Defining the City The construction of a city involves how is it defined, understood and experienced. These processes and definitions diverge wildly depending upon one’s location: East or West. Heretofore, western architects have subjected analysis of “The City” in China, indeed all of Asia, to a set of western-privileging universals for both physical and epistemological constructions.
More after the break.
For one, cities in the western context are understood and conceived as continuities, grounded in specific historical notions of civilization and progress towards a western-defined “modernity”. The city was therefore evidence of a particular kind of progress, the real-ization of that progress, the “real.” Buildings and streets provides critical evidence of an advanced civilization; it is the summary proof of superiority and mastery over nature. Cities thus define the logical, scientific culmination of civilization’s advance and the inevitable teleological development of western culture (1).
