Project on the city. Vol. 1. Great Leap Forward : Harvard design school project on the city

The Project on the City, formerly known as "The Project for What Used to be the City," is an ongoing research effort that examines the effects of modernization on the urban condition. Each year the Project on the City investigates a specific urban region or a general urban condition undergoing virulent change. It tries to capture and decipher ongoing mutations in order to develop a new conceptual framework and vocabulary for phenomena that can no longer be described within the traditional categories of architecture, landscape, and urban planning.

The first project focuses on the new forms and speeds of urbanization in the Pearl River Delta, China. The second project, Mirward Design School Guide to Shopping, investigates the impact of shopping on the city. The third project explores the urban condition of Sagos, Nigeria. The fourth project treats the invention and expansion of the "systematic" Roman city as an early version of modernization and a prototype for the current process of globalization.

Destined to become a crucial presence in the twenty-first century through sheer size alone, the Pearl River Delta region of the People's Republic of China - a cluster of five cities with a population of 12 million that will become a megalopolis of 36 million inhabitants by the year 2020 - has been gripped by a relentless pursuit of development at a scale and velocity previously unseen in the world. This maelstrom of modernization has been hastened by the presence of two Special Economic Zones in the Pearl River Delta: laboratories for the combined experimentation of communism and capitalism that have produced an entirely new urban substance. Great Leap Forward is based on field work conducted in 1996 and consists of a series of interrelated studies investigating a complex urban condition that has resulted from a uniquely transformed political environment.