The context of this writing should be understood as a broad polemic, shaped by firsthand observations gathered over nearly two decades of practicing and designing in the Chinese Urban Landscape and public realm. To arrive at a balanced definition of the Chinese urban landscape and public realm, there must first be an acknowledgment of the potential for biases inherent in examining the Chinese context through a discourse on the public realm that, by and large, originated to address the American context.

In America, there exists a rich body of scholarship on the public realm and urbanization. Influential thinkers from Jane Jacobs to Richard Sennett and Saskia Sassen are among a steady stream of ever-emerging new voices that arise from a vibrant civic and political culture that, at one point in time, encouraged open debate, enjoyed independent, uncensored publishing, and cultivated a tradition of dissenting intellectuals who publicly challenged state-backed planning ideologies and power structures. By contrast, Chinese discourse on the public realm and the built environment remains comparatively constrained, as post-reform urban thought is confined mainly to academic and professional institutions, where public critique is limited and few, if any, voices attain the broad pop-culture visibility of their American counterparts.

While dissent in the public realm arguably contributes to a more vibrant context for discourse, from which a greater diversity of ideas can presumably emerge, and while the capacity to openly criticize the decisions and actions taken by those in power is without a doubt an important ingredient, its perceived absence does not suggest that, without visible dissent, meaningful discourse on the public realm cannot exist. The Chinese public realm must still be examined through its own cultural, political, and social logic, rather than through the ideological frameworks derived from the Western and American discourse on the public and public realm.

At the core of American public discourse lies a profound alignment between identity politics and consumer capitalism. The fixation on self-definition through identity does not arise solely from civic ideals of justice or representation; it is continually sustained by a capitalist system that transforms personal identity into a marketable commodity. The logic of branding and self-display increasingly governs political participation, voting, advocacy, and protest. The close relationship between MAGA and its highly successful branded merchandise is a case in point, where politics is not only an identity marker but also a purchasable brand.

Much of contemporary progressive American discourse on urbanization and the public is expressed through ideals of inclusivity and equity, bound to a mutually constitutive dynamic between identity politics and consumer culture that reinforces each other to prioritize personal expression over collective purpose. Even the most liberal strands of American discourse on the public realm are grounded in a subtle yet pervasive form of American exceptionalism that often goes unacknowledged, positioning theories concerned with justice, equity, and colonial legacies as not only universally relevant but as emerging from a free, democratic, academically superior context, and therefore morally authoritative position. Consequently, when discussions of the public realm outside the United States adopt this perspective, they risk reproducing American values and assumptions about democracy, participation, and equity as global truths, ultimately reinforcing the same imperial tendencies that such discourses often purport to critique or resist.

Many of the roots of this condition lie in the reaction against the urban renewal projects of the mid-twentieth century, which left lasting scars on the American psyche and urban form. These large-scale interventions displaced marginalized communities and came to symbolize systemic injustice. In response, design and planning shifted toward participatory processes, championing inclusivity and community engagement as democratic correctives. However, this shift has not yielded a more cohesive, well-planned, or aesthetically rich public realm, because the democratic ideal underpinning it is not genuinely collective. It remains grounded instead in a consumerist individualism, sanctified by a belief in divinely ordained personal rights.

The outcome is a public realm deprived of coherence, beauty, and shared cultural meaning. Most critically, it lacks ideas. Whether good or bad, mistaken or inspired, the act of designing the American public realm has become as monotonous as its sidewalks, which are often excruciatingly mundane.

The problematique of American political discourse is inseparable from its conception of the public realm, producing a lens that obscures meaningful readings when examining conditions such as those in China. The Chinese urban landscape is shaped by fundamentally different relationships between the individual, the collective, and the State. To interpret Chinese urbanism through the framework of highly politicized identity politics is to miss its essential premise: that the public realm may exist not as a site of contestation and individuation, but as a shared medium through which myth, culture, community, and governance are continuously co-constituted and adhere to cultural logics, social systems, and political structures that do not conform to familiar American frameworks.

