soenke Zehle, Michael Keane, Luka Frelih, Hao Dong+Binke Lenhardt/crossboundaries, Alex Pasternack, Elaine Wing-ah Ho/HomeShop, Xuefei Ren.
Overall, the magazine tries to grasp the interlocking layers of creativity, ecology, organized networks, real-estate speculation, cultural heritage, the music industry and many more.

Import/Export

Once the Urban China Magazine is out, movingcities/orgnets will publish the writings online. As for now the introduction text to the “Import Cultures & Export Innovations in Architecture and Urban design”-chapter:

An important and often overlooked aspect of today’s architecture is the concept of mediation. With an enormous range of possibilities for image making and the ubiquitous demand on architects to ‘make a difference’, it seems as though the work of mediatiation has been sidelined. Mediation gathers knowledge and experience through a process of transformation and adaptation. The culture of construction has became a commodity where one size fits all. This self-inflicted architectural amnesia among professionals has many surprising results –great buildings are erected and designed in absence of any cultural legitimation, providing architects a plethora of possibilities. This global euphoria with neo-internationalism has frequently been controversial for local inhabitants, producing a dynamic tension in which local creativity precipitates on a global scale.

UC#33 Creative China | Design

Fake for Real Memory Game | design by Hendrik-Jan Grievink

Hendrik-Jan Grievink, the guest-designer of this issue, was also the graphic-mind behind the MyCreativity-newspaper, a free accidental publication dedicated to the anonymous creative worker result of conference with the same name that took place in Amsterdam in 2006. More recently he designed the “Fake for Real Memory Game” and soon after got sued by Louis Vuitton over its graphical style:

The Fake for Real Memory Game – consisting of 60 cards that playfully visualize the classical theme of fake and real in our society – has temporarily been taken offline due to legal issues with a luxury leather luggage brand Louis Vuitton. (…) Although the Fake for Real memory game is not a handbag, suitcase or anywhere near the product range of Louis Vuitton and the FFR memory game is immediately recognizable as an artistic and educational take on the fake industry, lawyers of Louis Vuitton nevertheless found it necessary accuse the creators of the FFR game of copyright infringement.

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More updates about the Urban China magazine will follow. In the mean time,
Be Creative! Get Payed!

movingcities.org on architecture, China & the creative industries

Creative China, Cutting and Pasting? | published in MyCreativity-newspaper | 2006
The Rise and Fall of Beijing’s Creative Business District | published in CRE-China | 2007
Interview With Jiang Jun, Editor-in-Chief of Urban China Magazine | MovingCities | 2008

http://movingcities.org/

Urban China Magazine | project intro

Belgian Architects in China | Embassy of Belgium | April 10, 2008

The Embassy of Belgium in China hosts a lecture organized by Bert de Muynck | movingcities. The lecture will feature two Belgian offices and one Mexican (with a Belgian co-founder) that work within the context of the ORDOS100-project. Lecture in English and starts at 6.30 pm. Please RSVP.

Lecture in English at the Embassy of Belgium on Thursday, April 10 at 6pm.
Welcome/drink: 6pm | Presentations and Q&A: 6.30pm | Reception:8 pm

Introduction by Bert de Muynck | movingcities.org

Presentations by:
Halewijn Lievens & Armand Eeckels | NU Architectuuratelier
Jan De Vylder | Jan De Vylder Architecten
Wonne Ickx | Productora

House with office Linq, Sint-Denijs-Westrem | NU Architectuuratelier

Dansstudio 118, Les Ballets C de la B., Gent | Jan de Vylder Architecten

Casa Chihuahua | PRODUCTORA

Description

For the ORDOS100-project FAKE Design, Ai Wei Wei’s studio in Beijing, has developed the masterplan for the 100 parcels of land in Ordos, Inner Mongolia, China, for the Client, Jiang Yuan Water Engineering Ltd. and will curate the 100 villas project, while Herzog and de Meuron have selected the 100 architects to participate. The collection of 100 Architects hail from 27 countries around the globe. Amongst these architects there are also several Belgian architects participating. Bert de Muynck, director of movingcities, invited three offices to talk about and present their work in the Belgian Embassy in Beijing. Throughout the past years each office has been developing a body of work that is characterized by a quality and originality in form, plan and detail, with projects ranging from housing till museum design. NU Architectuuratelier is known for its acclaimed project for the Victoria Theaterhuis in Gent, Jan de Vylder designed the cabinet for the renowed post-surreal Belgian artist Marcel Broodthaers collection in the SMAK (Gent) and Wonne Ickx is the co-founder of Productora, a Mexico based practice, that designed the exhibition space for the Belgian Artist Francis Alÿs.

