Transforming Materialities, Imported Spatiality and Architectural Meanings in Places in Southern Xinjiang

• In Event: Frontier Spaces: The Production of Place and Meaning in China's Borderlands

Abstract

An analysis of the rapidly developing urban areas in China’s Inner Asian borderlands offers insights into the relationship between the physical transformation of a place and the social meanings attached to it. In a process of continued sinicization and modernization of the borderlands, cities in Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region adapt their physical shape to cities all over China. The changes of these urban places are not unchallenged and sometimes lead to ideological struggles, for example between more traditionalist urban residents fearing a loss of local architectural heritage and a more cosmopolitan group of residents welcoming the modernization and globalization of urban areas. Further, the ethnic struggles and conflicts in this border region are not only debated through reference to history, language and religion, but also with regard to the transformation of the urban built environment. Drawing on empirical data gathered in the rapidly transforming cities in Xinjiang, this paper analyzes the close connections between material and social developments, between architecture and society. Urban places and the urban landscape are not only a material grouping of buildings and infrastructure, but also a projection surface for dealing with issues of identity and belonging, especially in multi-ethnically inhabited frontier regions. Like an open-air museum, the built environment is an assemblage of materials that is formed by society and at the same time forms it.

Author

• Madlen Kobi, Ethnographic Museum, University of Zürich