Reframing the discourse to account for China does not require idealizing the Chinese condition but rather recognizing that it operates within a different ontology of the public. The Chinese public realm is not primarily a space of political contestation but one of social performance, aspiring cultural continuity, and ritualized interaction. It cannot be adequately interpreted through Western notions of individual rights, representation, or participation, as these overlook the influence of the history of war, concept of guanxi (关系), the cultural role of consensus, the persistence of mythology, the reemergence of leisure, and the cosmological construct of qi (氣), which shapes much of contemporary Chinese urban life.

While the definition of what the public realm is or what constitutes a landscape is inherently ambiguous and open to perpetual redefinition, it is important to bring this account down to earth through an examination of one of the most ubiquitous elements found in many urban landscapes, especially those of highly industrialized economies, the sidewalk. A brief and cursory comparison between the Chinese sidewalk and the American sidewalk can provide some initial insight into not only the differences in the public realm they embody, but also how a western discourse on sidewalks is ill fitting for the Chinese context and therefore if considered as a ubiquitous condition of all sidewalks would by extension impose an unsuitable lens for understanding the contemporary Chinese urban condition. In Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space, a detailed study of the sidewalk as a contested and socially significant urban space that is often overlooked as ordinary infrastructure, Loukaitou Sideris and Ehrenfeucht have this to say:

“Sidewalks are unassuming, standardized pieces of gray concrete that are placed between roadways and buildings, and their common appearance belies their significance and history as unique but integral parts of the street and urban life.”

Although Loukaitou Sideris and Ehrenfeucht’s intent is not necessarily to claim this condition as globally universal, and is more so intended to draw attention to a seemingly invisible yet essential component of the built environment, the implication is subtly misleading. Describing the sidewalk as a “standardized piece of gray concrete” reflects a distinctly American condition that does not necessarily hold true elsewhere. The American sidewalk is among the most plain and unremarkable in the world, a fitting reflection of how Americans perceive the public realm. Its dull gray surface expresses not universal values associated with the public realm but those particular to America. If sidewalks mirror culture, then a comparison between a typical Chinese sidewalk and an American one may begin to reveal the deeper contrasts between their respective public realms and urban societies.

When experiencing the Chinese sidewalk, it is far from dull, homogeneous, or nondescript, and an entirely different understanding of social space is conjured. If one can move beyond the seeming chaos of objects, obstacles, steps, bollards, cones, poles, wires, and structures of every shape, size, and color, underpinning what at first appears to be a messy and uncared for territory is an aesthetic impulse that establishes the urban landscape as a place for design and aesthetic consideration; it is the opposite of a gray, nondescript, unimaginative territory.

The aesthetic of the American sidewalk is primarily defined by its materiality. An engineered cementitious mixture that creates large, uniform slabs prone to breakages and cracks, which provides a vast dullness and emphatically expresses its deterioration. The Chinese sidewalk, by contrast, is rarely a poured material but typically comprises units of stone, brick, or concrete. Units are well-suited to Chinese industrial processes; they can be fabricated, shipped to the site, and rapidly deployed by a large labor force. At every step of the process, from fabrication to installation, there exists a kind of vernacular aestheticization arising from the paver. Units are not designed solely for slip resistance; flowers, patterns, or colors are imprinted or cut into them. When being laid on site, patterns are often created, zig zags, checkers, lines, and interlocking patterns are common among the cheapest and most common of urban spaces. In fact, an almost inverse relationship occurs in which the poorest and least developed regions often tend towards the more flamboyant paving patterns.

Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht go further, describing the American sidewalk as a place defined by danger and fear, where the sidewalk itself is not regarded as a vital element of urban infrastructure but rather as a space that invites the possibility of harm. As they observe, fear permeates urban life and public spaces, and sidewalks, like other shared environments, carry the potential for danger, disorder, and even violence. To mitigate this sense of threat, cities and their residents have sought to minimize disorder by legislating certain uses and users out of public sidewalks¹. By contrast, in China, the sidewalk is not a space of fear but one of vitality, a site where leisure, culture, and creativity actively occupy the territory. Even through a cursory examination of sidewalk materiality, we can ascertain that China and America not only have completely different public realms but also entirely different outlooks on the role design plays in the urban landscape.

