Lilong identity

硕士学位论文

改善城市住房 研究与设计上海空间

姓

名：阿莉切

学

号：1237410

所在院系：建筑与城市规划学院 学科门类：建筑学 学科专业：建筑学 指导教师：支文军 副指导教师：Remo Dorigati

二〇一五年

六月

A dissertation submitted to Tongji University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Master of Architecture

LILONG IDENTITY A typomorphological study of Shanghai’s housing urban block and a new proposal for it

Candidate: Alice Pontiggia Student Number:

1237410

School/Department: College of Architecture and Urban Planning Discipline: Architecture Major: Architecture Supervisor:

ZHI Wenjun

Co-Supervisor:

Remo Dorigati

June, 2015

5cm 左右

中 文 题 目

阿 莉 切

同 济 大 学 5cm 左右

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学位论文作者签名： 2015 年 6 月 29 日

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学位论文作者签名： 2015 年 6 月 29 日

同济大学 硕士学位论文 摘要

摘要

里弄，字面解释，里：邻里，邻居；弄：小巷。里弄起源于 19 世纪 末，基于上海快速增长的人口需求，现在被普遍认为是上海老城的真 正肌理。在上世纪，城市的住房体系已经进入一个相对成熟完善的阶 段。虽然人口增加，住宅持续大规模增长，累积的速度以及政府制度 的限制，并没有使住宅建设在历史传统的层面上得到发展。与此同时， 对历史街区遗产建筑的破坏以及对西方国家城市模型的全盘引入也 在发生。幸存的里弄已经失去了它们原始的特质而只有外立面留存。

在此折衷的情况下，基于城市设计的五原则以及当地文化特点，及至 里弄丰富生动的生活，一个准确的类型研究被提出，来分析理解上海 城市形态产生的原则。

里弄区域建筑特点将会与当代住宅建筑类型进行比较，最终一个住宅 策略将会被提出并应用于上海虹桥一带的一块场地。

关键词：上海，里弄，类型研究，设计， 城市住宅

I

Tongji University Master Abstract

ABSTRACT Lilong housing, literally “li” 里 , neighborhood, and “long” 弄 , lanes, originated as a response to the needs of a rapidly growing Shanghai at the end of the nineteenth century and are now widely recognized as the real texture of the city.

During the last century however, the housing system in the metropolis has been in a complete state of transformation. The residential asset has been continuously growing, but the rapidity of the accretion times and the restrictions imposed by the central regulations, did not permit a development in line with traditions. Compounding the situation there is also the demolition of a large part of the historical heritage of the city and the introduction of a complete different model imported from the western countries. Where survived, the lilong has lost its original character and only an exterior appearance is left.

In light of this compromised situation, an accurate typomorphologic analysis is produced, to understand the principles organizing Shanghai’s urban form, with the recognition of five important elements, and the features of its cultural identity, summing up in the vivid life of lilong alleys. The lilong neighborhood will be compared to the common contemporary solution for the residential urban block, the high-rise compound, and finally a settlement strategy will be proposed and applied to an empty area in Hongkou district.

Key Words: Shanghai, lilong, typo-morphological, design project, urban housing

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同济大学 硕士学位论文 目录

Index

PART 1. INTRODUCTION 1.1 Problem statement…………………………………………………………….5 1.2 Research aims and goals……………………………………………………...6 1.3 Thesis structure……………………………………………………………….8 1.4 The typomorphological approach…………………………………………….9 PART 2. SHANGHAI CONTEXT 2.1 A growing population………………………………………………………..12 2.2 Real estate trend……………………………………………………………..17 2.3 Housing policies……………………………………………………………..22 2.4 Approach to the architectural………………………………………………..24 PART 3. LILONG NEIGHBORHOOD 3.1 The research model………………………………………………………….30 3.2 Lilong birth context…………………………………………………………32 3.3 Old shikumen lilong…………………………………………………………35 3.4 New shikumen lilong………………………………………………………..39 3.5 New type lilong……………………………………………………………...41 3.6 Garden lilong………………………………………………………………...44 3.7 Apartment lilong…………………………………………………………….46 3.8 Conclusion on lilong typo-morphological analysis…………………………49 PART 4. CONTEMPORARY URBAN HOUSING 4.1 An historical gap……………………………………………………………54 4.2 Actual overview…………………………………………………………….55 4.3 High-rise bith context………………………………………………………57 4.2 High-rise typomorphological analysis………………………………………58 4.3 High rise-lilong comparison…………………………………………………62 PART 5. DESIGN STRATEGY 5.1 Summary on Shanghai housing……………………………………………..66 III

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5.2 Proposal of new typomorphological features……………………………….68 5.3 Project area………………………………………………………………….80 5.4 Prototype drawings……………………………………………………….91 PART 6. CONCLUSION 6.1 Reflections on China / Europe comparison………………………………101 6.2 A chance for typomorphological application……………………………..102 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………106 APPENDIX A – Other Chinese residential assets…………………………..111 APPENDIX B – Reflections on density……………………………………...123 APPENDIX C – Shanghai urban history……………………………………140

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Part 1

1.1

Introduction

Problem statement

Lilong housing, literally “li” 里, neighborhood, and “long” 弄, lanes, originated as a response to the needs of a rapidly growing Shanghai at the end of the nineteenth century. These dwellings, in fact, were the result of the economic power of foreign investors meeting the cultural knowledge of local constructors, in a place where the government impositions could not be applied and in a time of astonishing urbanization. Lilong are now widely recognized as the real texture of the city as buildings born free from any formal restriction and indeed strictly connected to the city needs.

