ABSTRACT
Foreign/Western building styles are becoming ‘popular’ cityscapes in Chinese cities. These ‘transplanted cityscapes’, especially in residential buildings, such as ‘continental European style’ (‘ou lu shi’, see also Giroir Chapter 11 in this volume), are applied to the homes of China’s rising middle class as well as those of multinational expatriates. Another striking building form is the ‘gated community’ (see also Huang 2005, Wu 2005, Hsing Chapter 9 in this volume, Webster et al. 2005), which is similar to low-density sprawling American suburbs. In a sense, these ‘exotic’ building forms are becoming ‘ordinary’ cityscapes under China’s new urbanism. To what extent do these transplanted cityscapes reflect the globalization of city building or even ‘homogenization’ and the global spread of the archetype of postmodern urbanism (for global spread of the gated community, see Webster et al. 2002; for the archetype of postmodern urbanism and the ‘LA school’ that promotes the concept, see Dear and Flusty 1998, for a critique see Beauregard 2003)?
