Chinese Trendsetters: Neville Mars and the Dynamic City Foundation

A few days ago CScout China paid a quick visit to the offices of the Dynamic City Foundation, a small Beijing-based research and design institute founded in 2004 that is focused on the rapid transformation of China’s urban landscape. We met creative director Neville Mars and had a chat about the DCF’s new book, The Chinese Dream – a society under construction.

Trained in Delft, the Netherlands, Neville Mars started his career working for OMA in Rotterdam, and since then his work on a wide range of international projects has won widespread acclaim in architectural circles. The Chinese Dream is the culmination of four years of research by Mars and the DCF, with material collected via the DCF’s open source website and contributed by visionaries, architects, urban planners and social scientists. The overall goal of the book is to investigate and explore China’s objective of building 400 new cities by 2020 in a process known as “flash urbanization”.

Talking about his reasons for writing The Chinese Dream, which is the DCF’s first book, Mars comments, “It would have been easy to come to China and jump straight on the construction bandwagon. However, I felt it was essential to take a step backward and really take a long-term look at this country’s high speed urban growth. We wanted to document this growth, highlight some of the problems associated with it, and suggest improvements to the urban planning process. No other individual or organization had really undertaken such a study before.”

Mars continues, “China is half way through its economic reforms and the journey towards becoming a mature society. By 2020 four hundred million farmers will be living in new Chinese cities. The urban middle class will have doubled in size. The world’s biggest pool of one-child consumers will be out shopping. I believe we need to consider this future very carefully in order to ensure China’s built landscape is as sustainable and people-friendly as possible. This book offers hope, and we want it to inspire rather than demoralize.”

The Chinese Dream, of which roughly 80% is in English, contains a range of material, from light-hearted pictographic pieces on architectural styles to heavier, theoretical articles on the urbanization process. Like MAD Dinner, the book is intended to provoke thought, and is certainly not for digestion in one cover-to-cover marathon. For designers, scholars and those with a general interest in China’s architectural development alike, it represents a uniquely fascinating analysis of what may be the quickest urban transformation a country has ever undergone.

Images courtesy of DCF

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