Hidden Shadows, China's Dual Soul

In the sunny regions of southern China, people protect themselves from the sun's radiation, and this act has social and cultural implications that determine and alter physical and architectural space.
A simple traffic light wait draws strange geographies of resting places, all united by the search for shade.
The designer's eye is not unaware of the details and planning on a larger scale that in everyday life become spontaneous appropriations, alternative use of spaces designed for other purposes or re-configuration of residual and forgotten places.
New landscapes, often self-managed, provide alternative readings and interpretations.
With the awareness that reading the territory means understanding it and mapping it to then transform it, like the ancient cartographers-explorers, we proceed with a reading ‘from below’, choosing slow journey times useful for reflection. It is then decided to use the means of transport symbolising pre-modern China, the bicycle.
The journey produces and accumulates material for extensive research, but it is a personal experience. And it is this latter aspect that stimulates the imagination. In a challenging tropical climate, one quickly learns to manage the sun/shade ratio by
imitating the local population in the most basic daily activities that often interface with the rapid technological development of the landscape. Imposing infrastructures are temporarily inhabited with commercial activities; water control canals become recreational fishing
opportunities; public transport stops are transformed into temporary food markets, to name a few examples.
900 km travelled in 10 days in the summer of 2020 Covid restrictions. The only external condition is not to go outside the administrative limits of the city of Suzhou in the province of Jiangsu in China. A route designed on the perimeter of limited territory but vast enough to offer very different scenarios. From the industrial ports along the Yangze River to the nature reserves of the enormous Tai Lake, from the borders of the megalopolis, Shanghai, to the Watertowns of Zejiang Province.
Starting from these assumptions, the article aims to identify and understand some of the spaces generated by the complex infrastructural system under construction in China, with particular attention to the landscape of the neighbourhoods that make up the city of Suzhou. Their critical reading helps clarify some aspects of architecture that can interact with landscape and society.