The lilong had in fact the capacity to adapt itself to the city’s needs, perfectly summarizing the Shanghai housing evolution and the changes in their inhabitant’s lifestyle. As told by Peter G. Rowe in its book, “almost without exception, subsequent transformation of a particular housing type did not result in a new type altogether. The one exception was the lilong housing, which seems to be anchored in both the western terrace house and the Chinese courtyard house traditions, but is a relatively distinctive housing type in its own right”.1 But despite this recognition, during the last century, the housing system in China, and moreover in a metropolis like Shanghai, has been in a complete state of transformation. The residential asset has been continuously growing, but the rapidity of the accretion times and the restrictions imposed by the central regulations, did not permit a development in line with traditions. Still nowadays, dwellings are forced to follow a rigid set of rules that define standards and shapes, leaving very little space to the research work of architects.

Compounding the situation there is also the demolition of a large part of the historical 1

Jie, Zhang and Junhua, Lü and Rowe, Peter G. Modern urban housing in China, 1840-2000.

(Munich: Prestel, 2001), 293.

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heritage of the city; an operation of routine in Chinese history, made of cycles of destruction and reconstruction, but that now does not seem to find a satisfying substitute. The contemporary housing development in fact has lost some of the cultural heritage inherent in the traditional dwellings, and some basic principles on which all kind of Chinese vernacular architecture were founded, cannot be perceived anymore in the recent residential buildings. Looking at the prevalent typology proposed nowadays, the high-rise apartment, we see an improved solution in terms of quality compared to the previous constructions, but the rules of a different model.

Where survived, the lilong has lost its original character. Over time the situation of overcrowding caused by the economic development of the city, had increasingly worsened the life conditions within the neighborhood and forced the institutions to remodel or replace the old blocks. The main strategy adopted by the institutions has actually been to move the inhabitants in an outer area with higher comforts and replace the old constructions with residential compounds. Nowadays, the only way the traditional structure could be preserved is to convert the area into an attractive node with a cultural or commercial function, as for example the cases of Xintiandi and Tianziafang.

In light of this compromised situation, it is now the perfect time to conduct a thorough investigation about lilong. Recollecting materials about the issue for this research, what emerges is the abundance in typological studies about the housing form in architectural terms, while the disaffection for the morphological urban issue of the internal functioning of the neighborhood block and its relation with the city.

A research in this direction is indeed defined, with the aim to identify the regulating principles of the lilong urban form and in the end to reformulate them in a new residential proposal which could be one of several solutions for a fully integrated housing into the culture and the form of Shanghai.

1.2

Research aims and goals

The aim of this research is primary to improve the actual knowledge on lilong 6

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neighborhood with the help of typomorphological tools, also in consideration of the increased interest about China of the western academic world in the last few years.

These studies will lead in a second moment to the definition of a developing strategy for Shanghai’s urban residential blocks. Therefore the final goal of this thesis will be to discover the constant values belonging to the lilong structure, and to incorporate them into an housing prototype, built in correspondence with the defined typomorphological guidelines, that embodies the positive legacy of the Chinese tradition but also meets the current livable needs.

My principal research question will be: What are the typo-morphological principles that organize the lilong neighborhood?

And subsequently: It is possible to study a new residential strategy that reflects the typo-morphological features of lilong neighborhood, so that is kept the continuity with the local culture identity?

As the professor Wu Liangyong said in its research, “one conclusion that can be drawn from the theoretical debates and actual experiences of this century of urban development is that the negation of traditional city form is part of the inevitable process of development, but it does not signify its end. Establishing a new city form is often more difficult than destroying the old. It suggests that now we need to reconsider the traditional relationship between building form and urban space” 2. For this reason I would like to remember that, despite the dedication to the architectural project, is the methodology, more than any specific design outcome, that I hope will be appreciate.

Under the conviction that the good planning of the city will improve its livability, there is a need to study an alternative way to develop high-density urban housing that will respect the commune culture while responding to contemporary trend and needs.

In this sense the proposed solution wants to represent not an external imposition, but a 2

Liangyong, Wu. Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing. A Project in the Ju’er Hutong Neighborhood. (Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 92.

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set of suggestions developed in the consciousness of local heritage in combination with a critical foreign point of view.

1.3 Thesis structure The following research include a one-year experience in Shanghai, including the urban and architectural courses attended at Tongji University and a direct investigation on the city, and an academic year at Politecnico di Milano, during which the literature review and the design work were carried out. Over both these periods I discussed these issues with professors and colleagues and I depth the topic with movie viewing, background readings and cultural researches.

The decision to focus on Shanghai was dictated in part by the need to streamline the research operations, but mainly by the uniqueness of the city; a place influenced by foreign cultures and where the incredible economic growth pushed the design of the residential buildings to a continue modification.

