Earlier this week, Chinese architect Liu Jiakun was awarded the 2025 Pritzker Prize. For those of you who may not be familiar, the Pritzker Prize is generally considered to be the architect world's most prestigious prize. (The full list of laureates can be found, here.)
Jiakun is based in Chengdu, China and he has worked exclusively within the country. His largest project is a mixed-use complex known as the West Village, which is a truly enormous courtyard building that exists at the scale of a neighborhood.
It houses cultural, recreational, commercial, and office spaces, all of which are connected by an elaborate network of pedestrian and cyclist ramps. Here's what that looks like from above:
Earlier this week, Chinese architect Liu Jiakun was awarded the 2025 Pritzker Prize. For those of you who may not be familiar, the Pritzker Prize is generally considered to be the architect world's most prestigious prize. (The full list of laureates can be found, here.)
Jiakun is based in Chengdu, China and he has worked exclusively within the country. His largest project is a mixed-use complex known as the West Village, which is a truly enormous courtyard building that exists at the scale of a neighborhood.
It houses cultural, recreational, commercial, and office spaces, all of which are connected by an elaborate network of pedestrian and cyclist ramps. Here's what that looks like from above:
At first glance, it's the kind of large-scale development that looks as if it may not work. It looks like it could be the kind of project that sterilizes a fine-grained urban neighborhood. But get closer, and things start to look a little different.
The true test is seeing how it performs at the scale of a pedestrian. And I found this walking tour helpful in understanding what that might feel like. If you spend a few minutes watching it, or even just scanning through it, you'll see that the area looks active and busy, even at night.
Now, I've never visited this project, or Chengdu for that matter, but I suspect that the way to think about this project is not as one giant complex, but as a giant public space flanked by buildings. In other words, it's not that the complex is enormous, it's that the public spaces are enormous.
“I always aspire to be like water,” says Liu, “to permeate through a place without carrying a fixed form of my own and to seep into the local environment and the site itself. Over time, the water gradually solidifies, transforming into architecture, and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation. Yet it still retains all the qualities of that place, both good and bad.”
The West Village seems to be a testament to this approach. He aspired to not interrupt the flows of the existing environment, and perhaps that's why it works so well. Or at least, that's what it looks like on YouTube.
In 2023, there were 379,000 babies born in Italy. This is down from 393,000 babies in the prior year and represents a new record low. Already in 2022, the number of births was noted as being the fewest since Italy's unification in 1861. The result is a "demographic winter." Of course, this challenge is not unique to Italy. It is happening in most developed countries. Korea, for example, has a fertility rate somewhere around 0.72 babies per woman. Because of this, there are a lot of people in the world trying to figure out how to encourage more births.
Meloni, herself a mother of a single child, has said it is a priority for her government to increase the birth rate and encourage women to have more babies “for the simple reason that we want Italy to have a future again”.
So what's causing this?
One seemingly logical explanation could be that the employment rates for women and men are basically the same now. Fewer women are staying at home and so there's less time to have and raise children. In fact, the opposite is true. If you look at fertility rates across Europe, high birth rates tend to correlate with high employment rates for women. I guess families need to be able to afford children. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article (c. 2015) on the topic of fertility:
The map of the fertility rate in European countries more or less overlaps with that of women in work. In countries with relatively buoyant populations, such as France and Scandinavia, women play an important part in the labour market.
Remember Wuhan? Well, it turns out that it is emerging as an important hub for driverless vehicles. Right now it is home to the largest fleet in the world:
In Wuhan, 500 robotaxis, mostly run by Baidu, China’s rival to Google, recorded more than 730,000 ride-hailing trips last year. That compares with combined orders of more than 700,000 last year in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to Waymo, the self-driving car developer of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo told the Financial Times that it had “a couple of hundred cars” in each of the three fully autonomous zones.
One of the things that is allegedly helping Chinese companies is that they have access to more data. The networks of cameras and other infrastructure that make Chinese cities the most surveilled in the world are, coincidentally, also good for training machine learning models.
This has some industry experts speculating that China could reach an autonomous vehicle "tipping point" sometime around 2027. Meaning, the technologies will be significantly safer than human drivers (at least 10x) and ready for mass adoption.
I don't know if this is the right timeline. There have been many forecasts made over the years. But I do know that competition is good for progress and that having a rival can be an important motivator. And right now, this is yet another example of the US vs. China.
At first glance, it's the kind of large-scale development that looks as if it may not work. It looks like it could be the kind of project that sterilizes a fine-grained urban neighborhood. But get closer, and things start to look a little different.
The true test is seeing how it performs at the scale of a pedestrian. And I found this walking tour helpful in understanding what that might feel like. If you spend a few minutes watching it, or even just scanning through it, you'll see that the area looks active and busy, even at night.
Now, I've never visited this project, or Chengdu for that matter, but I suspect that the way to think about this project is not as one giant complex, but as a giant public space flanked by buildings. In other words, it's not that the complex is enormous, it's that the public spaces are enormous.
“I always aspire to be like water,” says Liu, “to permeate through a place without carrying a fixed form of my own and to seep into the local environment and the site itself. Over time, the water gradually solidifies, transforming into architecture, and perhaps even into the highest form of human spiritual creation. Yet it still retains all the qualities of that place, both good and bad.”
The West Village seems to be a testament to this approach. He aspired to not interrupt the flows of the existing environment, and perhaps that's why it works so well. Or at least, that's what it looks like on YouTube.
