Chinese and Italian cities “at work” on memory and imagination

This book is born from the will to undertake a joint research path on the general theme of transformation and renewal of urban contexts, deepening the case of historical Chinese and Italian cities. The research collected case studies and theoretical elaborations, focusing on the Chinese city of Shanghai and Chongqing and other Italian urban realities, filtering contents around thematic nodes such as memory, narration and reflection on new urban models. In particular, the initial idea emerged from shared reflections between Chinese and Italian scientific professors responsible for international agreements established between the Department of Architecture and the Design of Sapienza University of Rome and Chinese remarkable institutions. Indeed, the present research, promoted and directed by Dina Nencini, was joined by Anna Irene Del Monaco of Sapienza and Shaoming Lu of Shanghai Jiaotong University. All they, in turn, have involved other scholars already engaged in their previous and current studies on akin research issues and active in teaching and researching at University of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Tsinghua University in Beijing, University of Chongqing, University of Naples Federico II, IUAV University of Venice and Polytechnic of Milan. The book directly and indirectly draws on a series of questions about the “memory work” walking a theoretical path which has a relevant milestone in Lieu de memorie (Pierre Nora 1984) and the 1996 Trienniale di Milano entitled “Identità, differenze: Triennale di Milano, XIX Esposizione internazionale: integrazione e pluralità nelle forme del nostro tempo: le culture tra effimero e duraturo” (Identity, Differences: Triennale of Milan, XIX International Exposition: Integration and plurality in the forms of our time: cultures between ephemeral and enduring). Particularly, the exhibition was conceived within the framework of a conceptual pendulum, the postmodernism of Jean-François Lyotard’s wishing to leave universal values and the Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutic narrative, in bringing towards the mimesis the three following categories: prefiguration, configuration, reflection.1 And observing that “The inhabitant, like the reader, welcomes the building with its expectations, resistances and controversies”. Ricoeur’s interests are concentrated also on the concepts of architecture and narratives supporting also the idea that “to design architecture is like to work with memory since a built space is a condensed time.”2 Then, along the almost twenty-years-long conceptual path, the “memory work” in architecture has developed from removing modernity to absorbing modernity. The latest one, absorbing modernity, was the conceptual approach proposed by Cino Zucchi in the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale of 2014 entitled “Innesti/Grafting”. Therefore, within a kaleidoscopic framework, the book highlights differences and analogies on seven emerging issues grounded on the research work of Italian and Chinese scholars combined in pairs. Providing evidence of the comparative methodological approach is the most original purpose this volume intends to pursue. Also because it reveals the different challenges and possible overlapping areas of interests within two different architectural and urban cultural domain. Hence, the book collects essays by Chinese and Italian scholars in pair, as it is evident in the index structure, endowing analogies and complementarities, and bringing together theoretical studies and on-field case studies.