Xiuzhu

In this week’s reading, Pilcher’s article discusses about how physical and knowledge infrastructure create values and meanings around food. It is interesting to think culinary knowledge and cultural traditions as a form of infrastructure. Indeed, with the boom of social media,  the behavior of sharing and commenting have been playing increasingly critical roles in the dissemination of food knowledge. However, one inspiring point made by the author is that restaurants also serve as key knowledge infrastructure in the food industry. As the author put,“ restaurant as a site of innovation and cultural exchange”. The importance of restaurants is not restricted to the inheritance of secret recipes and cooking methods. Restaurants serving foreign cuisines are perfect places to observe how food, as a form of culture, learns how to “glocalize” itself to better adapt to the local market. A typical example I could think of is Panda Express in America. Nearly every Chines tourist group will dine in Panda Express at least once during their trip in the United State. Panda Express has become a standard place for group dinners of Chinese tourists. However, no Chinese will recognize the food served in Panda Express as Chinese food. It does not even provide chopsticks for the consumers. The food comes with fork and knife instead. What is served in Panda Express is American Style Chinese food, or may be we can call it Chinese food for Americans. Many dishes in Panda Express betray their original tastes to satisfy American appetites.  According to a report from Sohu, the founder of Panda Express — Zhengchang Cheng adopted several strategies to accomplish the transformation.

In order to make Chinese food more suitable for American tastes, considering that Americans like sweet and sour taste with a little bit of spicy flavor, Panda Express has made a series of localized innovations based on Chinese food elements. The most typical dish is the“Orange Chicken” (fried chicken with sour source). Basically, every Chinese restaurant I’ve been to in New York serves this course and highlights it as a recommended dish for their customers.What is more, in order to make the food production process more standardized and less dependent on the culinary skills of the cook, Panda Express adopted a “central kitchen” to solve this problem; the materials of all the dishes are processed in advance and made half-cooked, and then distributed to various branches. The seasonings are prepared in advance according to standardized recipes, packed in fixed barrels, and sent to the store for chefs to use directly. Even an inexperienced chef can cook up-to-standard “Chinese food” with the help of those source.That is why one can often see strange scenes of foreign chefs cooking Chinese food in Panda Express,.

Restaurants like Panda Express are locations where different cultures encounter each other and exchange knowledge. Changes on recipes reflect Chinese migrants’ attempts to integrate themselves into the foreign cultural context and reshape the imaginary picture of Chinese traditions from the perspective of food.

See the detailed story of Panda Express here.

Reference: https://www.sohu.com/a/281330280_120047038

In this week’s reading, James Corner discusses about the essence, functions , and different types of mapping. He argues that although we tend to think a map is an objective description of the surface, it actually entails certain certain value orientation of the map maker. As the author puts, “what remains overlooked in this sequence, however, is the fact that maps are highly artificial and fallible constructions, virtual abstractions that possess great force in terms of how people see and act. ” It is undeniable that a map usually contains a certain kind of power relations. For example, when we are studying world geography and looking at a world map in China, the shape of China is always positioned in the middle of the map and painted with the most recognizable color. Also, when we are using an electronic map, with the behavior of zooming, we could clearly see the hierarchy of importance of all those items on the map. The buildings deemed as landmarks appear in the first place, and other “details of the street” gradually come into view with the zooming of the map. I could strongly resonate with the point that what is represented by the map is now constituting our cognition of reality. It even constructs an alternative reality beyond the reality we actually live in.  It is normal for me to form an idea of a place before I really visit it by merely looking at the map. I have to admit that such visualization of reality makes it more convenient for me to make forward planning for my visit, but I always get shocked when I realize how reality is different than what is represented on the map when I actually arrive that place, especially when I am visiting some less developed place where many local family-run stores and restaurants are undercount by the system of the electronic map. Sometimes I feel like those stores and restaurants are eliminated by the statistical system just because they fall behind the times. With people more and more dependent of technology, the boundary between what is real and what is represented becomes even more blurred not because there are no differences between the two, but because what is represented by the map indicates some phenomenal trends happening now. Such intangible trends together with what is visible on the street form the reality as a whole.

I agree that mapping is not depicting, but digging out some truths hidden behind the surface. Through researching and completing the mapping project, the producer could gain insights on the subject. One example is a mapping project called Ghost Cities of China.With the development of the Internet, a large amount of personal information, private data, and behavior patterns are stored and disseminated on the Internet People may not be able to imagine how powerful those data could be. This project uses data collected from social media to analyze the vacancy rate in China’s second and third-tier cities. The team collected data from social media such as Dianping, Weibo, Renren and Baidu. The data reflected the convenience of residential areas to schools, hospitals, restaurants, and grocery stores of 22 different second and third-tier cities in China. They managed to calculate a convenience score for each area,  and used the score to determine the utilization rate of a residential area.   For many years,  vacant or underutilized residential areas in second and third-tier cities have increased due to excessive budget of construction made by the government. This “ghost town” map reveals the shortcomings of those seemingly prosperous areas and shows the risks of investing in these markets. On the one hand, the Ghost Cities of China map explores the underutilization of residential areas through gathering data from social media, and emphasizes the powerful role of open source data. On the other hand, this project is a great example of analyzing problems of a city or even a country through visualizing data in a form of map.

Here you can view the project.

