Page - 181 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

181 #Hallstatt Consideration of Mitchell’s imagology encourages us to ask what places want, while consideration of the Chinese directs us to the contradiction of places as living entities and as proper- ty, and to the thus far unsatisfying results of their having been cloned. A reviewer of Ghost Cities of China plaintively asks why, given that the Chinese government has the power to make and remake cities, the results are “so sad”: Copycat “western” towns, endless Central Business Dis- tricts, huge malls; this is urbanisation purely for quantity and profit. Other writers have argued that certain municipali- ties, such as Chongqing, have managed a more egalitarian statedriven urbanisation than others, like Guangzhou, but Shepard doesn’t explore the question. Neither does he ad- dress the future: once the ghost cities are populated, what next? (Hatherley 2015) Such questions also occupy Bianca Bosko in Original Copies: How will living in a replica of Germany or Beverly Hills af- fect Chinese citizens and their lifestyles? Will this trend con- tinue into the future, or is it a passing fad? How will history treat the simulacra townships? Will the popularity of these foreign building types choke the growth of a national, dis- tinctly Chinese, architectural style — or will it inspire it? (Bo- sker 2013, 18–19) Her argument is that “it is, in part, within these communities that the Chinese are beginning to stage sites of ‘otherness’ where a rising middle class lays claim to economic and cultural power and even incubates an embryonic political identity” (ibid., 4), and she underscores that these middle classes “are only the latest in an ancient and venerable line of borrowers from the archive of historical architectural styles,” which includes immigrants to the United States who, in the late nineteenth century proved “ex- ceptionally adept at transplanting European townscapes to the new continent” (ibid., 6). The question she does not ask about