Bricks of the Future: The Making and Unmaking of a New Beijing

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How might the future of a city be foretold in a single ubiquitous, yet often invisible, building material? Across the Chinese capital today, municipal planners, developers, artists, and residents alike are mobilising the brick not only as a window to the past and an indictment of the present, but a key portent of the future. Amid a capricious climate of creative destruction, this article tracks how bricks emerge as historicised artifacts, aesthetic interventions, and weapons used by and against the forces of China’s spectacular development. Against clichés of intractable permanence, the Chinese brick today is revealing new and unpredictable vicissitudes as it is co-opted in projects of governance and resistance, demarcating both the material and symbolic parameters of urban belonging in contemporary Beijing. Approaching the lived form of the Chinese metropolis through this traditional architectural material, the article describes Beijing brick in three instantiations: as a lightning rod for debate about the past, present, and future of Beijing’s historic old city; as a materialisation of the atmospherics of pollution and “progress”; and as the armament of both development and its opposition. Through these instances, the brick oscillates between being understood as a relic of aestheticised tradition, a symbol of modernisation, and a trenchant instrument of both building and destruction. As extended fieldwork in Beijing evidences, it is precisely this social and material mutability of the brick that today reorients life in the city toward novel human and nonhuman alliances and oppositions, while also conditioning wider political sensibilities about who counts and what matters in official and unofficial imaginings of China’s future.