City Wall Brick as the Medium that Solidifies State Control over Collective Labor

Cultural Narrative Re-encoded:

The Speculative Design of Nanjing City Wall

CHEN Jiacheng ZHANG Bolei

Abstract

UNESCO's "Cities, Culture, and Creativity" initiative advises practitioners and policymakers to promote innovative urban cultures through culture and creative industry, which also inspires more progressive engagements with urban cultural heritage. Arguably, speculative design can facilitate this agenda by contextualizing the role of a heritage in emergent global issues, therefore having the heritage re-interpreted for unprecedented cultural imagination.

Taking the highly recognizable Nanjing City Wall as an example, this paper argues that the current conservation agenda need to consider more than merely preserving the physicality of the cultural heritage, but to also continue the equally important cultural narrative through speculative design. By placing it in a speculated environmental crisis, the paper proposes a new way of re-connecting the city wall with Nanjing’s urban environment, speculatively constructing a survival wall system to sustain future urban functions.

Under the framework of research-through-design, the design proposal aims to generate new understanding of the city wall’s covert characters of interiority, mediativity, and corporeality, which can be further applied in museum settings for public education. In this way, the seemingly inert historical remnant regains its contemporary meaning by involving the pressing issue of climate change, through which its cultural narrative and symbolic image are promptly iterated.