NXL personal history statement

PERSONAL HISTORY STATEMENT My first impressions of urban design and architecture came through wars - not in the real world, but in a series of historical real-time strategy video games called Age of Empires. In order to defeat my enemies in this game, I often built a 'Town Center' to store resources, strong 'Walls' to defend and block, and several 'Watch Towers' outside my borders to observe and deter the enemy. It is where borders cross that war is most likely to occur. My interest in exploring multiracial cultures and architecture and planning beautiful cities came about when I was free to choose any nationality and culture to build a city in the game.

I was brought up and stayed until 18 in an isolated and old-fashioned residential area (called ‘the new estate for workers’), which was beyond the commercial housing market and then outdated in China's 1980s housing commodification. During my college in SEU, participating in several social surveys on urban and rural planning in Nanjing, I met many unhappy residents, such as families huddled in a crowded residential area beside the city center, a large number of migrants living in low-quality communities/away from the city center, and forgotten retired workers in the factory residential area, just like my family.

In 2018 I went to St. Louis, Washington, Philadelphia, and New York for study tours. The cities I have visited have extremely fragmented spatial distribution. For example, in Saint Louis, separated by the Mississippi River, there is the most authentic and shocking art, music, and nature at one side of the Mississippi River, and poverty and violence that keep visitors out at the other side. At the intersection of heaven and hell, there is the most famous tourist attraction - the Gateway Arch.

Living in several cities inspired me that the rules of building cities to take control of the resources and win the game in Age of Empires were still working in the real world. A city is made up of countless fragmented territories controlled by various sovereigns including the government, real estate developers, and so on. People are restricted by tangible or invisible walls and tend to move around only in fixed areas. High-quality green space and other urban public spaces are only available for a small part of citizens.

Unlike in a game, there are no winners in urban planning. The more isolated areas appear, the more pressure of competition among developers, the less mobility and denser urban spaces will be in the city. Even worse, fragmented spatial distribution results in serious racialism, inequity, and safety issues. Considering these facts, I decide to continue the dream of building a happy city that I have had in my childhood, but more humanely and scientifically applying the relevant knowledge, instead of defending and waging war like a game. Eventually, I figure out my motivation to study architecture and urban design.