29-03-17 // BOTTOM-UP GLOBALISATION

The Chinese city of Shenzhen could be seen as the ultimate migrant city with millions
of people migrating in and out of the city every year. Source: Crimson Architectural Historians

In one of their recent articles entitled “A City of Comings and Goings”, Wouter Vanstiphout and Michelle Provoost, from Crimson Architectural Historians, describe Bernd Upmeyer’s book on Binational Urbanism as “a fascinating study, which documents people of Turkish origin who live in and invest in property in both Kreuzberg in Berlin and in cities in Antalya Province”. They further state that “these transnational or binational spaces constitute an important economic exchange between these countries that is entirely separate from international trade or diplomacy. It is bottom-up globalisation with direct visibility at the level of the street and the neighbourhood”.

Wouter Vanstiphout is professor of Design and Politics at the Faculty of Architecture at Delft Technical University and Michelle Provoost is an architectural historian specialised in urban planning history, postwar architecture and contemporary urban development. Together they co-founded the office of Crimson Architectural Historians in 1994, which has subsequently been engaged in a large number of research and design projects in the fields of urban planning, architecture and art.