The streets and sidewalks of the Chinese and American cities, in terms of engineering function, are essentially identical yet produce entirely different public realms, and although Loukaitou-Sideris and Ehrenfeucht’s description of the dullness of the American sidewalk was not necessarily meant to suggest a universal condition, what remains most important is their effort to draw attention to one shared dimension: the seeming invisibility of landscape itself.

The invisibility of the landscape remains a deep-seated issue in landscape architecture discourse. Even the profession’s founder, Frederick Law Olmsted, lamented the lack of recognition and understanding of what landscape design entails. As he observed:

“If people generally get to understand that our contribution to the undertaking is that of the planning of the scheme, rather than the disposition of the flower beds and other matters of gardening decoration, it will be a great lift to the profession.”²

Architecture, at its core, is constructed and as such, has an intrinsic clarity. It may not be hyperbole to state that it is impossible to imagine any example of physical architecture that is not constructed. By contrast, the discourse of Landscape Architecture often attempts to contest its constructed nature and is, therefore, less intrinsically clear and more conflicted than architecture. Landscape Architecture is eternally bound by its ingrained conflict, cyclically confronting, embracing, then subsequently rejecting its own constructedness. The nuances of landscape’s intrinsic nature-culture dialectic give rise to an inherently more philosophical discourse, though the architectural community would widely contest such a claim.

The common perception of Landscape Architecture as predominantly nature-based, rather than a physically and culturally constructed field, ultimately leads to differing definitions of where and what the landscape’s physical, conceptual, and spiritual territory resides. These differing outlooks produce very different kinds of urban space. The American psyche, with the pervasive Abrahamic god, is deeply ambivalent about the idea of nature as constructed. By contrast, Chinese culture has long sidestepped this issue, holding that nature itself can be enhanced by correctly designing landscapes and architecture. This understanding is the foundational ethos of the practice of Feng Shui, which entails the beneficial management of qi flows. “Qi is usually translated as ‘vital life force,’ and according to Classical Chinese Philosophy, qi is the force that makes up and binds together all things in the universe.”³ The qi of a river, mountain, garden, or bus stop can be enhanced through siting and physical manipulation, i.e., design. The Chinese idea of nature is not necessarily a pristine wilderness but is understood as something that can be harnessed and manipulated to be ‘better’ than nature could have achieved on its own. This results in a condition in which there exists no inherent conflict in the idea of a constructed nature. This concept of nature manifests not only as an entirely different outlook on the built environment but also in utterly different practices of Landscape Architecture and Architecture.

Qi is not the only cosmological or mythological force capable of shaping the contemporary Chinese urban landscape; celestial bodies, the calendar of festivals, and other forces also play significant roles. The Qingming Festival, also known as the Tomb Sweeping Festival, is a fantastic time of year. It is a traditional Chinese festival celebrated on the first day of the fifth solar month, which falls in early spring. The traditional Chinese calendar is a lunisolar calendar, which means that it is formulated both through the movement of the sun, similar to the Gregorian calendar, as well as the moon, which, through its cycles, creates a highly differentiated annual calendar in which many holidays and festivals occur in different periods of the year. The moon dictates many important days in the traditional and contemporary Chinese calendar. The interplay between lunar and solar cycles creates a vibrant, more exciting year that does not fall prey to the monotony of an annual calendar pegged solely to the sun. The moon’s schedule, in contrast to the sun’s, seems to play to its own beat; it is dynamic, changing, unexpected, and surprising; a culture that attends to the cycles of the moon undoubtedly contains poetics that the sun alone does not afford.

