Digital Modelling for Urban Design

Conclusion

Modelling Urban Design Futures in India and China

Near the end of the line of the Hangzhou Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system, we headed into one of the urban villages outside the city. We heard a lot about the problem of urban villages in China for government officials and city planners. While the utopian fantasies of Ebenezer Howard's Garden Cities of Tomorrow and Le Corbusier's Ville Contemporaine were only partially realised in the West, in China, all its cities were being rebuilt to fulfil the Modernist dream of the Master Planned city. The urban villages of China do not fulfil ideals of rationality and order mandated from above, but exist as vital, messy reminders of urban growth initiated by actors below. In spite of repeated efforts, we were not able to visit any urban villages on our official trip, so we took advantage of the new BRT line, modelled on Curitiba, Brazil, to see this urban problem ourselves.

Informal garment factory in an urban village, Hangzhou, China.

The narrow road followed an irrigation canal, fouled with waste and garbage, through some abandoned fields to the dense cluster of four-storey houses beyond. The houses were uniform in height, material and design, and all had miniature copies of the Oriental Pearl TV Tower in the Pudong district of Shanghai atop a square attic cupola. A young man was washing his clothes from a pump along the dirty canal, ...