PUBLIC LECTURE AT THE UNIVERSITY OF GREENWICH

Tue 10 February 2009  -  5.30pm

Adrian Hornsby
POTS, PLOTS, AND DESPOTS: HOW CASH-RICH REGIMES IN CHINA AND THE MIDDLE EAST ARE MANAGING THEIR URBAN BOOMS

 Supercharged urban explosions along the East Coast of China and in the Arabian Gulf have brought in a new epoch of city-building. Never before have such speed and scale been achieved. Nor have such volumes of investment or floods of mobile labour. Foreign architects have poured in too to join local developers and young governments in a pandemonium of land reform and megaschemes. Regulatory frameworks struggle to assemble themselves at the pace at which the cranes go up. Yet strong central control ensures that decisions are made, and projects wholly unthinkable in the West are completed within the space of a few years. A superficial vying of starchitecture between the two regions - for the tallest towers, the greenest new cities, the glitziest cultural developments, and so on - suggests an almost formulaic generation of the new global modernism. However, radically different political and economic conditions underlie the production of space, and shape the emergent forms.

Speaker:  Adrian Hornsby is a writer of considerable diversity. His book The Chinese Dream (010 Publishers, 2008), a major study of Chinese urbanisation, was co-authored with the Dynamic City Foundation. He is Head of Research & Analysis at Investing for Good, the UK's first FSA-regulated social investments specialist, and writes regularly on enterprise-driven development schemes around the world. His book on impact investing is forthcoming 2009. He is a Director of Kilometer Zero, an international arts and politics collective, and for several years co-edited the Kilometer Zero Magazine. Other journalism includes special reports and supplements for the Architects' Journal and Urban China. He speaks frequently on China, emerging economies, and other global issues. He has written four plays which have been produced on stage in London, Paris, Amsterdam and Beijing, and on radio in London and New York.

http://burb.tv/view/Book_-_THE_CHINESE_DREAM

University of Greenwich School of Architecture & Construction
Norbert Singer Lecture Theatre (M055)
Mansion Site, Avery Hill Campus
Bexley Road, Eltham, London SE9 2PQ
Tuesdays 17.30

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