Do our cities reflect who we are?

Artist and architect, Forest Tang, calls for city designers to take aesthetics into account as the city changes and grows. This essay is an example of another way to write about our cultures. We can write for the purpose of  changing it for the better.

We are living in a city that changes with every passing day: old houses are being torn down, new buildings are springing up, high-speed rial, metro and expressways are advancing. Change and development is the theme song of the city:  the old-fashioned appearance is fading, the modern industrial civilization is growing in every corner of the city. These changes are the epitome of China’s development mode, whose speed is amazingly fast. However, dramatic changes in people’s material world accelerates the pace of life, and the desire for a modern life makes the pursuit of material the theme of all social activities.

It’s blameless for people to pursue a better life, but are the things you see, hear and feel in your life really of high quality? No, they are not. Most of the cities we are living in can only meet our basic needs. The things of high quality are so rare that they are within the reach of only a few people. Among the many influencing factors to this phenomenon, I think the key one is this: the aesthetic limitation of most people. We are lagging behind in the spiritual civilization compared with the high-speed material progress, so it is necessary to improve people’s awareness and understanding of beauty and high quality if a city wants to be developed into a modern city.

In the past, we judged the modern civilization of a city by its amount of high-rises. Nowadays it is the people’s quality, aesthetic education and beauty appreciation that represent the modern civilization of a city. As an educator, I want to do something for my city and its people’s aesthetic appreciation. Instead of making the intentional creation an academic concept, I hope it could be perceived and recognized by more people as a direction of aesthetic consciousness.

Aesthetics creates the future.

 

This excerpt from Tang’s recent publication, Black and White Forest: The Choice of Intention Creation 


Further Reading from Forest Tang:

U.S. Football

Eclipse 2017

 

 

 

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About Lori

Ever since Lori Younker was a child, she’s been captivated by her international friendships. She is mesmerized by the power of short works to inspire true understanding of the cross-cultural experience and expands her writing skills in creative nonfiction, guiding others to do the same. These days she helps others capture their life history as well as their stories of faith.