I was a bit surprised to discover, at some point between my second and third excursions to the neighborhood of Dashilar, that the press kit for Beijing Design Week included a few photos documenting not the myriad pop-up exhibitions or experimental renovation projects on view but rather glimpses of everyday life in the hutong, shorthand for Beijing as a whole. Unimpressed with the exhibitions we visited on a jetlagged first day in Beijing, I had it mind to seek the “real” Dashilar—whatever that might mean—during our second foray, hoping to highlight the non- or un-designed 99.9% of the neighborhood in the interest of making some kind of statement by capturing the beauty of the mundane.1
So I was a bit dismayed to learn that the press office at Beijing Design Week had beaten me to the punch, and I couldn’t shake the uncanny feeling that my unorthodox reporting had somehow been preemptively subverted into another instrument of propaganda. Indeed, the ‘official’ description of Dashilar, per Beijing Design Week, is “a special zone within Beijing’s old city,” “showcasing the regional characteristics that are the charm of the increasingly international Beijing.” Mythologized as a nexus of past, present and future—authentic Beijing condensed into a square kilometer—Dashilar has been cast as an instance of learning from past mistakes, which makes this kind of reporting is squarely aligned with the government (qua developers) agenda. Not that it’s really worth further speculation: Beijing Design Week is, by definition, an exercise of soft power (the softest, my friend joked), a vehicle for China to assert itself as a global destination for culture… which, of course, it is and always has been.
While it would be optimistic to extrapolate from Dashilar as anything more than a testing ground at this point, it’s certainly worth exploring the impressively thorough documentation at Dashilar.org. Although most of the website is Chinese-language only, navigating to the first menu item on the second of the three ‘sheets’ will take you to a page with several tiled links (in Chinese), each of which links to a bilingual PDF presentation. I recognized them as poster presentations from Dashilar, covering everything from the Historic Situation [PDF] to the Strategy Overview [PDF], as well as an overview of the PILOT program [PDF].
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