The first part of this research project will report some background information about the typological and morphological theoretic debate and its history, defining the terms going to be use in the thesis. In the second part will be defined the state of the art about the research on lilong neighborhood and then its urban form will be analyzed. In the third section the contemporary context of Shanghai will be reported to understand the socio-economic and political dynamics that influenced or still control the evolution of the city’s built heritage. It will introduce the fourth part, in which the proposal for a new residential strategy is defined and the application of these guidelines in a residential block in Shanghai is illustrated.

The research will be centered on the lilong neighborhoods, while other residential solutions, useful for a broader comparison on the development of housing type, and are listed in Appendix A, at the end of this volume. In this final section are also proposed some parameters and different urban tissue that are considered useful for the comparison with the final prototype (Appendix B) and a brief history of Shanghai (Appendix C).

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1.4 The typomorphological approach The compositional word typomorphology appeared for the first time in 1982 in Castex and Panerai’s article Prospects for typomorphology published in Lotus International.

In this short paper them, beside the definition of four analysis level of the city, propose to consider them in light of the different customs of usage, administration, construction and other aspects, connecting the term “type” to a more cultural context.

It can be seen as an evolution of the mid 1900s debate sprung among the Italian scholar, and in particular represented by Saverio Muratori and Gianfranco Caniggia, about the concept of type and typology. Muratori developed his thinking on the organicity of the urban form as a system made up from urban types in a continuous evolution under the drive of a changing culture. His idea of type was related to the Plato’s ideal form, a synthetic scheme inherently nested in the builders’ minds.

Subsequently Caniggia carried on this work applying the theory to the urban context in a more practical way, as we can find in his masterpiece Composizione Architettonica e Tipologia Edilizia. Lettura dell’edilizia di base (Caniggia and Maffei 1979). In this volume he analyze the urban tissue of some Italian cities showing us its method and his discoveries, as the definition of the “insulisation” and “tabernisation” processes for the urban accretion and the definition of the domus romanae as the matrix for the Roman planning (a parallelism can be found between the domus courtyard house and the traditional siheyuan dwelling, see Appendix A). In the following decades, the Italian Typological School pursued the study of building types and their historical evolution, considering the type more as a conceptual scheme rather than a structure of parameter. If by Caniggia and Muratori the word type, derived from the Latin term typus, meaning footprint, character, model, is considered as the a priori cultural concept behind the construction of every urban or architectural object, later Gregotti refer about it as a tool, as an idea useful to order the infinite number of possible cases of the experience. In this research the concept of type will be use to recognize the single object forming the urban organism.

In the same way we have to consider the British Morphological School, born during 9

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the same period with the research of the German geographer M.R.G. Conzen. He studied the urban form classifying the townscape into three study category, the town plan, the built form and the land utilization, in a way widely diffused and accepted today. Among them, especially the town plan was investigated as an effective object to describe the transformation process of the urban form.

Later after the development of these two theories, the French Versailles School, of which Castex and Panerai are members, has continued the work of both the previous Schools investigating about the relation between architectural and urban form with the examination of French case studies.

The typomorphological investigation is therefore the study of the urban form in consideration of the cultural background of a specific place and time. For this reason this kind of analysis will be relevant to cultural identity, to express the sense of a place, that feeling that merges some specific urban types to their inhabitants. It happen in fact that there are some features of the space that are the means of this connection, and replicated will arouse that feeling.

This belief could be a simplification in respect of the real complexity, but is true that there is a natural affection that bridges people and the construction type of their cultural origin. That’s why it’s important that also the contemporary construction report in the same way that emotional tie, representing one step, the actual one, of the evolving process of a building type. In a consequential way, when a type is imposed by an external power, it will affect the culture of the population and its behavior with the city.

To this end, already the Italian School and later the French one, applied their ideas to planning and design projects under the direction of a structured methodology, adapted to each specific case. The scale, the categories and the parameters in fact have to be defined in relation to the punctual situation and needs. Nowadays we can see a direct, thought limited, influence of their research in the design practice, when a first section of the work is reserved for the investigation of the context and its history, at least in the Italian academic world.

Only between the 1980s and the 1990s the theory of typology, and even later urban 10

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morphology, were introduced into Chinese academies by its returning overseas scholars. A study of Chinese city and architecture with such a structure was so in these last decades greatly improved, and some urban design project based their principles on these studies, but a real methodology for the Chinese context is not yet defined.

The differences between the Western and the Asian urban model, and the first application at the smaller scale of the building, leave space for a further exploration and definition of a specific approach. The Chinese context in fact, with its embodied cultural influences from Confucianism, Taoism and fengshui, provides an extremely rich soil for the development of a typo-morphological study.

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Part 2

Chinese context

2.1 A growing population The population of China in the last China Statistical Yearbook 2013 was reported as 1 354 040 000 people. This data has a positive growth since 1949, when the population was less than an half, even if the growth rate has followed a decreasing trend starting from the 1980s, when the central government started to apply the family plan and birth control policies. After this the household size decrease to 3.02 people per household in 2012, with the lowest data are registered in cities, but the population in Shanghai never stop growing.

