Arcadia Cloud

Landscape intervention
Guizhou, China 2016

Cities, the nodes of globalization, are the densest opportunities for social expression, as well as easiest escape to an evenness of culture. Globally ubiquitous technologies disseminate lifestyles, and their associated models of urbanity, which when rapidly deployed worldwide result in decontextualized urban interventions.


For instance, major orthogonal planned cities that, driven by a foreign need for resource efficiency, avoid geographic singularities in urban planning (Rem Koolhaas, Whatever happened to urbanism). In China, nowadays, this is represented by the super-block, or xiaoqu, that emerges from traditional and imported gridded floor plans (The Rites of Zhou, Ordenanzas de Felipe II). Celled up in micro-apartments, the bursting city teems with social isolation and declining standards of life. (Figure 1. Comparison of gridded plans of New York and Beijing).