RAS Shanghai – The Urban Design of Concession: Tradition and Transformation in the Chinese Treaty Port
Posted: February 15th, 2012 | No Comments »RAS LECTURE
Tuesday 21st February 2012 at 7:00 p.m.
Tavern, Radisson Plaza Xingguo Hotel 78 Xing Guo Road, Shanghai
PETER COOKSON SMITH
The Urban Design of Concession: Tradition and Transformation in the Chinese Treaty Port
The Treaty Ports were established as beachheads of foreign influence around the coast of China during the mid-nineteenth century, a period of massive Western expansionism and trading ambition. These port cities, based on enforced treaties between China and Western powers, became the centres of foreign settlement and trade in China, opening up parts of the country to Western cultural influence just as much as they expanded investment and economic horizons. In a more elusive way, the nature of these new ‘gateways’ both into and out of China, transformed not only attitudes to modernization, but almost inadvertently fuelled changing political attitudes. Foreign concession and settlement areas, which generally formed separate but planned extensions to established city structures, offered an alternative urbanism outside hidebound tradition and state control.
The Treaty Ports can be considered from a number of perspectives – initially as differentiated societies with dual administrative structures; as socio-cultural phenomena; as new political power structures; as robust centres of international trade and commercial growth; and as new regimes of city building and institutional development. In all, the treaty port period reflected a frequently unstable but inevitable transition from the old to the new China.
The talk will focus on these aspects and some of the contextual changes in the main Treaty Ports of Shanghai, Guangzhou, Fuzhou, Ningbo, Xiamen, Dalian, Harbin, Nanjing, Tientsin, Qingdou, Hankow and Shantou over the past 150 years and will be accompanied by sketch illustrations showing the imprints on the modernizing cities of older places and spaces from these early times, which have left a residue of physical traces in terms of plan forms, streets and building groups.
Dr Peter Cookson Smith is an architect, planner and urban designer. He has been resident in Hong Kong since 1977 when he founded Urbis Limited one of the first specialist planning, urban design and landscape consultancies in South-east Asia.
Over the past 35 years, he has directed a large number of studies in Hong Kong, and throughout China and other parts of Asia including new town planning, urban regeneration, central area and waterfront studies.
He writes regularly on the subject of urban design and is the author of ‘The Urban Design of Impermanence’ on Hong Kong, ‘The Urban Design of Concession’ on the Treaty Port Cities in China, and the forthcoming ‘The Urban Design of Intervention’ on Asian Cities. He was a Professor in the Department of Architecture, University of Hong Kong 2000-2004, and is a member of the HKU Advisory Council for the Department of Planning and Urban Design. He is also a Visiting Scholar at the Centre for Asian Studies, HKU. He is currently the President of the Hong Kong Institute of Planners, and Vice-President of the Hong Kong Institute of Urban Design.
Entrance: RMB 30.00 (RAS members) and RMB 80.00 (non-members) those unable to make the donation but wishing to attend may contact us for exemption, prior to the RAS Lecture. Membership applications and membership renewals will be available at this event.
RSVP: to RAS Bookings at: bookings@royalasiaticsociety.org.cn
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