Begins	15 Feb 2008 - 2:00pm
Ends	15 Feb 2008 - 6:00pm
Location	Wolff Conference Room, 65 Fifth Ave., 2nd floor

At The New School University Presented by the Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA), Parsons Department of Architecture, Interior Design and Lighting (AIDL) and the India China Institute (ICI)

Like no other city, Shenzhen embodies China’s massive transformation over the last three decades. Designated as China’s first Special Economic Zone, Shenzhen grew from a handful of rural villages to a dynamic city of over twelve million people in little over a generation. This breathless urban explosion is an experiment in the production and ordering of global excess, a laboratory for market transformation and social control, a site for futuristic urban design, and above all a collective process of creation. This series of events presents a visual and scholarly investigation into the texture of this city and the anxious landscapes engendered by globalization. Panels, films, and exhibits range from Shenzhen’s business core to its artistic fringe, with a special focus on the built environment, designing for civic engagement and the social phenomenon of urban villages. All events are free and open to the public

Wednesday, February 13th
Time: 6:00 - 7:30pm
Location: 25 East 13th Street, room E302
Film: Paigu: The Private World of a DVD Pirate
A Documentary Film by Liu Gaoming. Introduced by Mary Ann O’Donnell

Thursday, February 14th
Time: 4:00 - 5:30pm
Location: 66 West 12th Street, room 510
Panel Discussion: “Chinese Art for the Chinese? Chinese Art between the Local Scene and the Global Market Place.” Panelists include Yang Qian, and Heike Arzápalo, moderated by Vyjayanthi Rao

Thursday, February 14th
Time: 6:15 - 8:00 pm
Location : Parsons Architecture Gallery, 25 East 13th Street, 2nd floor.
Exhibit Opening: “Shenzhen: Urban Design and Urban Villages” with Gallery Talk Photographs by Mary Ann O’Donnell, designs by Urbanus, Architecture and Design Inc., Re-Luohu Studio from Hong Kong University, Meng Yan and Frankie Lui, and Khoury, Levit, Fong, Architects (Toronto). Curated by Brian McGrath and Alan Burton. The exhibit runs from Monday, February 11th through Wednesday, February 27th.

Friday, February 15th. Time: 2:00 - 6:00 pm
Location: Wolff Conference Room, 65 Fifth Ave., 2nd floor.
Vexed Urbanism: A Symposium on Design and the Social
Panelists include David Harvey, Grahame Shane, Keller Easterling, Mary Ann O'Donnell, Brian McGrath, Vyjayanthi Rao, Adriana Abdenur, Bach, John Lee, Robert Levit and Emie Wang. Detailed schedule and participant bios follows below:

 

Vexed Urbanism: A Symposium on Design and the Social

Day: Friday February 15 th, 2008
Time: 2:00 - 6:00pm
Location: The New School – Wolff Conference Room, 65 Fifth Ave., 2nd floor

Free and open to the public.

Part of the series on Shenzhen: On and Beyond China’s Fastest Growing City at The New School – Presented by the Graduate Program in International Affairs (GPIA), Parsons Department of Architecture, Interior Design and Lighting (AIDL) and the India China Institute (ICI) February 13-15^th 2008. Contact: gpiaevents@newschool.edu.

This symposium caps a series of events surrounding Shenzhen, China’s preeminent modern city. The panelists examine the phenomenon of “instant” urbanism embodied by Shenzhen and visible in new model cities and agglomerations expanding at breakneck speed from South Korea to India’s Special Economic Zones to the islands of Dubai. These cities present themselves as the global frontier, as infrastructure cities that unabashedly embrace utopian economic discourses combined with a fantasy of the clean slate and new horizons for architectural experimentation. While meticulously planned for prestige and production, these cities are, willingly or not, also collective processes, collaborations, appropriations, and re-combinations. These processes, often on desperately unequal terms, are the focus of the symposium. Social scientists and practicing architects and designers will examine the intersection of design for global urban nodes with the lived experience of their inhabitants and the resulting perturbations, schemes, adjacencies, and compromises that delineate the emerging geography of the contemporary “global” city.