While the sun controls the daylight and provides warmth, the moon controls the fluids of all bodies on earth, from the oceans to our cerebral fluids. Over millennia, the agrarian civilization that came to define China was very much in tune with the relationship of the moon to the cycles of agriculture. Significant lunar dates in the Chinese calendar are inseparable from festivals, which typically coincide with major agricultural events such as harvest in the fall and sowing seeds in the spring. While it may seem divergent or extraneous to recount holidays, festivals, and their lunisolar origins when contemplating the contemporary public realm, it is precisely these types of characteristics that should be considered in reframing the Western lens to produce a reading of the Chinese public realm that is based more closely on the terms through which it is lived and experienced.

The question is, what does it really mean to have an urban landscape and cultural realm defined so heavily by the moon? The moon is not simply a means of telling time differently; the larger cycles of the moon, as defined by the Chinese zodiac, are also a means of structuring and predicting personal characteristics, fortune, luck, and identity. Not only does the moon play a role in one’s own given personal identity from birth, but it also has ramifications for the nation. For example, Dragon and Tiger years are more competitive in academics, as more couples prefer to have children in those years. The moon shapes Chinese society in ways for which there is no corollary in the West. As such, the moon certainly plays a role in structuring the Chinese urban landscape.

The year, according to the moon, is never dull. The moon generates an intricate rhythm, as holidays, festivals, and major annual observances shift from year to year rather than being affixed to a single date on the Gregorian calendar. Simultaneously, through the Chinese Zodiac cycle, the moon establishes a broader temporal framework. Through the Chinese lunisolar calendar, a different perception of time and cycles can be understood, one that is both more active and present in the short term yet also broad, expansive, and understood to predate and extend past one’s lifetime. A society shaped so profoundly by the moon and its attendant mythologies will inevitably cultivate an entirely different public realm.

Although it is not a lunar holiday, the Tomb Sweeping Festival does have a relatively unique relationship to the contemporary urban landscape, particularly streets and sidewalks. While traditionally, families are supposed to go to the graves of their ancestors and clean or ‘sweep’ their tombs, as well as provide food and strong drink for offering, most people with little knowledge of the location or access to the burials of their ancestors enact the offering in the street through the burning of paper articles, primarily faux money, although burning paper cars, paper houses, and paper suits are also not uncommon. These articles are burned so that the ancestor may have some money, clothes, and stylish transport in the afterlife. During the holiday period, families often burn offerings daily to ensure sufficient afterlife provisions for the coming year. Although individuals also burn paper goods on specific death anniversaries throughout the year, the most widespread and collective burning takes place during Tomb Sweeping.

In the spaces of the city, most people will typically utilize the sidewalks and street corners for their offerings. An incomplete circle called a Hua Guo (画郭) or “painted wall” is drawn onto the pavement; the opening in the partial circle is intended to face the direction of where the ancestral grave is located to ensure that the ancestors are able to collect the money and assets while keeping out any other unwanted or lonely ghosts. The offerings are placed inside the partial circle and burned. When more offerings are to be given, a new circle is drawn, and offerings placed inside are set afire. Walking the streets during tomb sweeping is a bit like walking through a city after a firebombing or a zombie apocalypse; every street corner and sidewalk across the entire city and, indeed, the nation are aflame.

What is essential to consider is the reading and understanding of the contemporary Chinese public realm and urban landscape as a place not only for cultural activities but also for mythological enactments. What kind of urban realm is created when ritual is not bound or contained within specific theological spaces such as churches, temples or mosques, but instead commands the spaces of the city, the streets, and the sidewalks? The experience and interpretation of the public realm are transformed by collective mythology. In such moments, the Chinese urban landscape transcends both politics and space-time, revealing that the public realm must be understood through a framework unfamiliar to a Western-centric, politicized, commercialized, and individuated discourse.

