Fanny Fang (wf646)
Developing path of Shenzhen
I have a similar experience with the author, Glaeser, who spent the whole childhood in an urban city and concerned about the city. I was born in Shenzhen and grown up together with this young, dynamic city. I also have a lot of memories with other urban cities like San Francisco, where I studies and lived for four years, as well as New York, Shanghai, Seoul…They are all unique and using their own way to express the ideas and values to the residents.
In Roy’s article, she used Shenzhen as an example to illustrate the worlding practices process in Asia. “As Chinese tourists watch this panorama of production, a worlding is once again under way – a placing of Shenzhen in the world, a self worlding of Asia” (Roy, Postolonial urbanism). Different than Shanghai or Beijing, before the 1980, Shenzhen is only a seaside village that only have 25,000 residents. Therefore, according to the successful experience that Shanghai and Beijing has, Shenzhen choosed the best way to develop. Different than other international metropolis in China, Shenzhen has more Chinese characteristics and special developing path.
“The Shenzhen assembly line is known for its flexibility, with machine tools that can be redeployed for a new electronic product in a matter of days. It is an instance of a temporal imagination that is widely celebrated in Shenzhen as ‘Shenzhen speed’” (Roy, Postolonial urbanism). Speed is always the keyword of Shenzhen, that’s why we can see such many changes happened in Shenzhen in only ten years. In the video I posted, the video maker visit the Guangming distrct, Shenzhen where used to be the area that accomadted most factories in Shenzhen about ten years ago. However, within the development of Shenzhen’s economy, higher human costs, increasing rent, and higher requirements for product quality makes more small-scale manufactures moved our from Shenzhen to surrounding cities like Dongguan or Huizhou, which are much cheaper than Shenzhen. On the other hand, in 2018, Shenzhen’s GDP has surpassed HongKong and began to get more attention from all over the world. In order to leave a better impreesion to the world, Shenzhen began to move more factories to surrounding cities and start the new urban planning. This video shown the change of Shenzhen city in recent decade, also pointed out the current situation of the world factory.
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