Well I’ve just returned from an interesting weekend in the city of Foshan. I was invited by my boss, Jane, to attend the annual architecture forum in her home city of Foshan. This is a city of a few million (small in the Chinese context), situated about three hours north-west of Shenzhen.

It was great to get out of the city and see some more of the region. What most surprised me was the urban environment. Shenzhen merges into Dongguan, which merges into Guangzhou which merges into Foshan. Guangdong Province is a sea of dense urban sprawl - the world’s factory floor.

Foshan was a delight, however. As it was Jane’s home town she took us to a great local noodle shop, although to be honest I can’t describe the joy I felt when presented with the Swissotel breakfast buffet! A proper English Breakfast, with baked beans.

My room on the forty-sixth floor had a fantastic view of the city laid out below. Foshan is an ancient city and although now much smaller than its neighbour Guangzhou, the two maintain a rivalry as to which is the birthplace of Cantonese culture.

Unusually for traditional Chinese cities, Foshan has no urban centre, but instead a string of neighborhood clusters organised around the many waterways that intersects the urban fabric. This gives the city a smaller, more human scale that is both unusual and at risk of being lost forever in the contemporary Chinese developmental context.

Arup were presenting a recent project in the city - the Culture Mall. This project is massive by European standards and designed to equip the city with the cultural capital in museums, auditoria and the like to enable it to compete both nationally and internationally. The form of the project was inspired by the unique urban fabric of the city and is such extremely fitting in its exciting and eclectic design.

The forum was an interesting opportunity for me to see the kind of work going on in the city and it was extremely impressive to see the focus the city and it’s government were putting on the implementation of good design principles. This does not mean, however, that I was overly impressed with all of the projects. It was clear to me that good design in this region seems to be dominated by a few select firms which sadly means that the majority of developments are made up of buildings - not architecture. Some may argue that this is the norm in most of the world and I would agree. The fundamental difference is that here in China the scale is so different and the amount of construction is so huge that this situation can have a much larger detrimental effect on the urban environment due to the sheer greater number of users involved.