One can point to the many examples of religious or mythological expression in urban contexts in the west, people carrying the cross on Via Dolorosa in Jerusalem, a public audience with the Pope in Rome, a day of the dead parade in Mexico City, or Mardi gras in New Orleans are all examples of communal, cultural and mythological events which take place in and redefine the public realm. However, many of the Chinese festivals contain characteristics that allude western corollaries. For one, in China, there exists a puzzling relationship in which belief in mythological or cosmological structures and systems is not inherently religious. The combination of communism’s absolute rejection of religion with the persistence of traditional Chinese beliefs formulates a kind of atheist mythology. In this condition, in which mythology can be delaminated from the religious, it allows myth to be graphed directly onto contemporary conditions. Given the quasi-atheist nature of contemporary China’s ancient mythologies, festivals can be wholeheartedly supported by all governmental, political, and commercial institutions, resulting in unparalleled penetration into all aspects of life. America’s newfound sensitivity to multiculturalism has resulted in the de-religioning, decolonializing, and renaming of holidays previously presumed to be communal and shared mythologies. Thus, national holidays in America must carry no mythological connotations. By contrast, Europe’s unabashedly combined church and state result in holidays and festivals, which can have an urban-mythological dimension but are not without specific religious associations. Here again, China provides an alternate model which does not fit comfortably with the binaries established by western societal logic.

What is potentially unique is that through the delamination of religion from mythology, myth is, therefore, able to adapt and take on new forms, in which it can take on a contemporary dimension beyond the enactment of old rituals in new spaces, but one in which there exists the room to develop a contemporary layering and significance of the mythology.

Tomb Sweeping is only one among a seemingly endless calendar of mythological events throughout the year. Each festival carries distinct forms of enactment and performance that occupy and define the public realm in unique ways. These are not merely cultural events within the urban landscape, such as block parties or parades, but expressions of the interrelationship between culture and landscape, how each informs and is ingrained within the other. The aesthetic and mythological dimensions of Chinese culture in the urban landscape exist above or pierce through the political and commercial, allowing this mythic dimension to endure unimaginable hardship and unparalleled speed of modern industrialization and urbanization.

Cultural expression unfolds not only through mythic rituals shaped by celestial rhythms, but also through the everyday and the mundane, particularly in the form of leisure. Many forms of public activity in contemporary China arise from its modern history, the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and its subsequent experiments in building a socially focused, centrally planned economy. The collective and joyful nature of urban leisure remains one of China’s most striking pleasures, exemplified by the Plaza-Dancing-Aunties (guangchang wu dama 广场舞大妈), whose choreographed gatherings trace their origins to Chinese communism and pre-reform industrialization.

The industrial strategies of the late 1950s, aimed at creating “cities of production,” established the territorial and functional dominance of publicly owned work units (gongzuo danwei 工作单位, or danwei 单位). While strict control over rural and urban migration during this period reinforced dependence on the unit for employment and daily life,⁴ the danwei was more than a mechanism restricting movement and for organizing labor; it was also a residential and regulatory community central to people’s lives and instrumental in cultivating communal ideals and collective consciousness.

Although the danwei system “left little space outside its structure for individual leisure”⁵, communist theory regarded leisure as an essential component of the ideal society. In this sense, the collective nature of contemporary urban leisure in China, from synchronized dancing to group exercise, can be understood as both an inheritance and a transformation of this historical foundation.

For Marx, as a result of the abolition of the division of labour, any person can become an all-round developed individual who will be able “to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner.” This transformation toward all-round development, as stated by Marx, would be possible through cultivations in “free time.“⁶

While the idea of free time and choosing how to spend it was not inherently at odds with communist values, in practice during the pre-reform years before 1978, access to leisure was often heavily restricted. Although there was an ideological recognition of its importance, leisure was intensely controlled and highly regulated, and it gradually reemerged primarily as a collectivized activity.

