City of Nothingness

French geographer Michel Lussalt describes urban development as a complex of contradictions in his latest work, ‘Hyper-places: New Geography of Globalization’. Nature and artificiality, social bonds and loneliness, civilization and barbarism, the security of staying behind closed doors at home and the anxiety of going out, are all parts of the big complex, needly to say the big contrasts between the ever expanding enthusiasm for consumption and the willingness to save, and between the dream of living in harmony with nature and easy access of lands for habitation. The stable and fixed lifestyle and the flexible ways of housing and transportation caused by migration of people also contributes to the complexity of contradictions.

Urbanization begins with human migration, and according to surveys, people’s health is in turn, also affected by the design, architectural styles and the planning of the city. The repeated changes of urban designs reflect the changes of ways of thinking.

For example, during the epidemic of Covid-19, we have to stay at home, therefore the news reported empty city scenes which are the opposite impression of what we always have in mind.

This gives us an opportunity to jump out of the established impression to observe the city itself from a more multidimensional perspective. Cities are historical results of complex thinking development of mankind. Understanding this helps to gain a better understanding of the contradictions raised up by Lussalt.

Soon people discovered that wild animals could gradually be found in cities. With less and less human activities, nature will swipe away all human traces within years at a fast pace. Mankind has been maintaining a friendly, mutually beneficial and yet fragile relationship with cities. In such a contradictory order, even though it seems nothing is going on in the city, everything could just happen within a blink of an eye.

Photographers present these phenomena by observing them and dividing them, and cope with such contradictions in a unique way. Thus, an often overlooked natural state of cities and people is reflected in an either direct or a subtle way, triggering more thinking among us on the relationship between people and cities.

Curator: Guo Hetian