Imaging the Globalized City: Rem Koolhaas, U-thèque, and the Pearl River Delta by Chris Berry Introduction This essay examines the imaging—and the imagination—of the Globalized City.1 The Globalized City is not quite the same thing as Saskia Sassen’s Global City, as discussed below. But both terms acknowledge that globalization is transforming urban life in profound ways. What is it like to live and work in urban space under the new order of globalization? How is it different from life and work in the cities of the old international order – for example, the national capital, the imperial metropolis, or the colonial entrepot? These questions are crucial to understanding the consequences of globalization and judging its benefits and its drawbacks. When people take photographs, write essays, shoot video documentaries, and produce all manner of other texts about urban space today, their efforts contribute to answering these questions by imaging and imagining the Globalized City. To explore this theme, this essay focuses on three texts to compare two different visions of one urban (or conurban) space that has emerged post-globalization—the Pearl River Delta. The two different visions are those of Rem Koolhaas and U-thèque. Koolhaas is a Dutch architect and Harvard professor. The author of numerous books and designer of various iconic buildings, he is famous internationally, although perhaps less well known in China. However, even if few Chinese recognize Koolhaas’s name, his daring design for the new China Central Television building in Beijing is the subject of much local controversy and debate.2 Established in 1999, U-thèque is an independent film and video collective based in Guangzhou and particularly associated with the artists, essayists, filmmakers, and photographers Ou Ning and Cao Fei.3 Koolhaas has discussed what is called here the Globalized City in a famous 1995 essay called “The Generic City,” in which he celebrates the postmodern tendencies of globalization towards homogenization, erasure of history, and loss of identity bemoaned by so many others.4 Koolhaas does not mention China directly in the essay, but he does mention Asia often. Furthermore, he has spoken in interviews in the mid-1990s about the impact working in southern China was having on his thinking.5 In 2003, U-thèque produced a very unusual Chinese independent documentary called San Yuan Li after the neighborhood of of Guangzhou (also known as Canton) in Southern China that it depicts.6 Unlike Koolhaas’s essay, U-thèque’s documentary emphasizes history and local specificity. This makes it easy to contrast Koolhaas’s vision with U-thèque’s. It could be argued that Koolhaas’s is the view from inside global capitalism, with its drive towards homogenization. On the other hand, U-thèque’s perspective constitutes a kind of local resistance constituting the grain which globalization attempts to grind smooth in the promotion of unimpeded flows. There is unquestionably an opposition between Koolhaas and U-thèque’s visions of the Globalized City. However, it is too simple to see this as global capitalism versus local and possibly socialist resistance. First, Koolhaas’s may be position in more ambivalent than it first appears to be. “The Generic City” and San Yuan Li are only two of the three texts under consideration here. The third text is Harvard Design School Project on the City: Great Leap Forward, edited by Koolhaas and his colleagues, and tracking the recent transformation and urbanization of the Pearl River Delta.7 A huge tome bound in red with gold lettering on the cover, this could be called Rem Koolhaas’s Big Red Book. It was published about six years after Koolhaas’s essay on the generic city. Although it continues many of the tendencies from the early essay and gives concrete examples of them, it is also very much bound up with the history and local specificity that the earlier essay claims the Generic City is liberating us from. Second, just as this indicates a kind of complexity within the Koolhaas perspective, it would also be an injustice to reduce the position of San Yuan Li to a simply anti-globalization stance. This is partly because the attitude of the inhabitants towards globalization in general and the transformation of Sanyuanli in particular is never made clear, and partly because the filmmakers themselves maybe in Sanyuanli but are never of Sanyuanli. In these circumstances, we need to understand that the opposition between Koolhaas and U- thèque’s visions of the Globalized City is one within globalization. The Globalized City and the Generic City Although the San Yuan Li documentary is an autonomous work that can be screened alone, it was designed as part of a larger ensemble called The San Yuan Li Project. This includes a Chinese and English bilingual book,8 a website, and various other paraphernalia. The whole project was “a collaborative effort by a team of nine cameramen and women and two sound recording artists, using a total of six digital video camcorders, one digital audio tape recorder, three digital cameras, and three conventional still photography cameras.”9 The transformation of Sanyuanli that the project investigates is recent and coincident with the transformation of Southern China following the “opening up” (kaifang) of the country to global investment and trade. Now a neighborhood of Guangzhou, Sanyuanli was once a village in the countryside—but not just any village. After the opening credits of the documentary, the screen goes black and we hear a Chinese opera performance. The lyrics explain that the villagers of Sanyuanli defended the nation and went off to defend the British. This is a reference to the Opium War. Class struggle dominates the official version of the story given in the People’s Republic during the Maoist period. According to this perspective, the Qing Dynasty court was weak and corrupt. As a result, it did little to support the efforts of its own official, Commissioner Lin Zexu, to eradicate the opium trade. However, the local villagers of Sanyuanli, true to their peasant class origins, rose up against the invaders.10 However, Sanyuanli has now been swallowed up by the expansion of Guangzhou, and is a neighborhood near the railway station. Furthermore, Sanyuanli is also an example of the “village in the city” phenomenon that has occurred in many Chinese cities. U-thèque emphasize this aspect of Sanyuanli in the book part of the project by including in the unnumbered opening pages a map of Guangzhou with all the former villages clearly marked. As Ou Ning writes: “. the government requisitioned the farmlands but, at the same time, preserved the rural residents’ private dwelling plots and the rural residence registration system. The subsequent urban developments . completely hemmed in the former rural settlements, making them virtually marooned islands in a forest of modern city high-rise blocks.”11 When Hou Hanru refers to the village-in-the-city as “a kind of extra-territories” [sic], the question of a link between imperialist history and contemporary globalization is raised again.12 Ou Ning makes this even clearer by stating, “The violent colonization over a century ago is reincarnating itself today in the new shape of global dominance and its encroachment of cultural values.”13 The only widely known model that has emerged so far for thinking about the city and globalization is Saskia Sassen’s Global City. Yet, Sassen is very clear that only a small number of cities fit this pattern, and I do not think that Sanyuanli in particular or even Guangzhou as a whole are among the select few. In fact, Sassen’s work is itself a corrective to some early ideas about globalization. She notes that many believed the tearing down of trade barriers associated with globalization results in finance and investment becoming fully mobile. However, she writes that, “The widely accepted notion that density and agglomeration will become obsolete because global telecommunications advances allow for maximum population and resource dispersal is poorly conceived. It is, I argue, precisely because of the territorial dispersal facilitated by telecommunications that agglomeration of certain centralizing activities has sharply increased.”14 The very particular characteristics of Sanyuanli and the “village in the city” confirm Sassen’s challenge to the idea of a completely “smooth” and undifferentiated environment offering no local differentiation or resistance to global flows. However, Sasken’s Global Cities are the hub cities on the network of globalization. They are distinct from the imperial metropolis, the national capital, and so on. Each of these earlier urban forms stands at the central point and all else comes below it in a hierarchy. But as part of a network of other Global Cities, each Global City is becoming less connected to the areas around it as it becomes more connected to the rest of the network. The idea of the Global City has been very important in making us think about the impact of globalization on forms of urbanization, but it does not account for other urban forms resulting from globalization, such as Sanyuanli. The Global City is one of the cities that make globalization happen, an engine house or site of collective agency. Complementing this concept is the notion of the Globalized City advanced here. This is the city that globalization happens to, rather than the agent of globalization. It does not globalize so much as it is globalized. Another way of saying it would be “the city under the order of globalization.” At this point this can only be a notion, because it is certainly not based on the careful and detailed research and elaboration associated with the Global City over the last decade and a half.