Hybrid Modernity: The Public Park in Late 20th Century China

ISBN-13: 9781472445674 / Angielski / Twarda / 2020 / 230 str.

Mary G. Padua

Opis

This book provides a detailed historical and design analysis of the development of parks and modern landscape architecture in late 20th century China. It questions whether the fusion of international influences with the local Chinese design vocabulary in late 20th century China has created a distinctive approach to public park design that is novel. And, if so, how has this taken place, and what does it mean for landscape architecture and urbanism in China? It does so by examining the design of public parks built in post-Mao China since the reforms through a new theory - hybrid modernization - which sets the various processes for China's late 20th century socio-cultural context. Drawing on modernization theory, research on China's modernity, local and global cultural trends, it illustrates through a range of case study analysis how hybrid modernity defines a new design genre and language for the spatial forms of parks that emerged in China's secondary cities. IT argues that these forms represent a new stage in China's history of landscape architecture. The work reveals that as a new profession, landscape architecture has greatly contributed to China's massive urban experiment. In some ways landscape architecture has created China's trajectory for sustainable urbanism: an emerging interdisciplinary framework in design and planning that blurs the boundary between nature-focused environmentalism and human-focused urbanism.