Watch Mainland Quality: Meaning and Endurance in China's Contemporary Landscape

With blistering growth and an insatiable demand for expertise, designers have been rewarded with projects of remarkable scope and scale throughout China. The same conditions that create dramatic opportunities have also set the stage for disappointment, however, with low-quality implementation too often resulting in projects with limited physical integrity and programmatic relevance.

This short documentary film examines some of China's highest profile recently built works, selected primarily from the discipline of landscape architecture and distributed across some sixteen cities. As a collection, these investigated works form a cross-sectional snapshot of a moment in the country's material development and cultural transformation. Through an assessment of project effectiveness and build quality, insight is gained regarding the values that have driven the creation of these works in addition to the combined opportunities and challenges to be negotiated by those who will guide the next phase of this region's growth.