During its history, Shanghai’s population has continuously grown and decreased, due to political and economic reasons. The national influx was caused first by the political and war problems that originated around 1850s, followed by the increasing work opportunities created by the industrial and shipping activities development, and again between 1937 and 1941 because of the Sino-Japanese War, during which a lot of Chinese took advantage of the extraterritoriality principle in the foreign concessions.

During the 1970s, due to a strong population control policy that was forbidding people to move from the country to the city, there was a light decrease in the number of Shanghai’s inhabitants and for a decade the number stationed around 10 700 000 people. After that period, with the economic boom and the open door policy, the population started increasing again and it is still growing nowadays. The most recent estimate for the population of the city of Shanghai, elaborated in the first quarter of 2014, is about 24 151 500 people (which is 347 200 more than in 2012), with an average number of people per family of 2.7 and an household number of 5 243 100.

About Shanghai’s population density, calculated as people per square kilometer, we can register a non-stop positive trend since 1986, starting with a value of 1 995 and almost double in 2012. The latest data report a population density estimated to be 3 754 people per square kilometer, a surprising data if compared with the national 12

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average data of 140 people over square kilometer. Exploring the city we discover that the highest densities are in the central districts of Hongkou, Huangpu and Jing’an, with a data of 36 014, 34 448 and 33 570 respectively, a number that is ten times higher than the average value of the whole city. The districts of new development, such as Pudong New Area and Minhang, instead have a density just above the average, and the outer districts are the ones with the lowest density values.

Taking into account the composition of the population from the wider national level, it is true that the rural percentage has always been higher than the urban one. Starting from the 1980s, however, due to the central policies supporting urbanization, this proportion reversed. It happened in fact that between 2010 and 2011 there was a change in trend accounting more than half of China’s total population as urban citizens, and precisely with the percentage of 51.27 in 2011 and 52.57 in 2012. In line with the national trend, also in Shanghai the agricultural population is decreasing, in favor of the urban one, that in 2012 reached the 89.3% of the total population, the highest of whole China. In particular, the Shanghai’s number of inhabitants with a permanent residence permit in 2012 was around 14.27 million, while the number of migrant residents reached 9.9 million. These figures combined represents the city’s resident population, while the number of migrant residents, or floating population, increased in 2012, accounting for 85.7% of the total population increase.

In this research the issue of floating population it’s important if put in relation with the actual situation in lilong residential neighborhoods. It happened in fact that this disadvantaged group of people choose to move to the historical part of the city, where the miserable dwelling conditions reduce to a minimum the rent price in the informal sector. The 1990s policy for subsidized rental housing in fact never come to a satisfactory stage due to some bureaucracy obstacles (the strict hukou system that preclude the access to the urban state facilities for migrants), causing the widening of the gap between rich and poor. This situation caused therefor the construction of new rooms that the owners could subsequently rent to increase their profits. The addition of volumes inside the traditional urban tissue is a modification that, albeit small, change the shape of the private house and the city itself (see Appendix X with 13

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siheyuan for further information).

Last, we have to mention the foreign population, that always represent an important aspect in Shanghai’s history. Since their arrival, in fact, the foreign inhabitants used to consider the city as their second homeland, and especially after the second or third generation they named themselves as the “Shanghailanders”. Their number grew year after year since their moving to Shanghai and is not stopping even now. At the very beginning the foreigners came from 50 different countries, led by the Japanese and British, but also other nationalities as Americans, French, Russians and Indians had always retained a significant stake. Nowadays the majority of the foreign population came from Japan, Republic of Korea, United States, France and Germany and are mainly employees at foreign ventures or experts or overseas students and relatives.

These international expatriates brought with themselves their own social background, cultural values and religious beliefs influencing irreversibly the character of the city.

In 2012 the foreign population in Shanghai reached 170 192 people, occupying only the one per cent of the total city population but representing a strong importance on the city life.3

3

For all the data: - State Statistical Bureau. China statistical yearbook 2013. Beijing: China Statistical Publishing House, 2013. http://www.stats.gov.cn/tjsj/ndsj/2013/indexeh.htm - Shanghai Municipal Statistical Bureau. Statistical Yearbook of Shanghai 2012. Beijing: China Statistical Publishing House, 2013. http://www.stats-sh.gov.cn/data/toTjnj.xhtml?y=2013e - “Shanghai Statistic -上 海 统 计” www.stats-sh.gov.cn. Last modified February 26, 2014. http://www.stats-sh.gov.cn/data/release.xhtml 14

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Shanghai total population

Shanghai density

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Shanghai foreign population

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2.2 Real estate trend On “The Economist” magazine released on 11th October 2014 it was reported the updated data of the International Monetary Fund, ranking China’s economy as the world’s biggest one in purchasing-power-parity terms, even if the historians point out that this country is merely regaining a title that has held for the most part of the ancient time.4 The fact that China is among the world’s fastest-growing economies is proved also by the statistical data. The national Gross Domestic Product registered in 2012 was of 51 894 210 million yuan, and so about 8 488 335 USD at the current conversion rate, with an average annual growth rate between 2001 and 2012 of 10.1 percentage point.

