Design

Urban China Magazine
A spread from Urban China, which each month deals with a different subject concerning Chinese architecture

Urban China Magazine

Design

Made in China

Urban China magazine founder, designer and architect Jiang Jun was interested in journalism since his time as a student at the Tongji University, when he was editing the school’s magazine “Future Architect”.

He established Urban China in 2004, with the first issue launching in 2005. Almost 40 issues have been published until then and the magazine is now available on a monthly basis.

Choosing a different subject for every month, Jiang Jun and his broad team of collaborators have touched on several, yet equally important themes of Chinese architecture and its relation to planning and larger scale schemes. Their topics have ranged from “Informal Cities” and “Chinatown” to “Green Leap Forward” and “Chinese Education”, putting together a truly unique publication and the country’s very first urbanism magazine.

Urban China
See more spreads from China's first urbanism magazine: Urban China

Q&a with magazine founder, designer and architect Jiang Jun

W*: Who do you work with? How do you choose your contributors?
JJ: We work with very diverse contributors including officials, sociologists, architects, photographers, artists, and institutions of various disciplines including governments, universities, media, think tanks and specific events. Urban China is a project-oriented magazine based on inter-disciplinary cooperation.

W*: What is the state of urban planning in China today?
JJ: Urban planning has become one of the main means of macro-economic control, as it defines land use. As, in China, the land market is monopolized by local governments, urban planners are essentially the consultants for these decision-makers.

W*: What do you consider to be the biggest urbanism problems China is facing?
JJ: An immature regulation system in marketing property that used to be state-owned.

W*: And, what is China's biggest asset when it comes to urban planning?
JJ: Urban planning has a central role in financial planning. It acts as an effective control tool of the market, which contributes to planning capitalism.

W*: What is your approach?
JJ: To be progressive and respond to change, and at the same time, to be determined and strict in executing what has been decided.

W*: Every issue has a different theme. How do you choose your themes? What kind of topics do you cover?
JJ: We usually set up a list of topics at the beginning of a year, deploy them to different groups, set up an editorial model for each topic as the result of a research process, then send it to the contributors. There is a ping-pong process via which we might optimize the research model and decide who are going to be the final contributors. Then, we ourselves will do all the in-between work to link all the contributions together into a single integrated work. The decision of the topics is a mixture of the work in Underline Office and our prediction of the hotspots in the coming year. Before Urban China, I was working on a book called HiChina, which is actually a generic model of all the interrelated topics of a city. Urban China works on all of these topics.

W*: How do you see the future of Urban China?
JJ: Urban China could be more than a mere magazine in the future: actually, an online platform could be more effective and feasible. As a magazine, we can continue our experimental practice in broader projects, such as Urban Asia. The material and knowledge of Urban China could also be recycled and reflected in more products like books, exhibitions and websites.

9 June 2009 | Design