Billing itself as a biennale of fragments, collage and tactical urbanism, the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture will open on December 4, 2015. Curated around the theme of “Re-Living The City”, it proposes to re-imagine, re-purpose and re-make existing cities to create better solutions for human habitation; says curator Aaron Betsky “This Biennale makes a simple argument: we have enough stuff. We have enough buildings, enough objects, and enough images. We certainly have enough cities and built-up areas. We do not need to make or build any more. What we need to do is to reuse, rethink, and reimagine what we already have.”

The biennale has a strong reputation in the architecture community with many of the projects of previous biennales being cited in architectural journals  around the world and with work by well-known artists such Chen Zhen’s musical trampoline (“Danser la Musique”),  Kacey Wong’s “Paddling Home” luxury apartment raft and Polit-Sheer-Form’s tofu hut.

The 6th Biennale will be headed up by 2008 Venice Architecture Biennale Curator Aaron Betsky, Urban Think Tank Founders Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner and Doreen Heng Liu Liu, a principal of Node Architecture and Associate Professor at the School of Architecture at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.

The exhibition encompasses venues in both Hong Kong and Shenzhen and though for a long time Shenzhen  was seen as the upstart border city in this odd couple, it has been developing an identity of its own. In fact, several people we talked to in the architecture sphere seem to think that the Shenzhen-based shows have outshone their Hong Kong counterparts, the latter involving a smaller number of familiar faces and frequent collaborators.

“The volume as well as the quality of work alongside the choice of curators seem quite different between the two cities: Shenzhen, with its Chinese and international curatorial teams, multiple venues, types and sizes of special commissions versus Hong Kong’s choice of local curators and limited venues not only shows different organizational structures, but also a major difference between how both events are funded as well as supported by government and other various sources,” says Ercument Gorgul, Professor of Urban Planning at Tongji University.

Despite the varying levels of participation, the idea of choosing two border cities (influenced by different economic and political systems) creates a powerful backdrop for this biennale which focuses on the concept of “the border.”

Assuming a strategy of “hunting and gathering” the 2015 biennale entitled “Remaking the City” proposes to create social and economic connections through a collage of fragments of various different architectural projects. This will be presented in the physical form of a 3D collage (Collage City 3D, the first section of the exhibition) built on a shared scaffolding which will act as a kind of “white board” for brainstorming future projects.

Following the same DIY, “non-top-down” approach, the “Maker Maker” section encompasses both meanings of the movement by bringing in over 20 makers working in both analogue and digital modes who will give demonstrations of their “craft” to the public. Though the inclusion of the maker element could be seen as an attempt to jump on the “Maker” bandwagon—it fits in nicely with the growing development of Maker culture in Shenzhen. Examples of this are the hardware innovation platform started up by Eric Pan’s Seeed Studio and the annual Maker Faire, where local manufacturers roam the fair visiting makers offering them the opportunity to mass produce their creations, thus taking them from maker to market.

In the spirit of the maker movement “Unidentified Acts of Design” presented by the V&A will offer works created in urban villages by amateur inventors, not unlike a kind of small scale  tech-focused version of Cai Guoqiang’s “Peasant Da Vincis”…

The third section “PRD 2.0” zeroes in on the local specificities of the Pearl River Delta, namely issues of environmental pollution, food safety and an aging population by offering ways to re-engineer this region which was originally designed with the primary goals of producing and transporting goods—a kind of assembly line of city-sized proportions.

Meanwhile, “Radical Urbanism: The Future of Urban Life Is Informal” takes its starting point from a prediction mentioned in the curatorial literature that by 2030, over two billion of the world’s inhabitants will be living in slums. Rather than come up with strategies for how to raise and contain these networks of informal housing, the curators aim to examine how the inhabitants of slums meet their own needs in terms of shelter and other services. For instance, the exhibition will feature Detroit’s “Heidelberg Project” whereby artist Tyree Guyton launched a colorful intervention in the down-and-out neighborhood of McDougall-Hunt, turning houses in to Yayoi-kusama-esque canvases.

Finally “Social City” will attempt to harvest large amounts of data in order to understand and facilitate the creation of more sustainable urban environments. As a biennale which trumpets the creativity and inventiveness of the marginalized, it focuses a lot on the concept of the border—not so much as a literal checkpoint but as a peripheral zone—a place which seems outside the reach of traditional urban planning and mass land development schemes. Yet “the border” concept also brings up more sociological elements such as non-mainstream lifestyles and the default “border” of the city—nature.

The curatorial team of Li Xiangning and Jeffrey Johnson explore this thread in discussing how industrial zones which used to define the boundaries of cities are now seen as more integral in terms of generating economic growth. They talk about peri-urban areas that have become cities in their own right, occupying new territory between the rural and urban; also relevant is the notion of porous boundaries and tightly guarded borders versus special economic zones which they liken to heterotopias.

Both this team and Ole Bouman  are delving deep into the specificities of these two cities. Though we often think of Shenzhen as a “border city”, one wonders what might happen if that paradigm was reversed and Hong Kong was to be seen as a border town on the edge of the mainland. We’re certainly not positing any theories, but what Bourman’s team hopes to do is track this flux in urban identity using the former Guangdong Floatglass Factory as a case study. The factory, which produced window glass, the clothing for the skyscrapers which came to symbolize China’s economic power, was prized not for any architectural flourishes but for its functionality, and actually won awards on this basis. It was remote enough that its activities would not affect society at large were it to fail — it didn’t, and now, 30 years later, it has served its function. The glass production has moved elsewhere and the concrete shell of the factory is now part of a Cultural Special Zone. The project will also take place at the Old Warehouse at the Shekou Ferry Terminal, the Decheng Flour Factory in Shenzhen and Xipu New Residence in Longgang District. In his role as curator, Bouman tries to imagine the future of this zone which is poised on the edge of a dramatic re-branding, and it’s a story which speaks to China as a whole given that there are in fact a great number of cities in the throes of dramatic makeovers—trying to cast off their associations with manufacturing and heavy industry in favor of a more “value added” design and creativity-focused image.