From a geographical point of view, the coastal region are the most developed one, especially for their favorable location for trade operations, and have experienced in recent years a strong process of industrialization. Centrally located in this area, Shanghai has been one of the fastest developing cities in the world during the last twenty years, as shown by its per capita Gross Domestic Product that has been in a non-stop growing trend since 1991, reaching USD 14 687 in February 2014 with a 7.8 percentage point growth over the previous year. Beneath an overall profile, the main contribution of Shanghai to the national economy comes from the trading operations, being the largest port and industrial base in China, even if the importance of the tertiary sector in the city’s economy is increasing. Import-export activities shaped the development of the city and also its functioning, as represented by the historical importance of Shanghai’s financial institutions as a by-product of the commercial sector.

Beside its historical relevance, the real estate activity has become more and more important during the last few years. Considering the 2012 national investment in

4 “The Economist- The world’s biggest economies -China’s back”, The economist, 11th October,

2014. Access: 30th October, 2014. http://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/21623758-chinas-back 17

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urban areas, almost the 20% of them are involved in real estate development, an operation that in the same year has led to the completion of 3 355 030 000 square meters of building floor space, with the remaining part of 11 672 380 000 under construction. With a comparable proportion, the same happened in Shanghai, a situation confirmed by the increasing amount of investments in the construction market and made visible by the crazy speed of building construction. The total investment in Shanghai real estate development in 2010 was more than three times the one reported in 2000, and the floor area of construction increased during the past decade arriving to almost 133 million square meters in 2012. In both the investment and the construction data, housing is the most important item, represented in 2012 over 60% of the total real estate expenditure. Concerning the distribution of this huge amount of residential buildings in the city, Pudong New Area is the zone with the highest index of new constructions, a densifying effect after the application of the developing plan started in 1991, while another important developing area is Minhang district, in the southern part of the city, both on the east and west bank of Huangpu river, that was always a residential pole in which new towns were erected.

To give an idea of the amount of new construction The Economist magazine reported that “in 2010 new residential floor space completed in China reached 1.8 billion square meters, slightly less than the entire housing stock of Spain. Likewise, it took China approximately 15 years to build the equivalent of Europe’s entire housing stock.”5. The construction of such real estate residential assets, compared with data such as the per capita GDP, result in an housing exuberance that put China in a condition of “overhoused” country. As argued by the Economist Intelligence Unit, this situation can be caused by a not mature set of law on property taxation, or the reduced size of urban households, or even by the low quality of the Chinese residential building, commonly known as “tofu project” because of their average lifespan of 30 years. If an increasing demand of housing is in the future of dozens of lesser-known 5

Economist Intelligence Unit. “Building Rome in a day. The sustainability of China’s housing boom” The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2011, 2011.

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inland developing cities, the more urbanized coastal provinces are facing a period of adjustment with a lower construction rate, moving to a more stable perspective. This kind of balance will downgrade real estate from the leader driver role in Chinese growth, while on the other hand keep the country, and their major cities as Shanghai, away from the risk of a real estate bubble about to collapse.

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同济大学 硕/博士学位论文 致谢 Per Capita GDP - 2012

Building composition in Shanghai

Residential typologies in Shanghai

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2.2

Housing policies

Before the foundation of People’s Republic of China in 1949, most urban housing was private rental in a system governed by landlords. In that period, the common procedure of an housing developing project included the establishment of a set of requirements by the municipal government, the subdivision of the land, the definition of an unified settlement plan by an architectural firm, and the sale of these design projects to individuals or private real estate developers for construction. During this period one of the main objective of the city governments was the substitution of slums residential area with new housing buildings for common people.

Everything changed after 1949 through a socialist transformation of the country, in which the majority of properties owned by big landlords where confiscated and nationalized. From 1953 also the housing construction went under the control of public institutions and housing began to be built by government owned enterprises.

This transformation is symbolized by the work units, the danwei, a comprehensive welfare provision system for public workers which provided the house as the basic item. Other elements included in this welfare system were free education, health care, and a work place inside the community wall. Concerning the housing provision for private employees, the Municipal Housing Department was instituted, but the lack of public investment in free market housing construction was a problem which has eroded this welfare system from the inside. At the time, a freer real estate market was in contrast with the national objectives of the socialist country, and so it caused a shortage in housing availability, an overcrowding situation, and poor quality life standards (3 m2 floor space per person was the ordinary circumstance), a condition exacerbated also by the unequal dwelling distribution between the cadres of public officers and the working class people, among which there was discontent.

