The Concrete Dragon

Starred review from April 14, 2008
Urban planning professor Campanella (of the University of North Carolina and Harvard's Graduate School of Design) presents an overview of today's China, which has recently grown so fast and so lavishly that its scope is hard to comprehend. The geography is vast, and so are statistics that now define it. With a huge rural-to-urban migration over the last quarter century, dozens of megacities-"the primary spatial forms of the new global economy"-have cropped up over natural and man-made obstacles, boasting a culture of skyscraper one-upsmanship, a passionate embrace of foreign architecture and sports (golf, skateboarding), a legion of theme parks featuring scale models of Chinese and world-famous landscapes (like the U.S. Capitol Building), and the relentless reinvention of ancient metropolises. Politics, capitalism, epic road-building, spiraling bridges and, now, pre-Olympic commotion mix with surprising effects; once-ubiquitous bicycles are replaced by automobiles; everywhere there is domicide, the destruction of long-time residences; and traditional Chinese culture in decline: "Even as Beijing erects singular architectural monuments to create a definitive identity for itself, it has largely rubbed out... what gave the city such unique color, richness, and character." A fascinating read, this current-events primer could very well be a crash course in the world's future.

Starred review from June 23, 2008
Urban planning professor Campanella (of the University of North Carolina and Harvard's Graduate School of Design) presents an overview of today's China, which has recently grown so fast and so lavishly that its scope is hard to comprehend. The geography is vast, and so are statistics that now define it. With a huge rural-to-urban migration over the last quarter century, dozens of megacities-"the primary spatial forms of the new global economy"-have cropped up over natural and man-made obstacles, boasting a culture of skyscraper one-upsmanship, a passionate embrace of foreign architecture and sports (golf, skateboarding), a legion of theme parks featuring scale models of Chinese and world-famous landscapes (like the U.S. Capitol Building), and the relentless reinvention of ancient metropolises. Politics, capitalism, epic road-building, spiraling bridges and, now, pre-Olympic commotion mix with surprising effects; once-ubiquitous bicycles are replaced by automobiles; everywhere there is domicide, the destruction of long-time residences; and traditional Chinese culture in decline: "Even as Beijing erects singular architectural monuments to create a definitive identity for itself, it has largely rubbed out... what gave the city such unique color, richness, and character." A fascinating read, this current-events primer could very well be a crash course in the world's future.

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