Unfolding the Megacity
This is Juan Du on a bridge, dressed in her usual black loose-fit style, wearing bright red lipstick, and smiling. Behind her stand a series of ‘cage home’ buildings in Hong Kong. Cage homes are subdivided apartments of less than 100 square feet, with communal bathrooms and usually no kitchens. [1] The fast highway bridge, together with the tower blocks full of crowded homes in the background, manifest the multi-layered, composite and contradictory nature of the megacity; with a peaceful facial expression, she is determined to unravel and improve it in her own way.
Juan Du is an architect, but also, and perhaps more importantly, a renowned scholar of the urbanisation process in Asia, especially in informal communities within huge cities. Through her design practice, research and teaching, Du is committed to promoting a more socially and environmentally responsible design for cities and their people.
Du was born around 1977 to an intellectual family in northern China, not far from the sea. As a child, she already showed talent and enthusiasm for painting and history, forecasting her future ‘parallel practice-and-academia career.’ [2] Her family moved to the US in 1989, possibly due to political concerns. From the age of sixteen, Du attended the University of Florida, where she completed a Bachelors in architecture. Her curiosity to explore, and eagerness to win, pushed her to graduate successfully, a feat that only one-fifth of her classmates achieved.
After practising across the US and Europe, Du completed a Masters in architecture at Princeton University, and was invited to curate the 2005 Shenzhen/Hongkong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/Architecture. This marked the start of her long-term research into Shenzhen’s rapid development. Strolling down the narrow streets of urban villages, she was struck by a sense of familiarity – it reminded her of her childhood in northern China. Originating from China and yet raised with a multi-cultural background, her unique experience provided her with a dual insider-outsider perspective on China. With that, she focused on the interplay between the bottom-up vividness of people and the top-down reforming plan, which lays the foundation for her book, The Shenzhen Experiment, published in 2020.
In 2006, Du relocated to Hong Kong, where she founded her own studio, IDU, and became Associate Professor at the University of Hong Kong. Over the next fifteen years, she established the Urban Ecologies Design Lab and led in-depth research on urgent architectural and social problems, including Project Home Improvement – a community design initiative providing upgrades for ‘cage home’ residents. Du went on to finish her doctoral thesis on Shenzhen’s informal communities at ETH Zurich in 2019, then expanded it into the award-winning book, The Shenzhen Experiment, emphasising contingent factors such as history, ecology, politics, culture and, especially, people, in the city’s success. In 2021, she became Dean of the Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design at the University of Toronto.
Besides the political or economic approach, Du has established an alternative, gentle but reactive, path for architects to drive social change, which becomes her unique agency towards cities. She brings together macroscopic urban research and microscopic engagement with disadvantaged communities through innovative design experiments with a reflective attitude to alter existing conditions. Such experimentations have allowed her to ‘evolve from a scholar-practitioner to a public scholar, and perhaps now a developing activist-practitioner’ [3] – all towards a more people-oriented and sustainable city.
Image Credits : Photo by Tsang Hin Chung (曾憲宗).
1. Berlinger, Joshua. “Social Distancing in 100 Square Feet: Hong Kong’s Cage Homes Are Impossible to Self-Isolate In.” CNN, 26 Apr. 2020. Web. (Accessed 20 July 2022) Link.
2. Williams, Austin, and Xin Zhang. New Chinese Architecture: Twenty Women Building the Future. Thames and Hudson, 2019.
Tutors:
Dr. Cathelijne Nuijsink and Léa-Catherine Szacka
Students:
Michela Bonomo, Branet Inès, Margherita Pia Carla Annamaria Chiozzi, Abigail Sian Connolly, Ileana Crim, Sonya Falkovskaia, Leandra Graf, Nils Willem Grootenzerink, Marie Liane Hausmann, Sophie Elisabeth Keller, Sichen Li, Xinyi Li, Catia Marcotulio, Oana Emma Popescu, Elena Rieger, Dara Fiona Rüfenacht, Alejandra Schmid Lamarty, Max Irving Schubert, Chloe Miette Szwarc, Julia Francesca Tanner, Julie Alodie Agnès Theythaz, Sophia-Christine Maria Trumpp, Eva Pia Tschopp
Guest Lecturers:
Dr.Hannah le Roux, Dr. Rixt Woudstra
(Guest) Reviewers:
Prof. Tom Avermaete, Dr. Irina Davidovici, Dr. Carlotta Darò
Teaching Assistant:
Annamaria Bonzanigo
Online Exhibition Support:
Maaike Goedkoop, Kaspar Zilian, Leandra Graf
This course was taught during Dr. Léa-Catherine Szacka’s research stay at ETH Zürich, made possible with a Scientific Exchange Grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNFS).
Contact:
Léa-Catherine Szacka, Cathelijne Nuijsink