From the perspective of the CCP, successful leisure activities should follow three principles. The first and most fundamental principle was that people should join voluntarily. Official guidelines on leisure activities repeatedly stressed that these activities must match the real interests and hobbies of young people so that they would take part voluntarily.⁷

Although in the transition from a centrally planned industrial economy to a state capitalist model people’s leisure time is no longer regulated, the ideals of collectivized leisure continue to evolve and shape the public realm and the urban landscape. The fact that the Chinese people appear to use all spaces of the public realm for culturally specific forms of communal leisure produces a condition in which the Chinese urban landscape is also a place of joy, relaxation, cultivation, and cultural expression. These routines are performed daily and continually reinforce the relationship of culture to the physical manifestation of the public realm, the urban landscape.

Given the embedded nature of leisure and community, tracing its roots from the danwei, Chinese leisure in the public realm takes on unique characteristics. In no other city in the world can one hear the crack of bullwhips in the early evening as couples practice their skills at keeping a spinning top spinning, or circumambulating a tree with hands extended outwards to absorb it’s qi before heading to work or the local senior center, and as Laura Vermeeren notes in her 2022 Cultural Studies article Locating Vernacular Creativity Outside the ‘Urban Cool’ in Beijing: Ephemeral Water Calligraphy, “as early as seven o’clock [in the morning] many groups of retired or middle-aged men and women flock to the park to dance, exercise, sing, make music or meditate.”⁸ The types of leisure activities that people take on in China and practice in the parks, streets, and plazas of the city are almost beyond imagining. Given the underlying premise of “nurturing life”, there are no prescriptions, and inevitably, one always comes across a strange, new, and often comical forms of self-cultivation.

Apart from the insistence on the importance of landscape as a cultural realm, or the reading of the production of landscapes as fundamentally different in China due in part to a more robust cultural relevance of landscape spaces, the visceral and experienced reality of the Chinese urban landscape exists beyond analytics as it is primarily a landscape of joy. Palpable joy throughout the urban landscape prefigures, entices, and is derived from creative expression through the invention of new forms of leisure. Therefore, the Chinese urban landscape is not only a place to enact predetermined and set forms of leisure but also the catalyst for the creation of new forms of leisure. “The public park, I suggest, is an active agent that helps produce creative expressions by transforming into a creative hotbed of its own right, invented and maintained by retirees.”⁹ What should be noted is the importance of the elderly in producing unique and creative forms of leisure, which are instrumental in reinforcing the relationship between landscape and culture.

Because the State previously provided all forms of livelihood, from work to housing, retirement was and continues to be regulated. For many, retirement is not something determined by the individual; it is established through policy that once one reaches a certain age, one must retire. Given medical advances, the age of Chinese retirement is relatively young. This means that leisure activities become a vital part of the life cycle. Cultivating hobbies and learning new leisure skills becomes integral to dealing with one’s free time as a retiree. The communal dimension provides easy access to different forms of leisure, offering both introduction and support. Leisure therefore becomes something more than an individual pursuit; it is not only one’s own time but collective time. Collective enactment of leisure is not only a societal construct but something that reinforces the spaces in which these activities occur as realms that sustain cultural expression and collectivization.

By contrast, the elderly in America have no socially structured conduit through which to inform urban identity. More often than not, they are viewed as a burden and not seen as having an active or necessary role in shaping urban space. By virtue of elevating the idea of the public realm as defined through identities in conflict, the American urban landscape becomes a contested ground in which community is formed through the oppositional forces of activism and protest. Unfortunately, this limits the potential of the public realm as it can only be defined through those who are physically and mentally able to contest, which excludes the young and the old. While the old and young in America exist in the urban landscape, they are not permitted to shape its qualities.

Where American cities leave their oldest residents without meaningful avenues to contribute to urban identity, Chinese cities provide culturally grounded practices that draw people into collective presence. These practices emerge through the cosmological dimensions of how qi relates to self-cultivation, through the appeal of experimenting with obscure hobbies that lend themselves to collectivized activity shaped by behavioral patterns inherited from the danwei system of the pre-reform period, and through the continued ability of both young and old to engage the city together. Leisure in the contemporary Chinese urban landscape, therefore, moves beyond medicated and commodified notions of what constitutes a healthy life. Protein powder, keeping fit, lowering cholesterol, and heart rate monitoring gadgets reflect an individualized understanding of health, yet Chinese leisure offers something broader, a shared experience that positions the landscape of the city as a site of communal cultivation rather than a platform for personal optimization.

