The China Lab Guide to Megablock Urbanisms

A wider conversation on the policies and collective experiences of large-scale development that are shaping China’s urban future.

Superblocks are the basic unit of China’s urban development, but they are also spatial instruments with social, cultural, environmental, and economic implications, operating between the scales of architecture and the city. These redefined ‘Megablocks’ then become laboratories for the consequences, opportunities, and potential global proliferation of Chinese urban models, reconsidered through the filters of ecology, economics, and ethics. In this bilingual Guide to Megablock Urbanisms, China Lab aims to document and advance China’s urban future.

Co-published with GSAPP, Columbia University.

Contributions: Amale Andraos, David Bray, Eric Chang, Yung Ho Chang, Renee Y. Chow, Edward Denison, Duanfang Lu, Joris Fach, John Fitzgerald, Steven Holl, Michiel Hulshof, Jun Jiang, Clover Lee, Zhongjie Lin, Matthew Niederhauser, Xuefei Ren, Daan Roggeveen, André Schmidt, Grahame Shane, Jian Shi, Jiaming Zhu, Jianfei Zhu

Jeffrey Johnson is the founding director of China Megacities Lab, an experimental research unit at the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, at Columbia University, where he also teaches.

Cressica Brazier is a researcher for China Lab@Columbia University GSAPP. Curator of the Liminal States Archive.