A Land Port for Greater Xi'an

A city with an important historical past is now interested by a “urban-fiction” expansion project and is set to become in the next few years another Chinese megalopolis.

Xi’an was the first major Chinese city encountered on the Silk Road by merchants travelling the 8,000 kilometres between Rome and China from the West. It was the first capital of the Empire, unified in 221 BC by Qin Shi Huang who, in just a few years, introduced simple but radical reforms (a writing system, currency and standard measurements and cart axle lengths). The same Emperor decided to have an entire army of terracotta soldiers, complete with weapons and horses, guard his tomb, discovered by a peasant in the 1970s by chance because intentionally buried and hidden.

Iacovoni-Xian_02 — Above: residential towers in Xi'an. Top: the Terracotta Army guarding the tomb of Qin Shi Huang

The significant past of the city of Xi'an is apparent not only in its numerous monuments, such as the Giant Wild Goose Pagoda and city walls, constructed in the 14th century and among the longest and best conserved in the country, but also in its numerous recent works – since the 1990s, shopping centres, entertainment districts and hotels have been designed in the form of old sacred buildings. The past also seems hugely popular in the never-ending TV series on the intrigues of the Imperial dynasties and in the large canvas advertisements draping construction sites. These depict a sparkling blue sky above either pictures of landscapes and architecture of the past or possible future cities made of glass and steel skyscrapers.

Iacovoni-Xi'an — The open spaces of the Terracotta Army archaeological site

Xi'an’s real sky is anything but blue. A permanent fog caused by pollution shrouds the city, which has the appearance of a scattered worksite with a skyline in several shades of grey. Against this, the silhouettes of the old pagodas are joined by those of more and less recent office blocks – no archistar designs for the moment – and, above all, the many 30-storey apartment blocks, often grouped together and all constructed with the same prefabricated units.

The chaos seen in many zones, indicating a situation in full flow and experiencing a period of adjustment, is countered by the order found in the large spaces designed and planned as historic parks or entertainment districts. Here, the extreme attention paid to public space features is coupled with the extraordinary expertise in garden design and maintenance typical of the Chinese culture.

What is striking as you walk around the city is the intense use of public spaces, where people may be practising Tai Chi in groups – as in the Chinatowns of the West – or performing collective dances, flying kites, spinning tops with whips or keeping fit with the gym equipment scattered here and there in some parks... an active, normally peaceful and even festive multitude that seems to be a natural progression of the open-air choreographic practices of the Maoist regime.

Again, however, the sometimes ancient past and long-established forms of socialising have been extensively invaded by more recent ones linked to new-generation telephony. The latest and extremely expensive smartphones are held by many of the young people encountered in the streets of this city – and they are constantly talking or listening to who knows what music selection.

Another striking thing about this city is the number of teenagers crowding its streets, a sign of a young population, unlike ours. On Saturday afternoons, they pour into the streets, like those around the Bell Tower in the city centre, not far from the Muslim quarter, and fill the huge shopping malls home to the big brands and, more often than not, amazing labyrinthine rows of micro-shops selling cheap clothes and junk of all sorts. It is like a river in flood, crossed by going with the flow and never against it, a huge basin of consumers that fuel seemingly boundless markets. Indeed, the most important urban project in the Shaanxi region, part of the 11th Five-Year Plan of the People’s Republic of China, is the Xi'an International Trade and Logistics Center, a whole new town given over to trade and occupying an area of 44.6 sq km (that is, just under half of Paris).

This is 15 km northeast of the city centre and close to the site of the 2011 Xi’an International Horticultural Expo where the building designed by Plasma Studio is still standing and waiting to be incorporated into the new expansion. In promotional renderings, it appears boundless, organised around a cardo and decumanus of office skyscrapers and surrounded, as far as the eye can see, by 30-storey mass-produced apartment blocks and, among other things, another zone for container storage and movement, a free trade zone, and an unexpected urban-rural development area.

Only some buildings in this expansion have been built so far, e.g. an immense textile trade centre still waiting to open and a conference hall where a giant updated version of the model of Imperial Rome kept in the Museo della Civiltà Romana in EUR lights up, synchronised with a narration running across a mega screen in the background. It is like science fiction – or perhaps we should say urban-fiction – to us Europeans who are obsessed with downsizing. The dreadful traffic makes the air stifling and the time required for any movements totally unpredictable, raising crucial issues on how sustainable and functional the development of this land port will be, even with the planned addition of 13 new metro lines to the two existing ones by 2030.
Yes, this is only the beginning. At the moment, Xi'an with its 9 million population is only a second-class city but in a few years’ time it will be another of the many Chinese megalopolises.

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A Land Port for Greater Xi'an

A city with an important historical past is now interested by a “urban-fiction” expansion project and is set to become in the next few years another Chinese megalopolis.

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Wood: a key resource for south tyrol

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