Chinese leisure, mythological enactments, lunisolar rhythms, water calligraphy, plaza dancing, and unitized paving with their associated patterning are not merely peripheral curiosities. They are constitutive practices and forms that make the public realm legible as a medium of cultural continuity, social performance, and shared cultivation. Taken together, these elements reveal that the Chinese urban landscape is not only unique but also poorly aligned with the assumptions that underpin the current discourse on the public realm. If we instead view the Chinese urban landscape and public realm on its own terms and for its innate capacity as a place for design and a vehicle for culture, it can offer a new understanding and a new direction for the discourse.

In the United States, the urban landscape is often conceptualized in almost the opposite manner. Rather than being understood as a field of shared cultural inheritance, it is framed as a realm of negotiation, a place without its own inherent identity. The landscape is not seen as a wellspring of collective expression but as a territory upon which individuals project their personal identities. The result is a contentious amalgamation of competing concepts of self. The public realm therefore becomes primarily a political sphere, a site where individuals struggle for recognition of their identities and associated rights. In this way, it is unlikely ever to be regarded as a place for collective vision where in aesthetics can play a vital role. When urban space is viewed only through its political dimension, particularly the American brand of politics, the city becomes a landscape of perpetual contestation, an ugly and disregarded entropic territory.

Recognizing this contrast requires a reorientation of theory and practice. Rather than evaluate the contemporary Chinese urban landscape and public realm through a discourse fixated on bureaucratic participatory methodologies, the insistence on individuality, and the elevation of commodified identities over collective expression, a new approach to analysis could acknowledge the importance of examining dimensions beyond identity politics and reaffirm the importance of aesthetics in cultivating a cared for and culturally grounded landscape, territory, and discourse. Such an approach does not need to idealize China, nor excuse its constraints, but it should allow the Chinese public realm to be understood on its own terms and appreciated for the distinct possibilities it offers to the wider discourse.

¹ Loukaitou-Sideris , Anastasia and Ehrenfeucht , Renia, Sidewalks: Conflict and Negotiation over Public Space, (Cambridge, The MIT Press, 2009), p. 241.
² Wade Graham, American Eden: From Monticello to Central Park to Our Backyards: What Our Gardens Tell Us About Who We Are (New York: HarperCollins Publisher, 2011), p. 336.
³ What is Qi? Definition of Qi in Traditional Chinese Medicine.
⁴ Luigi Tomba, The Government Next Door: Neighborhood Politics in Urban China (Ithaca & London, Cornell University Press, 2014), pp. 6-7.
⁵ Laura Vermeeren, Locating vernacular creativity outside the ‘urban cool’ in Beijing: ephemeral water calligraphy (Cultural Studies, 36:5, 748-769, DOI:10.1080/09502386.2021.2011934, 2022), p. 756.
⁶ Yifan Shi, Leisure, Lifestyle, and Youth Subcultures in China, 1949-1987 (Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Simon Frasure University, 2021), p. 31.
⁷ Yifan Shi, Leisure, Lifestyle, and Youth Subcultures in China, 1949-1987 (Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Simon Frasure University, 2021), p. 36.
⁸ Laura Vermeeren, Locating vernacular creativity outside the ‘urban cool’ in Beijing: ephemeral water calligraphy (Cultural Studies, 36:5, 748-769, DOI:10.1080/09502386.2021.2011934, 2022), p. 749.
⁹ Laura Vermeeren, Locating vernacular creativity outside the ‘urban cool’ in Beijing: ephemeral water calligraphy (Cultural Studies, 36:5, 748-769, DOI:10.1080/09502386.2021.2011934, 2022), p. 757.