City in Transition: Tangshan China Urban Design Studio, Spring 2019

China is the world’s most populous country and has been associated for decades with rapid urban growth, but China is also a complex landscape with cities in economic and social transition. Deindustrialization is rampant, particularly in Northeast China in areas associated with resource extraction and processing. The resulting “transitional cities” struggle with abandonment, pollution, and the challenges of reuse and reactivation. While these issues are long familiar to urbanists in European and North American contexts, the design of postindustrial space is an emerging and newly pressing issue in China. With its economic slowdown and rising social disparities, China, a country where urban design and planning has confronted only rapid industrialization and growth for the past four decades, has already started to shrink. As a first case study, Tangshan, an industrial city located in the larger Beijing region, represents in microcosm China’s challenges to overcome the ecological degradation of newly abandoned and highly polluted territories.  

The 2019 Tangshan China Urban Design Studio, co-instructed by Lorena Bello Gómez and Brent D. Ryan, provides promising design directions for future urbanism in a country where vast numbers of cities are just beginning to experience the population declines and degradation of their physical environment that many European, American, and ex-Soviet cities have experienced for decades. The MIT studio occurred in partnership with Tsinghua University, Beijing, and Professors Liu Jian and Tang Yan. Launched in 1987, the MIT-THU Joint Urban Design Studio program is one of the longest running academic engagements between the U.S. and China. The book City in Transition, edited by Lorena Bello Gómez and Brent D. Ryan, contains work from the 2019 studio students and essays from experts and scholars around the world. The book is dedicated to Tunney Lee, Architect (1933-2020). The studio and book were supported by the MIT Paul Sun Fund and by Mr. Sheng Lin