3RD URBAN SPACE AND SOCIAL LIFE: THEORY AND PRACTICE
Quality City: The Challenges of Developing Smaller Cities
Location: Cixi, Ningbo, Zhejiang, China.
June 4-7, 2012
The conference offers an opportunity to 1) discuss an often neglected topic that is the booming development of smaller cities around the world due to global / national / local political-economy strategies, and responses from the grassroots; and 2) experience the rapid development of Cixi in person.
Cixi, China, is a vibrant and newly developed small city, two hours south of Shanghai. Cixi’s land has been claimed from cultivating salt field along the coastline in the last thousand of year. Currently a population of 200,000 consists of half locals and half migrant workers. Perhaps you may not know. Many of your large and small home electronic appliances are manufactured in this “richest” city in China. Within an area of 1,361 square kilometers, the city houses breathtaking mountains and lakes, conversed small villages, satellite cities, the most productive industrial parks, delicious berry (in June), archeological sites of porcelain, 5,000 bridges for a network of canals, the longest bridge in the world across Hangzhou Bay, and a wetland park.
Our mission and the Cixi’s economic, social and cultural initiatives hope to inspire collaboration among academia, professionals, artists, business sectors to investigate the concerns on the balance among economic development, social, and cultural life in a sustainable environment for smaller cities.
The scope of this studio and our conferences ranges from a single built form, to a village, a city and a nation which is constantly impacted by multifaceted forces from rural and urban to global developments. We particularly welcome talks / papers / visual presentations / exhibits in comparative perspective. The conference expresses a broad interest in, but not limited to, the following themes:
The interactive impact of migrant workers and small, newly developed cities
The challenges in relocation of the locals in the process of urban development
Development of social and cultural life under rapid economic development agenda
Identities of smaller cities
Sustainability of built- and natural- environment
Issues in small city urban planning
Compare and contrast successful and failing development and planning for smaller cities
Arts, histories, preservation and conservation of heritage