Landscapes in Motion:
mobility and the perception of space and time in the Jiangnan, China
When standing on the street lined by six-story luxury department stores at Xienjiekou, Nanjing, one would not suspect a parallel sprawling subterranean mall underfoot. A web of escalators pull crowds under to gawk at shops averaging four meters wide by six meters deep, spread out for blocks on end over two stories. If Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York summarized an epoch of reaching skywards, this is an investigation of buildings on their sides, a layered, complex urbanism that stretches horizontally that thickens the very surface of the earth.
Nanjing is amongst the fourteen cities that comprises a mega-city region in the area historically known as the Jiangnan, south of the Yangtze River Delta, China. With 80 million inhabitants, it is the most populated urban agglomeration in China and its principal economic workhorse. It is also part of a larger global phenomena of emerging city clusters, from Boston to Washington to the Randstad in northern Europe, that have economically more to do with each other than apart. Such city clusters are not simply larger scaled cities with their suburbs. Unlike the homogeneous and fragmented Fordist suburban landscapes - the Jiangnan is a single organic complex of stacked and coexisting landscape-scaled processes stretching out over 300 km between each of its three main nodal cities.
The primary linkages within this mat urbanism are rail-based. A proposed network of regional bullet-trains together with municipal subways provides modes of movement that will fundamentally alter the function and perception of the Jiangnan as a whole. It offers an opportunity to fulfill the economic advantage of clustering cities. It also permits the layering of other processes and flows - urban and rural, human and biological, productive landscapes and excess non-places - embedded within a fine-grained rail-based framework. If North America was shaped by the automobile in the past century, what will the experience be of moving horizontally at unprecedented speeds and distances within the Jiangnan of this century.
The capturing of speeds and vast multi-layered territories demands alternative methods and mediums of investigation. Mapping permits the quantitative exploration of different systems and their increasing density over time. Photography frames the qualitative experience of movement within the contemporary condition. Lastly, an architectural proposal seeks to combine cartography and imagery in a tangible, material exploration of landscapes in motion that is the condition of the Jiangnan.
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