Urban Villages and Urban Design: Mary Ann O’Donnell, Anthropologist (Shenzhen), John Lee, Architect, Edward Barnes Studio/SBC Global (Los Angeles), Robert Levit, Khoury, Levit, Fong, Architects (Toronto)

The Urban Beyond—From Shenzhen to Beijing : Vyjayanthi Rao, Anthropologist, The New School, Emie Wang, Architect, MOCHEN (Beijing)

From CBD (Central Business District) to Central Shopping District (CSD) Adriana Abdenur, Urban Sociologist, The New School, Brian McGrath, Architect & faculty, Parsons, The New School

Break: 3:45 - 4:15 pm

• David Harvey, Geographer, City University of New York (CUNY)
• Jonathan Bach: International Affairs, The New School
• Keller Easterling: Architect & faculty, Yale University
• Grahame Shane: Architect & faculty, Cooper Union

Panelists Bios:

David Harvey, a leading theorist in the field of urban studies whom Library Journal called "one of the most influential geographers of the later twentieth century," earned his Ph.D. from Cambridge University, was formerly professor of geography at Johns Hopkins, a Miliband Fellow at the London School of Economics, and Halford Mackinder Professor of Geography at Oxford. His reflections on the importance of space and place (and more recently "nature") have attracted considerable attention across the humanities and social sciences. His highly influential books include The New Imperialism; Paris, Capital of Modernity; Social Justice and the City; Limits to Capital; The Urbanization of Capital; The Condition of Postmodernity; Justice, Nature, and the Geography of Difference; Spaces of Hope; and Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. His numerous awards include the Outstanding Contributor Award of the Association of American Geographers and the 2002 Centenary Medal of the Royal Scottish Geographical Society for his "outstanding contribution to the field of geographical enquiry and to anthropology." He holds honorary degrees from the universities of Buenos Aires, Roskilde in Denmark, Uppsala in Sweden, and Ohio State University.

Grahame Shane is Adjunct Professor of Architecture at Cooper Union. He taught design at Architectural Association (1972-76), Bennington College (1976-82), Cornell University (1981-2), Rice University (1983), Columbia (1986-89), Urban Design at University of Pennsylvania (1990-91), Urban Design at Columbia (1991), Director Urban Design Studio II at Columbia (1992-9). He has recently been a Visiting Professor of Urban Design at the University of Montreal (2000-1). He lectures at the Bartlett School of Architecture Graduate Urban Design Program, University of London (2000-2004) and conducts Master Classes at the University of Venice (2002-2004). He is also teaching at Cooper Union and the City College. He has lectured extensively in Europe and the United States on architecture and urbanism and has published widely in architectural journals including Casabella, Architectural Design, Design Book Review, Harvard Design Magazine, Journal of Architectural Education, and Architectural Record. His book Recombinant Urbanism; Conceptual modeling in Architecture, Urban Design and City Theory will be published by Wiley International in London in March 2005.

Keller Easterling is an architect, urbanist, and writer. Her latest book, Enduring Innocence: Global Architecture and Its Political Masquerades (MIT, 2005), researches familiar spatial products that have landed in difficult or hyperbolic political situations around the world. Her previous book, Organization Space: Landscapes, Highways and Houses in America, applies network theory to a discussion of American infrastructure and development formats. Ms. Easterling is also the author of Call It Home, a laser disc history of suburbia; and American Town Plans. She has recently completed two research installations on the Web: “Wildcards: A Game of Orgman” and “Highline: Plotting NYC.” Her work has been widely published in journals such as Grey Room, Volume, Cabinet, Assemblage, Log, Praxis, Harvard Design Magazine, Perspecta, Metalocus, and ANY. Her work is also included as chapters in numerous publications. She has lectured widely in the United States as well as internationally. Ms. Easterling’s work has been exhibited at the Queens Museum, the Architectural League, the Municipal Arts Society, and the Wexner Center. Ms. Easterling taught at Columbia prior to coming to Yale.

Mary Ann O'Donnell is an anthropologist living in Shenzhen, where she is a Research Associate at the College of Arts, Shenzhen University. She writes "As anthropologist, as teacher, as translator, as photographer, and as dramaturge, I have sought alternative ways of inhabiting Shenzhen, the oldest and largest of China’s special economic zones. In 1980, Chinese urban planners set out to design a city that met the criteria of an international city. They also intended to build a city that would attract international investment. Consequently, Shenzhen was built to be a space where Chinese and non-Chinese could come together. Obviously, Shenzhen urban design presupposed that business would be the point of all this collaboration. And yet non-economic values have also taken root in capitalist soil. I create and contribute to projects that reconfigure such shared spaces, where our worlds mingle and collide, sometimes collapse, and often implode.

