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 region or a general condition undergoing virulent change. The Project attempts to document and understand the mutations of urban culture 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 investigates the impact of shopping on the City. The third project explores the African metropolis of Lagos, Nigeria. The fourth project examines the invention and expansion of the 'systematic' Roman city as a precursor of modernization and a prototype for the current process of globalization.

Great Leap Forward

Destined to become a crucial presence in the 21st century through sheer size alone, the Pearl River Delta (PRD) region of the People's Republic of China-a cluster of five cities with a population of twelve million, that will become a megalopolis of thirty-six million inhabitants by the year 2020-has been gripped by a relentless pursuit of development on a scale and velocity previously unexperienced in the world. This maelstrom of modernization has been hastened in the PRD by the presence of two Special Economic Zones: laboratories for the combined experimentation of capitalism and communism which has produced an entirely new urban substance.

Great Leap Forward is based on field work conducted between 1996 and 1997, and consists of a series of interrelated studies which investigates the complex urban condition generated.

The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping

Shopping is arguably the terminal form of public activity. Through a battery of increasingly sophisticated models, shopping has been able to infiltrate-even replace-almost every aspect of urban life. Town centers, suburbs, streets, and now airports, train stations, museums, hospitals, schools, the internet, and even the military, are increasingly shaped by the mechanisms and logic of shopping. The voracity by which shopping pursues the public has, in effect, made it one of the principal-if only-modes by which the city is experienced. But, because shopping has not been regarded seriously, the revolution it has achieved has gone largely unnoticed.

The Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping is a series of essays, statistical analyses, and reflections that together portray the people, techniques, ideologies, inventions, and spaces by which shopping has refashioned the city.