Abstract

This chapter highlights the changing relationships between the city and its modes of representation through an examination of the historical transformations of Kunming, a city on the southwest border of China. Our intention is to introduce particular characteristics of urban space in Kunming as the basis for a more detailed examination of the historical differences between Western and Chinese perspectives of temporality in building, which will be explored in a forthcoming book, and how these differences are manifested in the changing social contexts of the city. This chapter demonstrates that changes in the territorialized districts of the traditional city of Kunming since the Qing Dynasty (1644-1912) constitute a movement towards modernization. Moreover, this development has given rise to a distinctive type of mercantile space within the city centre, with increasing importance attached to the commercial street. Importantly, this feature of the urban topography of Kunming can be seen as closely related to the surrounding mountains and lakes, both within and outside the old city boundaries that have served as primary reference points for Kunming's urban planning. The study seeks to establish whether the traditional meanings of temporality in building, as manifested within the particular urban grain of Kunming, still inform contemporary urban and architectural practice, given that such relationships are often concealed beneath the homogeneous image of the temporal city.

Keywords: Kunming, urban change, traditional street, temporality, Modernization

These were buildings […] that disguised their own histories of fabrication and subsequent restorations. The Forbidden City transcended the merely human circumstances of its life in time. In the European tradition of building and making to which Beauvoir was implicitly comparing the Chinese palace, an artifact's historicity is both the source of its authority and the basis for an eventual demystification of that authority. In the modern West, the very old building or painting is venerated for having survived and for testifying with its body to the corrosive effects of the passage of time (Nagel and Wood 2010: 7).