The relevance of the Greater Bay Area within international geo-political assets is steadily increasing. Relying on projections and observations by Li Shiqiao, Rem Koolhaas and Manuel Castells as main bases for his interpretation of this process, Thomas Chung investigates the future layout that president Xi Jinxing’s project will delineate, involving nine urban areas of the Pearl River Delta and the two Special Administrative Regions of Hong Kong and Macao. In order to construct a range of possible futures, the author critically traces the various political turns that affected the Pearl River Delta since the 80s Open Door Policy up to affirming its contemporary role on a global scale.
For the 2019 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB), titled "Urban Interactions," (21 December 2019-8 March 2020) ArchDaily is working with the curators of the "Eyes of the City" section to stimulate a discussion on how new technologies might impact architecture and urban life. The contribution below is part of a series of scientific essays selected through the “Eyes of the City” call for papers, launched in preparation of the exhibitions: international scholars were asked to send their reflection in reaction to the statement by the curators Carlo Ratti Associati, Politecnico di Torino and SCUT, which you can read here.
The Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, whose development blueprint was finally released in February 2019 following the Framework Agreement signed in Hong Kong during the SAR’s 20th anniversary in 2017, is nothing less than a political megaproject directed from China’s highest level [1]. After four decades of reform and opening up, the driving force behind this explicit rebranding of the Pearl River Delta (PRD) is twofold, to reaffirm the region’s leading role in national economic development and to address both Chinese geopolitics as well as the country’s global ambitions. The Greater Bay Area (GBA), comprising the nine PRD cities plus the two SARs of Hong Kong and Macao, is presented as an extension of “PRD miracle” in a new phase. Began in 1979, the PRD’s market-oriented reform process has transformed the region from an economic backwater to a regional powerhouse of global significance [2]. From gaining notoriety as the “world’s factory” with cheap land and labour churning out low-end consumer products in the 1980s-90s, the PRD has been successively restructured, albeit somewhat unevenly, to be more identified with innovation-driven high-tech manufacturing aspiring to “smart city” developments. With emerging realities such as improved connectivity, rising affluence and mobility and the arrival of “new retail” with a technology-dependent digital economy, the national GBA directive calls for further commitment to regional cooperation while promising ample opportunities for growth.
