I visited Chongqing for the first time earlier this month, and am trying to put words into the…

I visited Chongqing for the first time earlier this month, and am trying to put words into the intense emotion I felt traversing the intricate and functional web of infrastructure and built environment that defined this city.

That overwhelm was not only pride, shock, or joy, but of profound disappointment that the U.S. has fallen decades behind and lost the bigger point behind the drive for unencumbered growth.

Sure, China has overdone housing to the point of drying up the entire architecture discipline to dust, it doesn’t conduct environmental reviews when building the longest high speed rail network (larger than Japan’s, France’s, Spain’s combined), and has gone into major debt financing it all, and surely conveniently propelled municipal level politicians into higher office.

BUT, they did it.

And it kills me that we work tirelessly on projects in this country that take upwards of a decade to build, or never see the light of day from losing NIMBY battles, or we resort to begging the 1% to finance our practices by building bespoke-state-of-the-art homes for them that will never be lived in.

Chongqing, was a fishing village built on steep steps reaching down to the Yangtze and Jialing rivers, and in the 1930s was nothing more than wood sheds. Which was then bombed out by Japan during WWII. All this development began in the late 90s.

I’ve been reading Dan Wang’s “Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future” to contextualize and understand the disparity between two vastly different yet similar places. And it offers glimmers of hope in the same way recent books such as Ezra Klein’s “Abundance” and Marc Dunkelman’s “Why Nothing Works”, are illuminating the abundance mindset that a nation of lawyers and politicians have no capability of having at this moment.

And this country’s built environment isn’t saturated. It has SO MUCH potential to build, and rebuild, and repair. It has the legal structures, the innovative drive, the talent, the ambition, AND capital.

We need to remember that we can execute at greater scale and for the collective good.