All these deficiencies, and especially the shortage in social housing, will have great consequences on the future market development. The first important housing reforms that tried to supply to this scarcity were issued in 1980s and signed the beginning of a trial stage started from some big cities and towns, after which the first approved 22

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nationwide plan was the Housing Reform Plan of 1988. The original ban on land use rights transfers was abolished, opening for the first time after thirty years the possibility of private property. To encourage people buy their own home, rents were increased and heavy subsidies were disposed in the selling of public housing. During the same privatization operation was also founded private development companies going to build the new housing estates and a special savings system, the Housing Provident Fund, introduced incentives in support of the new buyers was introduced first in Shanghai and then in the all country. Employees and employers have to contribute with a portion of their salary for the housing improvement, so that the housing investment was not burdening only on the national balance but would be equally shared among state, employers and individual households. The house was so turning from a “free good” to a “commodity” thanks to a marketization operation, bringing social and economic benefits for the country. This privatization caused the shift from an homologated socialist organization to a market-based system, where housing supply matched the households income. In such a scenery it became clear that the new middle class has emerged as the key player in the housing market, supported through different financial arrangements. The new form of a society classified according to the purchasing power become visible in the city with the growth of gated communities, of both rich and poor groups, and the beginning of segregation problems. At the end of 2010 the 80% of private homeownership was reached with an average floor space per person of 30 m2.

According to the last Five-Year Plan of 2011, new policies of urbanization and protection of ‘Basic Housing Rights of all people’ was introduced. Municipal governments are responsible to help and assist low income families to acquire and live in a reasonable quality housing, which construction was planned in 36 million of affordable housing units, 10 of which already started among the main cities. With these goals, a huge construction of housing in cities is still a need, but if the real estate construction is entrusted to private investors whom first purpose is to make profits, it will anyway cause an unregulated and unsustainable development of the city.

Concerning the quality of dwelling, it have to be mentioned that the planning even of 23

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the apartment’s interior design, has always been under the control of the central government. Modifications and experiments in housing typologies were only elaborated by the central offices or universities design institutes and nationwide spread. Furthermore, because of the rapidity of the construction process, the most effective and profitable way to solve the lack of residential construction was the copy and paste operation. Once found the most efficient residential form, it became the only model, at the expense of the architectural research. “Overwhelmed by the task of housing enormous urban populations, residential planning in China has continued along the path of industrialized, “standardized” apartment block types arranged in the form of large housing estate”.6 Only nowadays the private studios claim the right to deal with this major design issue and start experiment with housing.

2.3

Approach to the architectural heritage

The common ground of Chinese culture is the Confucianism ethic. Among its principles, the conservatism one influence the urban history prescribing the repetition of settlement forms, its architectural features and even their technical aspects. It does not mean, as in the Western culture, that an ancient building has to be protected and restored in its integrity, but conversely that a damaged construction can be demolished and rebuilt with the same identical form, in a cyclical process of rise and fall.

Recollecting in brief the history of preservation issue in China, it is to say that it did

6

Liangyong, Wu. Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing. A Project in the Ju’er Hutong Neighborhood.

(Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999), 92.

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not attract

much attention during the 1949-1978 Mao’s period, when the soviet

influence forced the Communist Party to look at the historic buildings as the symbol of a feudal and capitalistic past. The will therefor at the time became that of wanting replace all the historical heritage with a new socialist city, a feeling that caused the dejection of numerous symbolic constructions, such as the outer walls of numerous cities.

After the socialist period, with the problem of housing scarcity and the perception of the past as an obstacle for the modern evolution, the destruction of numerous historical buildings increased. Scholars, architects and planners hence started a pro-preservation campaign that in 1982 led to the redaction of the first national preservation law, the Law of People’s Republic of China on Protection of Cultural Relics. It was at first limited to the protection of singular buildings, while in the later years it was strengthened with the enactment of other regulations at the local level.

Specifically, in 1994 the city of Beijing and in 1999 the city of Shanghai promoted the protection of the respective historical areas and in 1998 the preservation planning section became an essential requirement for a city master plan, modifying the people’s vision of architectural heritage and transforming it in a memory to preserve.

In the contemporary era the perpetual mechanism of reproduction and restoration of ancient building, even of the humblest, have been broken and the ancient shape have been substituted by new imported models. It happened in fact that, under the pressure of the increasing demand of housing, the local government, and especially of predominant cities, saw in the private developing operations the best way to achieve the required density and the highest economic return, in a public-private coalition system. Of the total real estate investment in urban areas in fact, only the 14% are involved in reconstruction and technical transformation of old buildings, while 69% are used for new constructions.7 Given that many historical lilong neighborhoods, mainly located in prime areas of Shanghai, but today considered low-density squatter 7

For all the data: Shanghai Municipal Statistical Bureau. Statistical Yearbook of Shanghai 2012.

Beijing: China Statistical Publishing House, 2013. http://www.stats-sh.gov.cn/data/toTjnj.xhtml?y=2013e 25

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unhealthy settlements, have been razed to the ground at an astonishing speed. The residents usually had not the possibility to claim their rights on their properties and had to watch their houses being demolishing. They have been subsequently relocated in outer part of the city and only few were lucky enough to afford the cost of a new apartment built on the expropriated land. Today, lilong houses stand in sharp contrast with the new construction; as descripted by the writers Wang Anyi, “Amid the forest of new skyscrapers, these old longtang neighborhoods are like a fleet of sunken ships, their battled hulls exposed as the sea dries up.”8 In Shanghai the interest on preservation raised in late 1980s, when the government started to survey historic buildings. In the following decade, these constructions, including banks, hotels, theaters and lilong neighborhoods, were recognized and collected in some lists and at the same time the first project for the redevelopment of the historical area on the Bund started.