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs offered an interesting insight on how different streets and communities provide people with different degrees of safety and comfort. I strongly agree with the point that it is not the density of population that decides how safe a street could be. Take my own experience for example. When I studied in NYU New York, I chose to live in Jersey City instead of NYC, because I felt my own safety could be more guaranteed in Jersey City. I have visited my friend’s apartment in midtown Manhattan (near K-town), and her apartment was surrounded by a lot of restaurants, bars and shopping malls. I concede that place was so busy and alive, but it didn’t provide me any sense of safety. To me, all the pedestrians are potential threats and could suddenly start an attack. In Jersey city, however, the street I lived was with more living facilities, such as grocery stores, markets, and parks. There were less people on the street at night, but when I passed them, I felt they were community members just like me and would be willing to lend a hand to others who got in trouble. I could smell a rich flavor of life from them, which comforted me a lot. It is hard to give explicit standards on classifying the safety level of different streets, but there are always dynamics among people on the street that convey their emotional states and their identities in relation to the street.

In Global Cities, Local Street, Zukin talked about how local culture and global trends converge in local shopping streets, and how the shift of the shopping street reflects the social changes happened in the local area. As the author states: “the aesthetic of the shopping street is a collective projection of social class and cultural capital”. I agree that the aesthetic preference expressed by a shopping street is designed to attract people from certain social group. and in turn shapes the local culture and educates the inhabitants. However, sometimes I also feel that some shopping streets only have exhibitionary value but are not able to provide people with any sense of belonging. One example I could think of is the Nanluoguxiang（South Luogu Lane) in Beijing. Nanluoguxiang is popular among young people because pf all kinds of snacks and small shops. Many stores are with delicate designs and ideal for taking pictures. What I feel strange about that street is that it doesn’t provide any kind of cultural sense but only consumerism. When a shopping street becomes famous, we always try to label it with a certain tag to account for its popularity. For example, Tianzifang is famous for its artistic atmosphere, whereas Houhai(a street in Beijing) is famous as a bar street and well-known for its rock culture. However, in Nanluoguxiang, some stores sell traditional Chinese street food, some sell western fast food, some sell originally designed clothes, whereas others sell chain brand products. It is hard to imagine those different kinds of products coexist on one shopping street, but they are sold there in a strange but harmonious way. Those stores are opened on that street not to built a space for certain social group to inhabit or to contribute to certain cultural atmosphere. Stores in Nanluoguxiang are just built to invite people to consume. Every day after 11:00 pm, after both shop owners and tourists leave the street, Nanluoguxiang becomes an empty hole in the middle of the city. To some extent, Nanluoguxiang is a great example of the integration trend of global culture, but on the other hand, it also reveals the nihility and rootlessness behind it.

Here you can see the appearance of Nanluoguxiang.

https://youtu.be/VhiR_Prq57A

In this week’s reading,  Glaser started with his experience of living in New York in his childhood. He mentioned the changes of New York happened during this decades, and argued about the advantages and functions of urban cities. As a person grown in Beijing, I agree that urban cities are places that could provide people with all kinds of entertainment and create big ideas. Being used to surrounded by all those cultural and entertaining resources, I could hardly imagine the life in non-metropolis. For most of the time, we think it is natural for a person from a less developed city strive to move to metropolis, but it is always surprising when we heard someone from a big city choose to live in a suburban area. Also, I think the author’s idea about the relationship between environmentalism and city construction is very interesting. By saying that “we must discard the view that environmentalism means living around trees and that urbanites should always fight to preserve city’s past”, the author indicates constructing tall buildings might be conducive to city environment, and make city life affordable to more people. It’s hard for me to agree that building edifices could help to protect the environment, because I believe the more people the city promises to contain, the less likely the environment would be protected. Nonetheless, I do concede that the behavior of protecting city past is to a large extent a barrier put up to resist he flow of population from other areas. It would be interesting to see constructing tall buildings as a population running mechanism, especially when we take a look at Beijing, a city which has its heartland full of low buildings and palaces, symbolizing authority and power. 

Here is an image that shows the layout of the heartland of Beijing.

Anna Roy talks about the process of worlding. In her opinion, the previous political economy and postcolonial frameworks are not sufficient to describe and explain the development of different global metropolitans. The author’s main point is that the postcolonial theory studying urban cities has to concerned the theoretical positions of geographies of knowledge and articulation of subject-power. Through reading the text, I feel I could strongly resonate with what the author called “homegrown” modernity. Although we tend to think that the process of globalization is driven by the intention of expansion of the western countries, it is undeniable that in many cases, the idea of urbanism is not learnt from the west directly, but rather borrowed from the metropolitans that shared similar culture values and cultural background. “They are, in this sense, provincial as much as they are global” (Roy & Ong, 2011, p.311). It is true that in Asia, there is a chronological order of stepping in modernity. Cities like Hong Kong and Tokyo learned modernity from the west, and then provided examples for other Asian cities to mirror. When acquiring the sense of modernity from Tokyo and Hong Kong, what Asian cities learnt were indigenized urbanism. A great example I can think of is Taiwan. Because of historical reason, Taiwan was governed by Japan for over 50 years. As a result, Japanese culture permeated the whole Taiwan society and strongly affected the modernization process of Taiwan. Wandering in Taipei (one of the most important urban cities in Asia) now, one will feel so much like roaming the streets in Tokyo. As a person who had been to Japan before went to Taiwan, the urban appearance of Taipei almost reminded me of the nostalgic moments of my trip to Japan. Thus, I would agree that the globalization process in different cities varied a lot, and it is impossible to use an universal idea of globalization to indicate all those processes without taking geoplotical knowledge into account.

Here are street photo of Taipei.

Here ares street photos of Tokyo.