Brian McGrath is Registered Architect in New YorkState since 1985 and New jersey since 2003. He is currently teaching at the Parsons School of Designin New York and Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok in addition toColumbia. He is a founder of urban-interface.com, an interdisciplinarystudio for urban ecosystem design projects in built and mediaenvironments.



Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at the New School for Social Research.She is currently completing a book manuscript of essays tentatively titled “Globalization and the Speculative Ethic: Space, Violence, and Subjectivity in Postindustrial




Adriana Abdenur earned her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University. Her research interests include international development, urban inequality, social movements, social theory, and spatial analysis. She is currently working on two research projects: a comparative study of land conflicts and urban governance in Brazil and South Africa, and a collaborative project on environmental degradation and social conflict in Wyoming's Powder River Basin. She holds a joint appointment with the Graduate Program in International Affairs.

Jonathan Bach is Associate Professor of International Affairs and the Associate Director of the Graduate Program in International Affairs at the New School. He works on contemporary reformulations of sovereignty, space, and identity. Before coming to the New School he held post-doctoral research positions at Columbia University’s Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy and Harvard University’s center for European Studies, and visiting positions at Columbia’s Harriman Institute and the Institute for Peace Research and Security Studies at the University of Hamburg. He is the author of Between Sovereignty and Integration: German Foreign Policy and National Identity after 1989 (St. Martin’s Press 1999), and his articles have appeared in Geopolitics, Public Culture, Studies in Comparative and International Development, Foreign Policy in Focus, Peace Review, and Philosophy and Social Science.

John M. Y. Lee, FAIA was a partner with Michael Timchula at the John M.Y. Lee/Michael
Timchula Architect in New York from 1993 to 2004. From 1987 to 1993, Mr. Lee
was a partner at Edward Larrabee Barnes / John M. Y. Lee, Architects where
he shared overall design responsibility with Edward Larrabee Barnes. He was
a partner of Edward Larrabee Barnes Associates from 1981 to 1987, an
associate of the same firm from 1971 to 1981 and a designer from 1967 to
1970. Mr. Lee's experience ranges from museums and academic buildings to office
buildings and master planning in this country as well as China, Australia
and Singapore. His commercial projects include the headquarters of China
Merchants Bank, regional headquarters of Legend (Inovo), both in Shenzhen,
and the utility headquarters in Tienjin, IBM's 590 Madison Avenue
headquarters and 599 Lexington Avenue in New York, Crown Center in Kansas
City, Breakers Row condominiums in Palm Beach and Pine Resort in Australia.
For government projects, he has designed the Citizen Center in Shenzhen and
the Federal Judiciary Building in Washington D.C. He has also worked on the
Asia Society in New York and the Dallas Museum of Art. His academic projects
include the new campus master plan and five phases of Biomedical Research
Buildings for The University of Texas, Southwestern Medical Center in
Dallas; and the Science and Technology Library at Utah State University.

Emie Hui Wang is President of MoChen Architects & Engineers. Based in
Beijing, MoChen is a privately owned Grade A firm accredited to provide
comprehensive design services including urban planning, architectural,
landscape and interior design, as well as structural and MEP engineering.
MoChen currently has over 130 employees, with offices in Beijing, Shanghai
and Tianjin. Emie co-founded MoChen in 1995. Emie is also selected Expert Member to several important government bodies of Beijing, providing expert advises in evaluation processes of a lot of
important civic/urban projects. These bodies include Advisory Group of
Beijing Municipal Government, Expert Panel of Beijing Municipal Planning
Commission and The Committee of Urban Sculpture and Environmental Art, Urban
Science Research Association of Beijing. Emie received her bachelor¹s degree
in Architecture from Tsinghua University in Beijing in 1991. In 2006 she got
her master¹s degree in Urban Design from Columbia University.

Robert Levit is Associate Professor of Architecture, Director of the Master
of Urban Design Program and a Cities Centre Senior Research Associate at the
University of Toronto. He is a partner in Khoury Levit Fong Partnership. He
was involved with the design of the The Museum of Contemporary Art and
Planning Exhibition Hall (MOCAPE) Shenzhen, China. (Khoury Levit Fong
Partnership International Competition Finalist (1 of 4), 2007). MOCAPE is an
80,000 square meter museum with which the city of Shenzhen plans to complete
its civic district.