At the end of 1991, Shanghai Municipal

People’s Government published the Measures for the preservation of historic modern buildings of Shanghai City, that divided the historical heritage in three categories: cultural relics noticeable at a national level, cultural relics of Shanghai City, historic buildings present in the city of Shanghai. Only later the preservation of historic heritage has been extended from individual buildings to entire districts.

The category of “historic building” was defined as specific for those buildings still in use. For this new group was introduced a rigid set of protection rules that prevented the inhabitants to change even the smallest detail of their homes. This decision, even if supported by the belief of preserve traditional architectural

and community

identity, has resulted in block the improvement of lilong construction quality, considering them as immutable as a monument and not as a place to live as actually they are. Because of the unsolved overcrowded situation and the unsuitable conditions, the current living conditions in lilong neighborhoods resulted so as problematic and people desire to move to a better place. In lilong neighborhood “there are cracks in the streets and along the walls, the alley lamps have been smashed by mischievous

8

Anyi, Wang. La canzone dell’eterno rimpianto. (Original title: 长恨歌) (Trento: Einaudi, 2011), 5.

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children, the gutters are clogged, and foul water trickles down the streets. Even the leaves of the sweet-scented oleanders are coated with grime”.9 Despite all the efforts in the preservation field, the Historic Preservation Law for both Beijing and Shanghai only took effect in the early 2000s. Moreover, this law only protected some areas considered as small representative gems, leaving freely pursue the destruction process in the remaining area of the city. Shanghai in fact experienced massive demolitions in the 1990s due to the 365 Plan announced in 1992 by the Sixth Communist Party Congress of Shanghai. It defined the destruction of 3.65 million square meters of old housing deemed inappropriate for living. In 2000 this objective was achieved with 27 million square meters of housing demolished, 640 000 households relocated, and 1 billion square meters of new housing constructed.10 In a simplified vision, some projects reproducing the lilong architectural form were later adopted in the city, but the modifications made to increase the floor area ratio radically changed the original structure and scale of traditional proportions. As example, Fukang Li neighborhood (福康里) is a renewed residential block in Jing’An district in which the district government and the private enterprise wanted to establish the original number of households. This approach resulted in the complete destruction of old buildings and the reconstruction of three rows of terraced houses, multi-level condos, and two tower blocks, organized according to the original lilong fish-bone layout. A variety of high quality communal spaces, as gym, playground or tea house, were added, and the local residents were actively involved in the planning process causing a general improvement of the residential environment, but the traditional features of lilong were lost.11 In parallel the municipal government identify the potential value of rehabilitating old buildings, both as economic return and as a promotional campaign of the modernization of the city. Han Zheng, the mayor of Shanghai, in a speech of August 9

Anyi, Wang. La canzone dell’eterno rimpianto. (Original title: 长恨歌) (Trento: Einaudi, 2011), 299.

10

For the data: Shanghai Municipal Statistical Bureau. Statistical Yearbook of Shanghai 2004. Beijing:

China Statistical Publishing House, 2005.

11

for further information: Wu, Fulong. China’s emerging cities. The making of new urbanism.

(Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), 216-220.

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2004 said that “development and new construction is one kind of progress, but preservation and adaptation is also another kind of development”.12 The lilong houses, with their uniqueness among all China, are now seen as the perfect symbol of a present important with its power rooted in a glorious past. Pursuing this new vision, the appearance of the buildings were maintained but a new series of function were settled in them, giving birth to an hybrid building with a modern soul in an ancient skin. The first economic operation of this new kind was the renewal of the lilong in which took place the First National Congress of the Communist Party of China, just next the Xintiandi new project area. The entire project was promoted by the Hong Kong investor company Shui on Group between 1999 and 2001, for the foundation of a new type of retail district based on the reproduction of that cozy feeling typical of the small European historical centers. It means there was a top-down development of the area imposed by a big power over the inhabitant’s willingness. In the project in fact there is not housing space, but only commercial and cultural activities, mainly of which are foreign brands that transform the residential block in a famous tourist spot. “The goal of my design - said Benjamin Wood, the chief architect of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill for Xintiandi project - is not to preserve the past but to bring some elements of the past to distinguish the project from other retail shopping districts of the present.”13 The case of Tianzifang neighborhood is another example of lilong redevelopment, though resulted from the will of citizenship. This block is located in Luwan district, not far from Xintiandi, but reporting a different functional structure including both lilong residences and small factories, built there in the 1930s due to the proximity of a former river. In late twentieth century, because of the economic change of the city, the factories were dismissed and were left vacant, but since 1998 these spaces were used as art studios and all the block was involved in a general restyling. Despite these operations, in 2000 the area was sold to a developer company that wanted to demolish 12

Quoted from: Architecture & Design, Aug 2005 issue.

13

Bracken, Gregory. Aspects of Urbanization in China. Shanghai, Hong Kong, Guangzhou.

(Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2012), 150.

