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  • Hybrid Modernity: The Public Park in Late 20th Century China by Mary G. Padua
  • Zhifang Wang (bio)
HYBRID MODERNITY: THE PUBLIC PARK IN LATE 20TH CENTURY CHINA Mary G. Padua. Hybrid Modernity: The Public Park in Late 20th Century China. 2020. Routledge.

When referring to Chinese landscape design, people in most countries might first think of traditional Chinese gardens that have been broadly and explicitly examined in many books and articles. Where are contemporary China's landscape practices explored? What are the similarities and differences between landscape development in contemporary China and other countries? There is not only a lack of English writing that synthesizes contemporary landscape practices in China but also a lack of reflection among Chinese.

Focusing on urban parks in secondary cities, Mary G. Padua's book Hybrid Modernity is the first English-language book and one of the first endeavors attempting to reveal China's contemporary landscape practices to the world. "Hybrid modernity" means a new design genre for the spatial forms of parks with a diversified fusion of local and global design languages. These new design forms are different from traditional gardening and reveal that landscape architecture became a new profession and entered a new development stage in China.

Instead of directly portraying urban parks in late 20th-century China, Hybrid Modernity does an excellent job of offering a continuous discussion of long-lived world civilization with distinct social, cultural, and artistic developments from its history: Mao's period, after Mao's period, the 20th century, and the present. Chapters 1–4 successfully compile and elucidate interwoven social evolutions that affect China's contemporary landscape practices into hybrid modernization. Chapters 6 and 7 speculate on new trends in the 21st century. From the perspective of landscape architectural history, this book is valuable because it paints a clear and continuous portrait of the little-known landscape practices in contemporary China using urban parks as examples.

Three facts are particularly prominent in contemporary China's park practices into the late 20th century. First, the efforts and struggles in maintaining the Chinese Picturesque style embedded in traditional gardening and the quest for a "Chinese" identity continue today. Although it is risky to transform traditional gardening into a form-based design language applicable everywhere, the thirst to maintain and formulate unique Chinese design vocabularies is appropriate in the international debates of globalization and locality. Second, politics plays an essential role in developing park innovations that demonstrate local officials' success on their way up to the political ladder. The value of landscape, consciously or unconsciously, is first and foremost a political consideration before its functionality. Third, China's landscape practices in the later 20th century are design experiments in a time of rapid development that means that the vast majority of designers have inadequate time to formulate systematic design thinking. Landscape "living laboratories" are indeed happening everywhere, for better or for worse.

Chapter 5 is the book's highlight, and it reveals hybrid modernity with a case study exploration of four purpose-built urban parks: the Living Water [End Page 75] Park, the Zhongshan Shipyard Park, the Jinji Lake, and the West Lake's Southern Scenic Area. The cases are well illustrated with graphics, maps, and photos after careful studies of archives, detailed interviews with designers, and the author's critical reflections. Table 5.5 is particularly inspiring in summarizing hybrid modern design language in China in the late 20th century, as revealed by the case study parks. The theoretical meaning of hybrid modernity in China becomes more visual, empirical, and understandable for readers.

In the midst of the insights offered by the parks, I want to highlight the author's argument that "These projects serve as the vanguard for the development of China's contemporary discipline of landscape architecture and the schema for hybrid modern design" (102). The term vanguard is completely appropriate, particularly for the Living Water Park and the Zhongshan Shipyard Park. I was involved in the beginning stage of the Zhongshan Shipyard Park, where I witnessed Kongjian Yu's struggles in advancing this pioneering design because the idea of maintaining "useless" and "ugly" industrial landscapes was unacceptable to most people at the time. It...

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