New book explores China’s Belt and Road Initiative from the ground level

LAWRENCE — If Americans think at all of “China rising,” they probably don’t think about the National Library of El Salvador or the General Hospital of Niger. But China’s Belt and Road Initiative, which includes support for those two infrastructure projects among many others, is a way of projecting soft power that is changing the landscape of the places it touches.

An assistant professor in the University of Kansas School of Architecture & Design has co-written a new book that features case studies of 20 BRI initiatives spanning the globe.

"New Silk Road: The Architecture of the Belt and Road Initiative” (Birkhauser) is co-written by KU’s Francesco Carota and Michele Bonino of Polytechnic University of Turin with the support of Sohrab Marri of the Balochistan University of Information Technology, Engineering and Management Sciences.

They write that, as the largest infrastructure program in world history, the BRI has been too little studied from the ground level and “needs new questions, frameworks and voices for understanding its material and social implications.”

They selected and examined 20 “Silk Road” projects, complete with photos, maps, descriptions and architectural drawings, and grouped them into four broad categories: 

• Gift architecture: Hybridizing extra-state architectures.
• Spaces of free exchange: Architecture between humans and data-driven machines.
• Mass enclaves: Living between standard forms and local conditions.
• Super gathering places: Meeting in between architecture.

Libraries and hospitals are good examples of the first category — gifts intended to gain favor.

The second category of “free exchange” includes the so-called “dry port” of Khorgos on the border of China and Kazakhstan, where a change in railroad gauge necessitates a logistics hub (and its attendant housing), but also other spaces being designed with highly robotized manufacturing in mind.

“Mass enclaves,” Carota said, are the flowering of mid- and high-rise, gated housing communities that afford developing countries’ citizens a modicum of middle-class life.

The final category, “super gathering places,” are places of “spatial grandeur,” which China helps to build in order to foster trade and other forms of connection.

Carota said the BRI, whose roots go back decades, but which was formalized by China’s leader Xi Jinping in 2013, consists of more than 2,000 separate projects in 150 countries.

“We're trying to understand how these new buildings and new models brought by China are actually influencing these places and the local culture,” Carota said.

The authors said they take a “new materialist” stance. Carota said they reject the dichotomy between internationalist and regionalist analyses, arguing that BRI projects reflect something beyond that binary.

“One can say that Chinese pragmatism allowed extreme architectural variety under an intrinsic and specific political and cultural logic; variety is thus one of the essential characteristics of BRI architecture,” the authors write.

They make the case for the importance of understanding the BRI because “Chinese expansion out of its domestic boundaries is probably one of the main relevant issues to be explored in the future to come.”