I found a story online about Guan Han Ji & Xiao Wang Qi, a shopkeepers couple from Nan Ting village.
(…) Xiao says before University City, they opened all day every day and had a busy pool hall on the 1st floor. Now she opens up 8am to midday and 5pm to 11pm. Afternoons are spent weeding a local farmer’s fields because she can earn more money that way. Similarly, Guan delivers gas cylinders throughout the village.(…)
Download a PDF with the whole story here.
INTRODUCTION
University Town is a strange, artificial environment: it’s not really a cityscape, nor is it a village, it’s a habitat that has some features of the city, but feels quite different. It feels isolated from reality. It has roads, bridges, parks and sportsfacilities. There’s public transport, there are shopping areas with banks, restaurants, fast food, and other services. There’s dormitory housing, there are school buildings, school canteens, museums and, finally, there are four villages. These last villages on the island will disappear very soon.
The villages provide a kind of public space that relates much more closely to the city, than the rest of the island does. Narrow chaotic streets, intimate small spaces to eat and or shop in, lively activity in the street, family life, various generations sharing the same public space. (how often do you see elderly people or young children on campus?).
Nan Ting Village is a place where many students of the GAFA go to hangout, barbecue, play pool, drink beer. Some students have their own small enterprises there. The villagers run restaurants and shops, there’s a market selling locally grown fruit and vegetables, locally caught fish. Villagers sit under the trees, playing chess, gossiping, smoking.
What will be left of any street life when Nan Ting, as it is now, is gone?
Where will the villagers go? What will be left of the history of this island? And how will campus life be without the little bit of liveliness and chaos that Nan Ting offers?
The new assignment is called Remembering Nan Ting, a Monument and can be downloaded here.
Here is a Google translation of the text.
To walk in a city without a set destination is relatively new. It was only in the twenties of the last century that the writer and philosopher Walter Benjamin invented the flaneur, a modern day man who went drifting trough the cities that emerged.
The website The Last Tourist is an example of mapping through writing stories and making drawings. It’s a project by Dutch artist Jan Rothuizen, who traversed the Chinese cities of the Pearl River Delta in 2005.
‘The last Tourist’ is an online passage along hand drawn maps, texts and photographs. This website provides a personal reading of the cities that write themselves.
