Great Leap Forward / Harvard Design School Project on the City

Unprecedented Forms Of Urbanism Generated By China's Experiment With Capitalism Examined By Harvard Design School Graduates In Collaboration With Rem KoolhaasTASCHEN will soon publish the first and second volumes of a projected four-book series from the Harvard Design School's Project On The City, an ongoing research collaborative that studies the effects of modernization on the contemporary city. Each year, six to twelve individuals document, examine, and analyze new forms and mutations of urbanity through particular areas or topics undergoing dramatic change, in order to develop a conceptual framework and vocabulary for phenomena that defy traditional categories. Even though research is formally conducted as graduate-level thesis projects advised by Rem Koolhaas (Professor of Architecture at the Harvard Design School), the Project represents "an important reversal, in the sense that teaching is no longer the distribution of a central knowledge, but is more the assembly of different insights and different experiences, where the students often represent deeper knowledge of a very specific condition than the teacher can ever hope to represent," according to Koolhaas.

Great Leap Forward, the first volume of the Project on the City series, examines the staggering urban changes in China's Pearl River Delta (PRD), a cluster of five cities with a population of twelve million, projected to reach thirty-six million by the year 2020. The establishment in the PRD of Special Economic Zones-"laboratories for the contained unleashing of capitalism"-was a vehicle by which the Chinese government could experiment with unrestricted modernization. The resulting economy-a communist facilitated capitalism-generated an entirely new urban substance.

Great Leap Forward attempts to describe the urban changes that occurred during the late 1980s and early 1990s-the most extreme periods of change-through the particular experiences, expertise, and viewpoints of its the chapter entitled "Ideology" is written by a communist-educated Romanian; "Money" by the daughter of an American developer; and "Politics" by the son of a Taiwanese journalist-turned-politician. Research was conducted through a series of journeys to the region that resulted in travel accounts, diaries, observations, documentation, and theories on the activities of the region. A "copyrighted" vocabulary was developed to describe these previously understudied conditions. For City Of Exacerbated Difference, where a city's functionality is a product of the greatest possible difference between its parts; Scape, a new urban substance that incorporates city and landscape; Infrared, the covert, invisible version of Communist ideology; Shenzen Speed, which produces urban substance almost instantly; Infrastructure, which both enables and prevents a functioning whole through connection and separation.