These were followed by dishes of fried potato and aubergine, Luzhou Vacations rather a greasy meal but filling enough. Then we sat around talking with some locals, Luzhou Vacations one of whom played a bamboo flute. Twilight faded into pearly clouds beyond the wet tiles of the gatehouse roof.
We asked if many pilgrims still visit Mount Ju Jie Shan, and they said that few come, though there are occasional groups of Hong Kong Chinese who have heard about the mountain and come to climb it. They told us emphatically that they had not seen a European here before. At seven the next morning the three of us set out on a path up the lower slope of the mountain.
Introduction
The challenge in urban design is to create the conditions under which cultural meaning and value can be seeded and then grow organically, flexibly and responsively, rather than try to prescribe all of the meaning and value at the outset. Such seed conditions are developed from the use of three capitals: social capital, cultural capital and economic capital. The author argues that when architects and urban designers work to leverage these capitals there is a greater possibility of achieving a sustainable urban renaissance.
Historically, cities were rarely designed as a whole. Cities typically evolved in a responsive and dynamic manner over years or centuries. There are some examples of successful, large-scale city renewals, including medieval Paris by Haussmann for Napoleon in the 1850s and Barcelona’s Eixample egalitarian city extension in 1859 by Ildefons Cerda. Less common are examples of tabula rasa design – or design from scratch – such as Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh in India and Oscar Niemeyer’s Brasilia with Lucio Costa, both archetypes of modernism. Chandigarh and Brasilia date from the 1950s and are now World Heritage sites. The advent of the instant city is a twenty-first century phenomenon born in China, where plans to build 20 cities a year for the next 20 years have resulted in some bizarre outcomes, including 64 million empty homes and ghost towns in the desert (Mail 2011).
