Digital Dialogue #23

July 23, 2025, 13:00-14:30

As part of the Digital Workshop Series “Digital Dialogues”, researchers discuss various aspects and questions of the Joint Center “Worldmaking”.

Digital Workshop Series "Digital Dialogues" #23: The Future of Chinese Cities: From Landmark Architecture to Flying Cars. A Digital Dialogue with Wen Zengxin, Gladys Pak Lei Chong and Dennis Zuev.

Chinese cities have long used landmark architecture to project an image of futurity. While many internationally renowned architects have left their signatures in China’s urbanscape, the emphasis shifted over time to include domestic contributors. Nowadays, this futuristic city image is more often than not built on abstract technologies rather than concrete architectural projects. What connects the two, however, is the entanglement of politics and markets in their creation. This digital dialogue brings two perspectives in conversation that shed their respective lights on the way this nexus has evolved over time. Zengxin Wen traces the history of Shanghai Grand Theater—completed during 1993-1998, known as the first public landmark commissioned to foreign architects in post-reform China—through a lately uncovered archive of its plans, competition texts, and drawings. He argues that the glass building not only represented market forces through its symbolic agenda but also enacted market-making in its material production; under a state-orchestrated redivision of aesthetic and technical expertise, architecture was reconstructed into a domain of “culture” as the jurisdiction of architects shifted from all-around “technologists” of the Maoist era to creative “authors” for a market economy.

The second contribution by Gladys Pak Lei Chong and Dennis Zuev examines the emerging economy around drones and “flying cars” in South China cities which are currently exploring the new “low altitude economy” (LAE). Airborne mobility can be seen as an important alternative option or additional option for land-based mobility practices, such as logistics, short-range passenger mobility and recreational mobility. With the need for low-carbon on demand transportation electric vertical takeoff operated vehicles eVTOLs are becoming a new pathway for transition to low-carbon aerial mobility. Their project aims to provide a fine-grained analysis of diverse social practices of urban aerial mobility embedded in the context of the sociotechnical transition.

Speaker Biographies

Zengxin Wen is a Ph.D. Candidate in Architecture at Tongji University and held a visiting fellowship at MIT during 2023-24. His research focuses on the transnational histories of 20th-century built environment, science and technology studies, and the political economy of design. His work has been published in Architectural Journal and presented at interdisciplinary platforms such as the Association of Asian Studies, Society of Architectural Historians, and the Harvard GRiSTS Forum. Zengxin also coordinates the digital archival project “Municipality and Municipal Architecture in Modern Shanghai.” He has practiced as an assistant curator for exhibitions at the Aedes (Berlin), SUSAS (Shanghai), Venice Biennale, Curitiba Biennale, and MIT City Science Lab. His ongoing exhibition, Building Shanghai, is supported by the Centre Pompidou X West Bund Museum Project.

Gladys Pak Lei Chong is Associate Professor of the Department of Humanities and Creative Writing at Hong Kong Baptist University. She received her Ph.D. in Media and Cultural studies and MA (cum laude) in Migration and Ethnic studies from the University of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. She researches (Chinese) governmentalities, cultural governance, subjectification, power-relations, society and technology, infrastructure and platform studies. She authored Chinese Subjectivities and the Beijing Olympics and co-edited two academic books, Trans-Asia as Method: Theory and Practices (2020), and Critiquing Communication Innovation: New Media in a Multipolar World (2022). Her work appears in journals like Men and Masculinities, interconnections: journal of posthumanism, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Visual Studies, Global Media and China, Science, Technology and Society, The Information Society, Chinese Journal of Communication, China Information, International Journal of the History of Sport and Journal of Current Chinese Affairs. Her research on youth aspirations, and technology, security, and risk are funded by the Hong Kong Research Grant Council.

Dennis Zuev is a senior researcher at CIES-ISCTE (Portugal) and coordinator of the Research Lab for Cultural Sustainability at University of St. Joseph, Macau. He is an associated researcher of Urban Transitions Hub and Instituto Oriente, both at University of Lisbon, Portugal. He has been conducting research in and about China since 1997, since 2013 he has been conducting research on Chinese e-mobility and urban transportation. He also conducted fieldwork in Macau, Argentina, Germany and Russia. He published a first book-length study on e-bikes in China: Urban Mobility in Contemporary China: the growth of the E-bike (Palgrave, 2018). Together with Gary Bratchford he has published books Vision and Verticality: A multidisciplinary Approach (Palgrave, 2023) and Aerial Visibilities: New Thoughts and Further Possibilities (Routledge, 2025). He is currently co-editor of the Palgrave book series Social Visualitites, co-editor of the journal Visual Studies (Taylor&Francis) and member of the editorial board of the journal Mobilities (Taylor&Francis).

Access:

Access via Zoom:

https://uni-wuerzburg.zoom-x.de/j/66179688161?pwd=H4J1bgUOoiQQzQQJkS6PNGNq2YNldM.1

Please note that the event will be recorded.