VIRTUAL: Livable Cities – New York

Abstract

The Wenruitang water system has been structuring the settlement pattern in Wenzhou for more than a millennium. Being atransportation infrastructure, drainage canal, and irrigation system, it also has been the main space around which the public life ofthe villages was organized. Since the reform and opening up in the late 1970s, Wenzhou, like most cities in China, has beenthrough a territorial revolution which redefined the relationship that people have with their environment and together. Water gaveway to roads, highways, and train lines, and historical settlements were demolished to create high-rise housing, shopping malls,and other urban islands. The space around the river has been privatized to become the landscaped backyard of gatedcommunities or wasteland waiting to be redeveloped. Meanwhile, the new system of infrastructures saw an informal public lifegrowing around, often but not only, at the junction of the new roads and the old Wenruitang, bridges, and crossing providing a freeopen covered space. In 1965, Charles Moore, in “You have to Pay for Public Space,” observed the disappearance of dedicated public architecture inLos Angeles, a region dominated by car usage and individual housing nested in their Arcadian environment. He identified twotypes of new public spaces: the carefully crafted Disneyland and the freeways.Our work builds on Moore’s analysis to map how infrastructure systems have been the matrix of public spaces, driven by informaladaptations and usages, to reclaim a public space you don’t need to pay for.