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Cities of Girl
Text: Gutierrez + Portefaix
Photo: Benoit Dupuis
Urban China – ‘Parrallel Universe’
Number 28, March 2008
08.02.15

In the last ten years, the social model of one East Asian culture has been swept away by a major economical crisis, while another has gone through unprecedented transformations to achieve both social and economic developments. Hence, both Japan and China have seen the emergence of a mobile society, fragmented and complex, and ready to challenge the traditional city with new urban experiences and life-styles. To see these changes, one simply has to observe people in the streets and new meeting spaces (café, restaurant, nightclubs). A swarm of young people, increasingly focused on beauty, fashion and accessories, are using the cities as giant stages to exhibit their newly claimed freedom. In Japan, freedom is marked by a definitive rupture from the traditional conformity of the social system. In China, it came along with growing opportunities to get a ticket to the middle class kingdom of super individualism. In both cases, the main protagonists are the girls or young women that are giving shape to the dynamic cycle of money, from the office to the shopping and entertainment hubs. In return, the materialist and media-oriented environment amplifies the attitude and aerial motion of these urban creatures. It is no surprise that their most popular television show is “Sex and the City”. They transport the original fiction from New York into a real lived experience in Tokyo or Osaka, Shanghai or Shenzhen. Accordingly, a new “self” has emerged for these girls from an environment far from home and their sexualities are now powering those cities.

Japanese and Chinese cities share an extreme energy, with fast growing forests of illuminated skyscrapers, nodes of highways flying in the air, busy traffic, crazy streets filled with noise and smells. But obviously today’s cities are not just infrastructures plus buildings set within a network of roads. Archigram’s famous statement in the 1970s “When it is raining in Oxford street, what is more important: the rain or the architecture?” can find here another inclination: “what is more important in the street of Shenzhen, the girls or the architecture?” At various scales, it is worth exploring the production of value and power at the intersection between these moving bodies and urban spaces. Our urban imaginary (including spectacles, forms of stranger sociality, creativity) is now calling for new questions about what the urban does to the body, and what the body does to the urban . And more specifically, we would like to revisit the urban experience through the culture of the body - the fashioned body, flowing and roaming in and around the city.

Responding to an immediate context, new forms of organization become even more apparent with the emergence of new technologies. Young women are now the pillars of the most-advanced innovation ranging from their wireless cell-phones to the latest formula whitening creams. And to some extent , their sophistication reflects the banality of the urban fabric. Their glittering nails propose a new landscape, and their thumbs, in constant movement, continuously activate the buttons of their cell phones. The plasma, or the magnetic field generated by the swarm of mobile connections, gives their environment its true climate. "Like life within an environment constantly under phosphorescent lighting, everything looks flat and undistinguishable and this creature Girl while comfortable here, lacks the knowledge of how to deal with the dark.” (1)

In an age of non-stop mutation and instability, their protected bodies are in phase with their time. More than ever present on the employment market, they aspire to a temporary but profitable job rather than joining the security of a large firm. Furthermore, they are as unwilling to sign on for a long-term contract as they are keen to stay away from marriage and having children. Independence is their highest goal, but what about their dreams? Aren’t they too big to fit into the next PRADA bag? Consumerism and the faith in the next product ha ve already proven to be as illusionary as the environment.

Diversity of accessories reflects the diversity at the street level. For example, Japan and China are now in the process of re-inventing the café tradition. The proliferation of foreign café chains and bakeries sell an atmosphere as much as coffee and cakes. Just for the pleasure of being seen, in a sweet and comfy environment, meeting with friends that are part of the same tribe. Connected but still lacking roots, the young generation moves towards the same cocoons, yet another profitable niche for interior designers. Refined decors mix up references to American TV series with traditional elements, usually wood and water (SPA). Strategically, the theme is an opportunity for the global economy and the local market to confront each other, forming a most successful recipe: “global style /local trade”.

Recently, girls have moved yet a step further beyond reality in the fantastic world of “cosplay” (2). Dressed up like their favourite manga / comics / anime characters, they like to gather in public space, adding another layer to the urban spectacle. As shown in Cao Fei’s video (3), this young generation aspires to live in displacement from the daily routine of their parents’ lifestyles, and their fiction is perfectly reflected in the physiognomy of the new city. Like them, the city is in a state of perpetual mutation. Like them, the city is adapting to be in phase with its times, and sometimes beyond. This means no more monuments but super-heroes. So the city is mainly characterized by the movement of those millions of young individuals, a grand collage of styles, of signs, of lived fictions, an unexpected assemblage of collisions that gives it an extraordinary fluidity. And this cannot be expressed with the giant plastic models promoting large projects and new urbanism in the museums. The actual city’s skin is vibrating to another power and we can claim: The girls are defeating the planners!

(1) Kazuko Koike, City of Girls, Tokyo, The Japan Foundation, 2000.
(2) “cosplay” is a contraction of “costume” and “play”.
(3) Cao Fei, COSplayer,a set of video and photographs, 2005