City of Production: A Fabulous Opportunity to Experiment with Positive Capitalism

"City of Production" is a call and response from MAP Office--a collaborative studio co-founded by Laurent Gutierrez and Valerie Portefaix that creates hybridized projects between architecture and the visual arts--to China's relatively recent adoption of capitalist industrial models. The intent is to posit alternatives to the Just-in-Time method of production. In order to engage with these questions, this volume documents MAP Office's five-year survey of the Sun Hin factory, which is one among thousands in the Pearl River Delta. Under MAP Office's aegis, the factory evolved into a City of Production--a laboratory that poses the challenge of positive capitalism; it has resulted in provision of social benefits for Sun Hin's workers. MAP Office has presented this project at the San Francisco Art Institute, the Tenth Istanbul Biennale and the Second Shenzhen Architecture Biennale.