In the depths of Beijing’s Planning Exhibition Hall, a big grey hangar that squats in the corner of Tiananmen Square, stands a scale model of the city. It is an endless field of tiny wooden and perspex blocks, low-rise courtyards huddled cheek by jowl with a motley jumble of towers, expanding ever outwards in concentric rings.
To attempt to build a model of China’s 22-million strong capital is a Sisyphean endeavour. This carpet of miniature rooftops is hopelessly incapable of keeping up with the city’s relentless pace of change, the exhibition hall too small to ever contain a megalopolis so sprawling that it is currently building its seventh ring road, an orbital loop that will run for almost 1,000km in circumference.
But the model’s bird’s-eye view exposes something that is illegible from the ground: the rigid order that underlies the rambling sprawl. A rhythm of axes, grids and symmetrical walled compounds emerges from the chaos, pointing to the fact that this seemingly incoherent metropolis is in fact the carefully structured product of one of the earliest planning documents in history.
The first thing you notice is the monumental fissure that slices north-south through the city, as if the urban grain had been severed by a great tectonic rupture. It is an axis that runs for more than 20km, shooting out like a laser beam meridian line from the walls of the Forbidden City, the palatial compound that lies at the centre of it all.
The 180-acre imperial palace appears to send ripples through the surrounding urban grain like a rock thrown into a pond, forming the successive layers of ring-roads. Its rhythm of symmetrical walled courtyards seems to structure the layout
