2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture

Urban Border

6 December 2013–28 February 2014

The 2013 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture in Shenzhen took ‘urban border’ as its theme. For good reason. If there is a place to study ‘border’ as condition, it is Shenzhen. Demographic, territorial, economic, political, social, and legal borders created this fifteen million city in less than thirty-five years, and drive its further development. The transformation of this ‘factory of the world’ into a post-industrial economy and society, the disappearance of the Hong Kong-Shenzhen divide in 2047, and the reconciliation of state capitalism and communist rule, are but three of the challenges Shenzhen is facing, to which its role and position in the larger-scale development of the Pearl River Delta can be added.

Volume’s editorial team spent three weeks in Shenzhen for the occasion of the Shenzhen Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture. The outcome of the stay in China is a Shenzhen-themed issue.

Read Volume #39 online on ISSUU.