Presentations will take up to twenty minutes each.

Location

Embassy of Belgium in Beijing
6, San Li Tun Lu
Beijing 100060
P.R.China
Tel +86 10 6532 1736/6532 1737

RSVP: Due to limited seats, please confirm you presence via mail (meichoy.wong@diplobel.fed.be) or telephone (6532 1736 ext. 318).

Info

Information on this lecture is available in Dutch and French on the website of the Embassy of Belgium

http://movingcities.org/

Belgian Architects in China | lecture

What can we learn from China? City/State Workshop

On February 21, 2008, Bert de Muynck | movingcities gave the opening lecture for the new semester at the Architecture Department at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel. The lecture was part of the “What can we learn from China?” workshop.

The title of the lecture was “The Chinese City; spaces of conflict, confusion, construction, culture and creativity.” Actually one should add to this; construction sites. The lecture opted to do the impossible and started with explaining the public this inherent notion of failure. We presented research in flux, cities in movement, an early 21st century urban anthropology of the Chinese city. At the end of the day we are still detectives roaming the planet in search for evidence that can support or deny the role of architecture and urbanism in shaping and constructing the contemporary city. The Chinese City, as we found out, is a phenomenon, a construct, a work in progress, a city of the moving type,… to wide, vibrant, elusive and large to capture within the the framework of a lecture, to much changing to develop theories that last, to elusive to capture, to flexible to grasp. We presented, leaving the audience staring mouth agape at a bombardment of images, analysis and architectures, is a moving society, upscaling, urbanizing, creating in an almost illogical way cities.

The Chinese City; spaces of conflict, confusion, construction, culture and creativity

The lecture was structured as follows:

• Visual introduction to the Chinese City
• What happened and where did this come from?
• The Chinese urban an architectural development as a topic of speculation, publication and exhibition
• What did we learn from Las Vegas?
• movingcities and the state of the contemporary city
• How to analyze the The Chinese City?
• Mechanism driving the development of the Chinese City
• Confusion and the search for an urban identity
• The role of architecture in the construction of The Chinese City, Ai Weiwei | FAKE Design & Wang Shu | Amateur Architecture Studio

Bert de Muynck | movingcities

Together with Dan Handel and Yonatan Cohen from the city/state unit movingcities gave the introduction to the workshop on February 21, 2008. We divided the students in four groups, and each group will fill the territory between Tel Aviv and Herzliya through one specific type of intervention borrowed from the Chinese condition. These intervention are:

• Central Business Districts
• Cultural and Creative Industries Clusters
• Housing
• Landscape Operations

Students participating in the City/State Workshop

Throughout the following week movingcities and the city/state unit will in tandem post updates on the progress of the workshop on the City/State Unit blog. The workshop concludes on Thursday February 28, 2008, with a review at the Architecture Department at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, Jerusalem, Israel. On Friday February 29, 2008, we will presenting the result at ZeZeZe Architecture Gallery, Tel Aviv.

movingcities would like to thank Yuval Yasky – unit master at Bezalel and Zvi Efrat, Head of the Architecture Department at the Bezalel Academy of Art & Design.

http://movingcities.org/

The Chinese City: lecture & workshop

View from railroad | Beijing-Harbin, 2006

What can be learned from China?

During the past decades China became the main attraction for architects and urban planners. As if in fast forward, and seemingly out-of-the-blue, urban environments are planned and build, all depending and feeding extensive cash flows and population migrations. But beyond the analysis of “unprecedented development of the Chinese city”, lays a reality; the city.
How are cities made in China? What can be learned from this? Is it producing models of urban forms, programs or architectures that can be applied globally?
Is it possible that the Chinese condition is so singular that it cannot be reproduced elsewhere?

Throughout the following weeks we will develop some of the background, content and methodologies involved in the workshop, both on the City/State and movingcities websites. We will elaborate ideas, thoughts and analysis that go deeper into the understanding of the development of Chinese cities. As such it will try to understand and present the mechanisms that boost the urban growth in China and debate its relevance for other urban contexts.
This mechanisms will serve as the basis on which the City/State Unit workshop will continue to work and test is relevance, possibilities and adjustments within the context of Israel’s urban development, case-study Tel Aviv.

City/State | movingcities project page includes:

• What can we learn from China?
• The Chinese City

http://movingcities.org/

City/State workshop