‘The City as Playground’ was the playfully entitled UK introduction to the Shenzhen/ Hong Kong 2009 Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture, one of the opening October lectures at Architecture Foundation director Sarah Ichioka’s new AF space on Tooley Street near London Bridge.

One might bemoan the lack of the proposed Zaha Hadid building in which to host them, but Ichioka’s broad and varied events programme is doing well to fill the void left in the absence of the Great One. Once I managed to get over the rather clumsy title (I don’t know, but Chinese events always seem to have highly protracted all-encompassing titles), chief curator Ou Ning thankfully introduced the event using his own more memorable title of ‘City Mobilisation’, which left me far more receptive to the ideas the speakers were talking about. 

‘Mobilisation’ is a contentious word in Chinese, having connotations with the Maoist Cultural revolution, but it seemed fitting to use it in the context of the invited architects, all of whom, with their installations and approaches, are challenging the preconceived notion of the static city. As part of the Biennale, 10 architects were selected to ‘occupy’ the main square in front of Shenzhen’s City Hall, a city that through central government policies, has experienced highly accelerated growth and over the last 30 years grown from a farming village to rival its neighbour Hong Kong in size.

The international cast are small firms, all putting their temporal stamp on the city. Brazil firm Triptyque are building a three legged ‘treehouse’, ‘Los Carpinteros’ from Cuba are putting up a spherical void encased in timber,– a form of ‘City Room’, and Japanese architect Sou Fujimoto is creating ‘Walking Chairs’ to transport punters across the square. Meanwhile MAD from China are printing two huge ‘Godzilla Footprints’ into the city park, apparently permanently – that Asian fascination with monsters obviously still reigns supreme…

But what are the likes of France’s Didier Fiuza Faustino and director of Danish firm ‘BIG’ Bjarke Ingels proposing? Both at the lecture to promote the Biennale, the two raised difficult questions about city occupation, and both brought their unique takes on the conundrum. Faustino’s been busy doing temporary installations for a number of events in France, notably the Bordeaux Biennale, but his proposal here seemed a compelling cross between childhood play and the pervasive nature of advertising with his proposal for a mobile dual ‘swing’ mechanism. Illuminated within a hoarding frame raised 6m off the ground, it turns the act of play into a form of urban exhibitionism. Ingels meantime, with his characteristic ‘leftfield’ thinking has chosen ‘guerilla tactics’ with which to occupy the city, employing a team of Parkour traceurs to infiltrate the Chinese city and film them in action. While intrigued with the two propositions, both raised philosophical questions. Both in a sense turn the notion of city occupation into a fetish, activities which until recently were actually the normal consequence of city living. Exposure, exhibitionism, danger, and aspects of the carnivalesque that are, through privatisation, legislation and monitoring, removed from the urban experience. In a sense than what we are looking at here is not a new understanding of space, but a knee jerk reaction to a new reality – an attempt to express what was the ‘natural way’ expressed now under the guise of art. Both make me question whether we have any sense of a ‘public realm’ at all now.

But that aside, Ingels, whose enthusiasm for his firm’s output gives the impression that he’s been installed with Duracell batteries, remains compelling viewing. With BIG’s 2010 Shanghai Pavilion, they are donating 1,000 bikes to the car choked city for tourism, sending 1,000,000 litres of sparklingly fresh Copenhagen bay water to the city for the pollution choked citizens to bathe in – via an offloaded Chinese tanker on its return leg. And maybe most intriguing of all, changing national law to transplant the actual ‘Little Mermaid’ in Copenhagen harbour, one of the only things a Chinese person would know of Denmark (they teach it in schools) to Shanghai for a six month sojourn in the pavilion. Collectively all these acts and their contentious private projects place BIG at the coal-face of the 21st century urban condition. With his self-declared ‘Yes is More’ attitude that can, in seemingly naïve approaches and assumptions, seem to make simple complex public/ private realm. I don;t know if I agree with his conclusions, but it is good that he’s going there. Ingels finished his talk quoting one of his Parkour traceurs saying ‘You don’t stop playing when you grow up, you grow up when you stop playing.’ And if the city is a playground, as the title of the Shenzhen Biennale posits, you get the sense that Ingels has taken the advice to heart, is putting away the childish things, and is really getting serious.