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Please join us next Wednesday evening at 5:47 p.m. in the Environmental Design Building, Room 134 as Daan Roggeveen, renowned architect and partner at MORE Architecture, delivers a lecture on Chinese urban development and architecture!

The Chinese metropolis has developed into the world’s most successful urban scheme. Combining bottom-up energy with top-down force, it pushes cities and their inhabitants towards progress, fast-forward. China’s megacities are efficient, with well-functioning infrastructures, top-notch public transport, proper housing, steady economic growth, a low crime rate, an attractive climate for foreign investors, and a glitzy skyline to boot. Can this metropolis be the blueprint for cities worldwide? In this lecture, Daan Roggeveen questions and investigates the current condition of the (Chinese) megacity and its shift from prosperity to progress. Connecting theory with practice, Roggeveen reveals a new understanding of the 21st century urban condition. Starting in Shanghai, this lecture describes a transformation towards a post-colonial urban condition in which Chinese urbanism will impact cities globally.

Architect Daan Roggeveen is partner at MORE Architecture, a multidisciplinary firm that he founded with Robert Chen. Based in Shanghai and Amsterdam, MORE strives to create contemporary notions of collectivity in the projects they work on globally. MORE recently finished mixed-use building Jiaxing Island (with AIM), contemporary art gallery BANK in Shanghai and the headquarters for MINTH Group. Current projects include a canal house in Amsterdam, a boutique hotel in the mountains of Anji (both under construction) and an urban plan in Accra, Ghana (with OKRA, MLA+, FABRIC and MIXST). MORE was recently included in the AD100, the list of 100 most influential design firms in China. With journalist Michiel Hulshof, Roggeveen initiated the Go West Project, a think-tank focusing on emerging megacities.

In 2011, they published the acclaimed book How the City Moved to Mr Sun – China’s New Megacities. Currently, Roggeveen and Hulshof are researching Chinese influence on African urbanization. Their study has been shown at Storefront for Art and Architecture, New York; Louisiana Museum for Modern Art, Copenhagen; Tel Aviv Museum of Art; and the Shenzhen Biennale. Roggeveen studied architecture at Delft University of Technology. He was curator at the University of Hong Kong / Shanghai Study Centre and taught studio at the Chinese Academy of Art, Hangzhou. A frequent guest lecturer at international universities, his expertise are regularly sought for debates and analyses around urban development in China.

This event is free and open to the public.