Guangzhou Bicycle Culture

I was amazed about the bicycle culture in Guangzhou, Gunagdong, China. When moving through the city, one gradient becomes apparent soon: the occurence of bicycles and their use in providing everyday amenities (mobility, transport and other services) is inversely correlated to the motorization of the urban fabric. Cars rule the streetlife more and more in China but the speed of takeover is not the same everywhere. In Shenzhen for example, cars are the only force on the road (as pedestrian you better watch out and run!). However there seems to be a different understanding persisting in the streets of Guangzhou, where people are walking in the middle of the street in the evening and sidewalks are occupied by street vendors and bicycle servicemen.

Also when visiting the older parts of town it is interesting to see how cars penetrate the streets which havent been designed for cars, and are thus finding their limits in small, narrow old streets where only pedestrians and bicycles can access. Within such neighbourhoods existing on the scale of a mini-blocka type of urban life unfolds suddenly to the visitor, a very urban and humanely loud and busy streetlife which is (to my experience) unknown to Europe and more and more diminished in China as well. Spontaneous street markets on tricycles, groups of women chatting in the street, kids and grandmas walking puppies in the road and grandpas hanging out in their chairs on the street. Such qualities I believe are worth extracting from life in the old urban fabric and can be brought into the design of small subunits of urban developments.

I am aware but wont discuss here the fact that such urban life is also tied to a certain income level and related issues of social disparity in modern China. For sure this is a cumulative effect of socio-economic factors and very difficult to address, but social upgrade of low-income classes is not prevented by the use of bicycles and the life in the old urban fabric. It may on the other hand be a viable strategy for urban development to develop unique urban qualities such as community life and streetlife - which are to a greater extent found within a dense and non-motorly mobilized urban fabric on a human scale - for the benefit of the residents.

Operating Shenzhen Bicycles

While staying here in Shenzhen there is the great opportunity to further the research of 'Smarter Than Car' about fading urban bicycle culture in China. The growing collection of portraits and snaps of bicycle livelihoods will allow us to describe the situation in Shenzhen and compare it to the research we previously did in Beijing.
A huge difference in Shenzhen to cities such as Beijing is that the local government stopped to build bicycle lanes about 20 years ago. This is definitely something you perceive within the streetscape, as well as the general absence of bicycle parking in the CBD area and shopping districts. Supposedly the bicycle doesnt fit well with the model of hyper growth in modern Shenzhen.

Summer School: Energy Landscapes 3.0

If you are free during the last week of July and engaged with the more and more regarded topic of energy landscapes, you may apply for a nice summer school with high profile advisors (and totally reasonable cost).
Bauhaus Dessau is organising a summer workshop Energy Landscapes 3.0, which aims to "analyse potential network geographies and concepts and their impacts on settlement structures in Europe. We will thereby explicitly refer to a chronicle of utopian thought on a large scale – visionary ideas for new Energy Landscapes promulgated decades ago by Sörgel in 1928 with Atlantropa and Richard Buckminster Fuller with his World Game in 1972."
An interesting detail from the synopsis of the summer school is that contemporary large scale fossil infrastructures should be redesigned in a 'smart' way. If we want to continue to use a comparable amount of energy (on a global scale) as we use today, we will have to innovate on a large spatial scale to complement a a dispersed renewable energy system of small power producing units. As stated earlier, it is important that designers engage in this discourse so that these new types of infrastructures can be welcomed by society and their additional values (as open spaces) appreciated. in this vein, the summer school has a great outreach of attracting participants from a wide range of disciplinary fields. 
The summer school Energy Landscapes 3.0 will be an opportunity to work with leading people within the landscape architecture profession and academia. For more information you may refer to the webpage of the summer school.
I am looking forward to the outcomes of the workshop and would appreciate if resulting designs and approaches are published online or in print.