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The City is So Young:

Interview with Yan Meng
Progressive ideas and research place Shenzhen-based urban design and architecture
practice URBANUS at the forefront of both local and global practice. Yan Meng, one of its
three principals, shared his insider view and insights with the Global Schindler Award,
highlighting the unique characteristics of Shenzhen and the potential for collective student
participation to contribute to todays challenges in planning for the cities of tomorrow. Mr.
Meng will be a member of the jury for the Global Schindler Award.
GSA: A certain density and certain development pressures and a unique history in
the Chinese context characterize Shenzhen. How do you, as an urban designer and
as an architect, engage with the city?
Yan Meng: Shenzhen is unique in terms of the development speed and strategy, and its
very artificial in a way. It was fabricated as experimental ground in the late 1970s and
early 1980s. A lot of people would say that Shenzhen as a city doesnt have a history, but
actually thats wrong. It has a unique history that we, a lot of the time, intentionally or
unintentionally ignore. In order to approach and understand a city, you need to do
thorough research. You have to be grounded in the city and really dig into it. We call this
strategy research-lead design. Especially in a globalized world where everybody is
working globally somehow, in unfamiliar areas, you have to try your best to understand
the problem at the very beginning what is really the problem of a particular city, whether
its Shenzhen or somewhere in Brazil or the US. If you can define the essential problem
better, then possibly you can come up with a better solution. We have so many solutions
proposed without clearly defining the problems. We want to target and be more specific in
our research about Shenzhen.

Global Schindler Award

GSA: What are some of the most important problems that you either have been
involved in - or want to be involved in - as an office?
YM: One of the most urgent urban problems, I would say, is the so-called urban
regeneration or urban renewal project, especially in a city like this, which only has thirtysome years of history. Right now theres a big campaign from the city level to redevelop
because the city now has very limited land resources; it cannot sprawl over an unlimited
amount of space. People have to reexamine places like its center which have already
been developed, redeveloped, sometimes at a very high density already, as possible sites
for redevelopment. It is a tricky situation, because it has already been built, it already has
a very delicate complex social network and community life;it is pretty much mature. If you
have to redevelop, the problem is that a lot of times most of the people have to be driven
out. Then they are replaced by, for example, the inhabitants of super-luxury apartments,
which, of course, only sell to the super-rich. Instead of getting more diverse, the city is
getting extreme and monolithic. Of course, this is not a unique issue in Shenzhen it is
everywhere but, in Shenzhen, because the city is so young, it doesnt have a lot of
layers of historic development. Everything was packed into less than forty years, so the
issue is more severe.
GSA: Is it almost that a process of urban editing is needed, that you have to
decide where to renew things, where to take things out entirely? Or would you say
that its more looking at how to redensify? What are some of the approaches?
YM: Redensification, I think, from the spatial, physical point of view, but on the other hand,
I think that how after this, another wave of urban redevelopment the social aspects of
the city can especially nurture very positive and healthier urban life. I think this is always
the big challenge for a city like this, because everything happens so fast. We dont have
much time to digest and there are not many lessons that we can learn, or precedents that
come, from other countries. At this point, we think it is really important to engage the
government, the developer, architects, social scholars, and all these people maybe
there should be some kind of a platform. We are trying to go beyond the traditional role of
the architect as a service provider. We think that architects can play a much more
significant role as collaborators or coordinators, to balance the needs of different parties
because everybody has their own agenda. For example, last week, we held a symposium
in our E-6 gallery. We engaged people from the government, developers, even some of
the residents of the urban village clusters, and also other architects working on the urban
redevelopment projects. Everybody came together, shared ideas and expressed what
they think this is important, what they want to get from the redevelopment. It was quite a
good occasion. But most of the time things like this are usually organized back-to-back, so
there is no chance to share.

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Global Schindler Award

We also do a lot of independent research, sometimes sponsored by government planning

institutions, sometimes by developers. We try to find a strategy even before the
architecture design and urban design, about how to redevelop some of the sites.
To just give some of the background, the things that go beyond the typical architects
work. URBANUS is unique in this aspect.
GSA: So would you say that youre kind of defining a new mode of practice?
YM: I think so, yes. Especially in China and in this type of city, because there are so many
problems around us, we, as architects, cannot really escape to somewhere else and then
try to do some fancy architecture. A lot of times you really need to engage with the city
more; I think this is really one of the most unique aspects of URBANUS we actively
engage and sometimes we promote ourselves not only as architects but also as strategic
coordinators and maybe as the urban curators that we sometimes call ourselves. We try
to do more.
GSA: For students of urban design, given these pressures, for instance in the
Chinese context, in the context of Shenzhen, how can they begin to help to address
these things, through these new modes of practice and through research?
YM: I think the platform is important. The student alone cannot really achieve a whole lot.
But I think the university, and a group of students lead by professors and specialists, can
work together with local architects and researchers, all in collaboration is much more
interesting, can do more. We have so many real problems facing us; we dont have to do
just theoretical projects. Of course we have the theoretical background, but on the other
hand we have some real problems, real sites, so I think a good strategy is to collaborate
with the local knowledge-holders.
GSA: Through the Global Schindler Award were trying to engage students
worldwide in questions of globalization, urbanization through mobility, accessibility
to different services and opportunities in the city. Do you think that students
worldwide can begin to approach these problems collaboratively?
YM: I think so. The global aspect of these kinds of projects is quite interesting to me.
People can really share a lot of their experiences and diverse ideas from different parts of
the world. This could be an interesting thing to explore, to work with the locals and also
with people from the universities and other fields, who have a deeper understanding and
more of a global viewpoint. There is the potential there for interesting and productive
collaboration.

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Global Schindler Award