In 2023, there were 379,000 babies born in Italy. This is down from 393,000 babies in the prior year and represents a new record low. Already in 2022, the number of births was noted as being the fewest since Italy's unification in 1861. The result is a "demographic winter." Of course, this challenge is not unique to Italy. It is happening in most developed countries. Korea, for example, has a fertility rate somewhere around 0.72 babies per woman. Because of this, there are a lot of people in the world trying to figure out how to encourage more births.
Meloni, herself a mother of a single child, has said it is a priority for her government to increase the birth rate and encourage women to have more babies “for the simple reason that we want Italy to have a future again”.
So what's causing this?
One seemingly logical explanation could be that the employment rates for women and men are basically the same now. Fewer women are staying at home and so there's less time to have and raise children. In fact, the opposite is true. If you look at fertility rates across Europe, high birth rates tend to correlate with high employment rates for women. I guess families need to be able to afford children. Here's an excerpt from a Guardian article (c. 2015) on the topic of fertility:
The map of the fertility rate in European countries more or less overlaps with that of women in work. In countries with relatively buoyant populations, such as France and Scandinavia, women play an important part in the labour market.
Remember Wuhan? Well, it turns out that it is emerging as an important hub for driverless vehicles. Right now it is home to the largest fleet in the world:
In Wuhan, 500 robotaxis, mostly run by Baidu, China’s rival to Google, recorded more than 730,000 ride-hailing trips last year. That compares with combined orders of more than 700,000 last year in Phoenix, San Francisco and Los Angeles, according to Waymo, the self-driving car developer of Google’s parent company Alphabet. Waymo told the Financial Times that it had “a couple of hundred cars” in each of the three fully autonomous zones.
One of the things that is allegedly helping Chinese companies is that they have access to more data. The networks of cameras and other infrastructure that make Chinese cities the most surveilled in the world are, coincidentally, also good for training machine learning models.
This has some industry experts speculating that China could reach an autonomous vehicle "tipping point" sometime around 2027. Meaning, the technologies will be significantly safer than human drivers (at least 10x) and ready for mass adoption.
I don't know if this is the right timeline. There have been many forecasts made over the years. But I do know that competition is good for progress and that having a rival can be an important motivator. And right now, this is yet another example of the US vs. China.
According to data for 2010
published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
in France, 84.4% in Finland, 85.6% in Denmark and 87.5% in Sweden, barely lower than the equivalent figures for men. In contrast, in southern Europe and Japan the share of women in work was much lower: only 64.4% of them had a job in Italy, 71.6% in Japan, 72.2% in Greece and 78.3% in Spain.
Staying on the theme of being able to afford kids, another possible explanation might be that kids are expensive and so you need strong family-friendly government policies to help support them. While this I'm sure helps, there's data to suggest that the correlation between these policies and birth rates is actually fairly weak. That's why, even though many developed countries have expanded such policies, birth rates continue to fall. Here's a graphic by John Burn-Murdoch from FT:
So what the hell is it then? Well there is another possible explanation and it is that it's more of a cultural thing. In the above article, John makes the argument that a number of other more important factors are leading to declining birth rates. Namely, more people are choosing to live alone, and not as a couple. Priorities have shifted, where family formation is no longer seen as central to a fulfilling life. And more young people are generally anxious. (He doesn't get into why but I'm sure that it's possible to blame TikTok.)
But what really stood out to me was this graphic:
Since the 1960s, parenting has gotten systematically more intense for parents. The average number of hours per day spent by mothers on "hands-on parenting activities" has grown significantly in most developed countries. However, there is one clear exception: France. It turns out that the French are, at least based on this data, less likely to be so-called helicopter parents. Parenting is less hands-on, kids get more freedom and -- perhaps because of this -- France has the highest fertility rate in Europe at over 1.8 babies per woman.
This is not to say that France's family-friendly policies aren't doing something as well. I would imagine they are. But the above makes intuitive sense to me. If you create an environment where the threshold to be considered a good parent is constantly becoming more duanting and more life-consuming, it's no surprise to me that more and more people are simply saying, no thank you.
According to data for 2010
published by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development,
in France, 84.4% in Finland, 85.6% in Denmark and 87.5% in Sweden, barely lower than the equivalent figures for men. In contrast, in southern Europe and Japan the share of women in work was much lower: only 64.4% of them had a job in Italy, 71.6% in Japan, 72.2% in Greece and 78.3% in Spain.
Staying on the theme of being able to afford kids, another possible explanation might be that kids are expensive and so you need strong family-friendly government policies to help support them. While this I'm sure helps, there's data to suggest that the correlation between these policies and birth rates is actually fairly weak. That's why, even though many developed countries have expanded such policies, birth rates continue to fall. Here's a graphic by John Burn-Murdoch from FT:
So what the hell is it then? Well there is another possible explanation and it is that it's more of a cultural thing. In the above article, John makes the argument that a number of other more important factors are leading to declining birth rates. Namely, more people are choosing to live alone, and not as a couple. Priorities have shifted, where family formation is no longer seen as central to a fulfilling life. And more young people are generally anxious. (He doesn't get into why but I'm sure that it's possible to blame TikTok.)
But what really stood out to me was this graphic:
Since the 1960s, parenting has gotten systematically more intense for parents. The average number of hours per day spent by mothers on "hands-on parenting activities" has grown significantly in most developed countries. However, there is one clear exception: France. It turns out that the French are, at least based on this data, less likely to be so-called helicopter parents. Parenting is less hands-on, kids get more freedom and -- perhaps because of this -- France has the highest fertility rate in Europe at over 1.8 babies per woman.
This is not to say that France's family-friendly policies aren't doing something as well. I would imagine they are. But the above makes intuitive sense to me. If you create an environment where the threshold to be considered a good parent is constantly becoming more duanting and more life-consuming, it's no surprise to me that more and more people are simply saying, no thank you.
