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What does it mean to be a good citizen today? What are practices of citizenship? And what can we learn from the past about these practices to better engage in city life in the twenty-first century? Ancient and Modern Practices of Citizenship in Asia and the West: Care of the Self is a collection of papers that examine these questions. The contributors come from a variety of different disciplines, including architecture, urbanism, philosophy, and history, and their essays make comparative examinations of the practices of citizenship from the ancient world to the present day in both the East and the West. The papers’ comparative approaches, between East and West, and ancient and modern, leads to a greater understanding of the challenges facing citizens in the urbanized twenty-first century, and by looking at past examples, suggests ways of addressing them. While the book’s point of departure is philosophical, its key aim is to examine how philosophy can be applied to everyday life for the betterment of citizens in cities not just in Asia and the West but everywhere.

This paper examines large development projects as a function of finance in the context of Hong Kong, taking Kowloon Station as an exceptionally revealing case. Hong Kong's property market is one of the most established in Asia, and it points to the ways in which large-scale development schemes proliferate along efficient and affordable mass transit railway systems with great speed and success. At Kowloon Station, finance redefines architecture; instead of focusing on aesthetics and community, it is now promoting standardization, market visibility and semantic control. The financial viability of these developments depends entirely on these new goals; mega-developments such as Kowloon Station – and those in other parts of Asia – are successful in inventing major mass transit railway stations as terminals, in capturing commuters within spatial enclosures surrounded by barrier-like physical features, and in terminating architecture as it has long been established as a discipline. Mega-development is increasingly reinventing the contemporary Asian city.

This piece presents the work of academics and architects in a collaborative venture. It provides an architectural design and a series of statements towards the hypothetical creation of an unconventional city centre in the Chinese city of Shenzhen. The idea is to create a linear university that would run the 20-kilometer length of the Shenzhen Strip: the 20K university. The contributors outline, in the diversity of their idioms, a complex spatial condition fundamental to life, and demonstrate new relationships between knowledge and the city. The design of the proposed ‘open university space’ responds to two simultaneous and interrelated challenges: that posed to architecture, and that posed to science. The university would embody the meeting of these at the intersection of the urban infrastructure and the knowledge infrastructure. The purpose is thus also to develop the notion of knowledge, embodied in institutions, as urban infrastructure. © 2011, SAGE, Los Angeles, London, New Delhi, and Singapore. All rights reserved.

The central concern of this paper is a characterization of a number of features forming a 'memory strategy' in Chinese cities. It is delineated against the background of a location-based memory strategy in the Western intellectual tradition, leading to what might be described as the 'archive city' which is underpinned, in a symbolic way, by the authentication, preservation and interpretation of ruins. The Chinese city, while being influenced by the demands of the archive city in the twentieth century, maintains simultaneously a separate layer of its own tradition of memory without location. This tradition could be seen to have created unique realities of architectural heritage, as well as their constant transformation, in Chinese cities in which the standards of the archive city could no longer remain the exclusive measure.

This article argues that contemporary Chinese architecture is profoundly shaped by a ‘culture of figuration’ that appears to be grounded in the way in which the Chinese square words manipulate images and meanings in relation to reality. This culture of figuration reconstitutes the image culture—as it has been constructed by the consumer society—and allies with the electronic media to produce a mediated architecture in China. As twentieth-century modernity articulated a critique of the image culture through the notion of authenticity, the culture of figuration anticipates a ‘figurative modernity,’ which suggests a possible space for a more reflexive architectural culture in China.

In this paper, I analyze several early-twentieth-century attempts to reprint, edit, and annotate a Northern Song dynasty (960-1127) construction manual, the Yingzao fashi (1103), each one revealing an aspect of the project to define Chinese architecture. As manifested in the research on the Yingzao fashi by a number of Chinese scholars and architects, the project to reconstitute and understand the text was closely connected to broader intellectual issues in early-twentieth-century China: nationalism, philological scholarship, and modern historiography. The Yingzao fashi was rediscovered in 1919 by politician and scholar Zhu Qiqian, who saw it as an important text that provided crucial knowledge of the tradition of Chinese architecture. It also became a central document in the construction of a modern Chinese architectural history by Liang Sicheng, Lin Huiyin, and Liu Dunzhen, which was founded on a historiography strongly influenced by the European Enlightenment tradition. Interest in the Yingzao fashi declined in the latter half of the twentieth century due to a Communist cultural policy germinated at Yan'an in the 1940s. The reappearance of the Yingzao fashi in the early twentieth century played a much broader intellectual role than the book originally had as a manual of construction and administration.

This paper delineates a broader intellectual agenda in Liang Sicheng's seminal writings on Chinese architectural history in the 1930s and 1940s, by linking them to the historiographical writings of his father Liang Qichao, an insightful and hugely influential figure in early twentieth-century China. This broadening of understanding of Liang Sicheng's work is vital not only to the understanding of his architectural writings themselves, but also to grasping some of the most far-reaching intellectual concerns of Chinese architecture in the twentieth century, to which Liang Sicheng's contributions are most crucial.