A British architect and I once strolled along Wu Da Dao (Five Great Avenues) in Tianjin, China, a residential area built by British arrivals in the early 20th century. While standing in front of these European-style houses, the architect exclaimed that the area is like an elegant British gentleman but with a Chinese accent! Similar feelings of déjà vu had also emerged in front of me when I walked on the Liepu Aleja Brīvības bulvāris in Riga, Latvia, or the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia, USA. Although these designed landscapes are located in different cities and even countries, their constructions are all under the light of the Avenue des Champs-élysées of Paris, France, and present distinctive localized characteristics.
What promotes various landscape factors to be carried across national borders? And how are these landscape factors integrated with local identities and qualities, and thereby generate such various representations?
Provincializing transnational landscape is drawing increasing attention from international academia. This, on the one hand, benefits from the rapid growth of transnational landscape activities. With the process of globalization, transnational flows of capital exchange, commodities, business communities, and migratory movements carry landscape ideas, aesthetics, technologies, and materials across national boundaries, interacting with local conditions to promote the landscape evolution and development of the world[1]. During this process, these landscape elements interplay with political, economic, social, and cultural actors, and thereby making these actors encode into the landscapes and present them in front of the public to promote the development of landscapes.
On the other hand, the rise of the topic of localizing transnational landscape results from the shift of the academic research paradigm. Since Michael Peter Smith published Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization[1] in 2001, the transnational perspective has emerged in academia. Rather than focusing on the landscape homogenization brought by globalization, this perspective emphasizes the differences and changes produced by the transcendence of cultural, political, and economic borders of nations. Recently, it is even gaining increasing attention. For example, the journal Urban History published a special issue of “Transnational Urbanism in the Americas”[2] in 2009, and Davide Ponzini, a professor from Politecnico di Milano, Italy, published the book Transnational Architecture and Urbanism—Rethinking How Cities Plan, Transform and Learn[3] in 2020.
Therefore, it calls for us to move beyond the political, economic, social, and cultural boundaries of nations to explore mechanisms, processes, and influence of provincializing transnational landscape, contributing to developing practices and theories of landscape architecture.
It is particularly important for China to study provincializing transnational landscape. Firstly, China has been closely connecting with both Eastern and Western countries, for example, through the Silk Road and the Imperial Chinese Tributary System. The provincialization of landscape ideas not only forms the inclusive landscape layout of China but also promotes the spread of Chinese culture around the world. Studying provincializing transnational landscape will shed light on re-considering China’s historical local-global interactions through the landscape, and provide a lens of “the Other” to explore the regional characteristics of landscapes in China, which, in turn, will advance the research on the landscape, cultural, and communication histories of China and beyond.
Secondly, with the process of rapid urbanization, many transnational landscape ideas and technologies (such as green cities and carbon neutrality) popular in Europe and America are introduced into China. Examining provincializing transnational landscape will contribute to facilitating the implementation of these ideas and technologies in China by providing theoretical and practical support.
Last but not least, studying provincializing transnational landscape will aid China to advance its transnational economic cooperation frameworks, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, in the context of the global economic and trade patterns and orders are reset with a post-pandemic world. In doing so, it will be beneficial to telling China’s story well, in order to let the world better understand China.
參考文獻
[1] Smith, M. P. (2001). Transnational Urbanism: Locating Globalization. Wiley-Blackwell.
[2] Reiff, J. L., & Ethington, P. J. (2009). Introduction. Urban History, 36(2), 195-201.
[3] Ponzini, D. (2020). Transnational Architecture and Urbanism—Rethinking How Cities Plan, Transform, and Learn. Routledge.
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