Accidental Affinities in the Contact Zone: Envisioning Public Well-being in Michael Sorkin’s Urban Imaginaries for China

Abstract

This research looks into Michael Sorkin’s urban images not only as vehicles of his universal guidelines for urban designs, but more critically as localized and situated instruments for social and environmental justice that manifest a coincidental parallel between China’s indigenous cultural psyche and Sorkin’s urban ideals. Since 2010, more than half of the Michael Sorkin Studio’s projects are based in China, including new city planning, river basin planning, infrastructure management, and massive residential complex designs. Although most of them remain on paper, these urban images function as intermediaries between theory and reality in their capability of visually incorporating unique local conditions with broad social arguments. This research frames foreign urban design projects as a virtual contact zone, where designers/theorists’ own background and ideals engage with the local socio-cultural context through hypothetical images that envision ideal conditions, and thus catalyze new urban solutions with both universality and situatedness. This study sees unbuilt proposal images beyond “failed” projects, and argues for the significance of these images as intermediaries between theory and reality in Sorkin’s genre for their capability of visually incorporating site- specific specificities. I first introduce Sorkin’s urban theories which claimed “the end(s) of urban design” and critiqued the existing urban spaces dominated by global capital and consumerism. I then discuss the “transitional” Chinese cities as a test field for Sorkin to experiment his urban ideals. Tracing clues of indigenous spatial forms that are adopted, transformed, and re-applied in Sorkin’s urban designs for China, I particularly investigate how traditional ways of life and self-emergent urban forms in China coincidentally run parallel to Sorkin’s urban ideals. This research thus explicates the potential of coincidental affinities between foreign urban ideals and local cultural conventions, with Sorkin’s work in China as an inspirational case that achieves both local and universal applicability in global urban studies