Photo by Dezeen.

Landgrab City

By Joseph Grima, Jeffrey Johnson, José Esparza
December 2009 – January 2010
2009 Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism

From the China-lab site:

Landgrab City is an installation commissioned by the Shenzhen/Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture/Urbanism and located on Shenzhenwan Avenue (Nanshan), a busy shopping district in the city of Shenzhen. Conceived as an experimental investigation into the full extent of Shenzhen’s spatial footprint, the installation is comprised of two parts: an aerial photograph of one of the city’s densest areas, home to approximately 4.5m people, and a plot of cultivated land divided into small lots. This land is a representation, at the same scale as the city itself, of the amount of territory necessary to provide the food consumed by the inhabitants of the portion of city sampled in the map, projected to 2027 (the year China is expected to overtake the US as the world’s leading economy). Each lot represents the extent of a single food group’s footprint: vegetables, cereals, fruit, pasture (for livestock), and so on.

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“Farm plots amidst apartment blocks in Chaozhou. A beautiful addition to an otherwise drab urban scene.” Photo from Flickr by JesseWarren.

Chaozhou, literally “Tide Prefecture”; (usually spelled Chiu Chow in the US and Hong Kong), also widely known by its Postal map spelling Teochew, is a prefecture-level city in eastern Guangdong province, People’s Republic of China.

Link to larger photo.>