In the summer of 2005, Princeton-educated architect Juan Du was recruited to the burgeoning Chinese megacity of Shenzhen to curate an urbanism exhibition celebrating the 25th anniversary of its founding. Shenzhen’s salute to itself would visually recount its origin myth—how reformist premier Deng Xiaoping’s dream of a paint-by-numbers metropolis springing from virgin land near the Hong Kong border came to pass. Opened as a market-friendly “special economic zone” in 1981, the upstart city was already on track to eclipse New York in population. As a swaggering 25-year-old, Shenzhen touted itself as a model—a centrally planned SimCity whose success could be replicated all over China, maybe even the world.
After taking myriad study tours of Shenzhen’s skyscraper-studded sprawl with municipal officials, Du missed a flight out one fateful night and began wandering the back alleys alone. There, hidden behind walls in the automobile-dominated, self-consciously “modern” metropolis, she found an informal world of deep-rooted urban villages teeming with pedestrian-packed open-air night markets. Circling back today, a decade and a half after mounting her government-backed exhibition, Du has published a myth-busting history of Shenzhen that highlights the interplay between the region’s centuries-old villages and the vaunted “instant city” layered over them.
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