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the ancient buildings to construct new residential high rises. In 2004 the city government, influenced by the positive result of the urban transformation, decided to keep the creative industrial park and the surrounded residential area. It was therefore planned a rezoning of Tianzifang with a mixed-use strategy that encourage the rent of the original residential spaces and the activation of commercial, cultural and leisure activities attracting swarm of tourists. Even if the residential function was almost completely replaced, the bottom-up mechanism, sprung from the local district governmental body and inhabitants, sign a modification in people’s approach to the city’s architectural heritage.

Another redevelopment case in the city is Duolun Road community, located in Hongkou district. It was a traditional Shikumen block who’s main feature was the presence of the quite residential Duolun Road that during the 1920s and 1930s attracted writers and other literates becoming a prominent cultural center. Despite its golden past, during the twentieth century it became a common degraded low-income residential area, and so the local government in 1998-1999 carried out a regeneration project based on the rule “rebuild it as the former”. To restore the original cultural life, a modern art museum (Duolun MOMA), some art galleries, creative studios and cafes were located along the main road and the area was transformed in a pedestrian way.

Also in this case, as the Xintiandi one, there was a top-down operation, but the consistent support of the municipal organization triggered a mechanism of regeneration which also covered the adjacent residential areas allowing the permanence of some residential units.

These new approaches promote the local economy but destroy the original community identity. What makes lilong such a characteristic location in fact is not only the architectural features or the community dynamism, but the combination of them, exactly the object of the typomorphological approach. If we preserve only the first of them we will create a fictitious setting for a more pleasant walk, but to create the second one we need to know how to create a place for that specific community.

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Part 3

3.1

Lilong neighborhood

The research method

“… so I thought that in place of the large number of rules that make up logic I would find the following four to be sufficient, provided that I made and kept to a strong resolution always to obey them. The first was never to accept anything as true if I didn’t have evident knowledge of its truth: that is, carefully to avoid jumping to conclusions and preserving old opinions, and to include in my judgments only what presented itself to my mind so vividly and so clearly that I had no basis for calling it in question. The second

to divide each of the difficulties I examined into as many

parts as possible and as might be required in order to resolve them better. The third to direct my thoughts in an orderly manner, by starting with the simplest and most easily known objects in order to move up gradually to knowledge of the most complex, and by stipulating some order even among objects that have no natural order of precedence. And the last to make all my enumerations so complete, and my reviews so comprehensive, that I could be sure that I hadn’t overlooked anything.”14 Thus wrote René Descartes in his Discourse on the Method in 1637, summarizing the processes of analysis and synthesis. What it is here explained is how the synthetic complex that is the city will be divided into smaller components to be analyzed, and then recomposed to understand the rules governing the urban form, and how typomorphology will help us to comprehend the cultural tie between residents and place. We need a method to justify our operations.

To do this we must have to specify both the geographical and historical context of our study object. All the studies made on China and Shanghai in the previous chapter will hence be propaedeutic for the complete understanding of our research. Because of the peculiarity of the Chinese context we need in fact to reconsider the Western-derived method that is based on the study of the European city, a completely different 14

René Descartes. Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting one’s Reason and Seeking Truth in

the Science. 1637.

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organism. If from the nineties some Chinese scholars tried to decline this research structure to urban Chinese form and traditional Chinese architecture (Miao 1990; Liangyong, 1999; Qijun, 2000), no one, except few collateral studies, focused on the scale of the urban block, investigating the practical functioning and dynamic of the city. The same happened for the specific case of Shanghai, about which we can find a lot of publications regard its urban form and development, and a consistent number of papers studying the architectural features of its traditional housing form, the lilong, but none of them concerning the neighborhood unit, an element that ever had an important role in Chinese urban history. In this sense it is here define the scale of this study among the hierarchy of the city structure.

To define the urban block, we can start from the Italian term isolato, which derives from the latin insulae. At the beginning of the Roman Empire this word assumed the meaning of “home” that, separated one from the other by an ambitus (a distance of about a meter), resembled a small island. Later it came to represent the whole tenement constructed in Rome and other important cities of the Empire; the insula corresponded in fact to the urban organism composed by stores and workshops facing the streets, big inner gardens and four or five floors of dwellings to rent.15 Therefore, since the ancient time the urban block was characterized by the sum of different function and defined by the street grid, a definition supported also by Conzen, who described it as “within the town plan unoccupied by streets and bounded wholly or partly by street-lines” (Conzen, 1969). The urban block is involved also in the division of the public from the private space in a gradual or clean separation of the space. The urban block of Shanghai doesn’t have a standard dimension or common orientation, because of the different establishment period and motivation they can occupy mutated areas in different cores of the city. As examples, in the inner city they are smaller, denser and usually residential or a mix of housing and commercial functions, while along Wusong River we will discover some big mono-functional industrial block. Despite these differences, the residential blocks, the ones this

15

www.treccani.it / isolato 31

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research will focus about, show a common way to relate with the outer city, that is to protect themselves behind a wall or a gate, giving the perception of a desolate street and sidewalk among dwelling plots.

Then, inside the system of the urban block we can recognize further different elements. In this case, the study will identify and investigate the boundary of walls and gates, the inner streets system, the presence of commercial activities or other functions, the filter space of private courtyard and last, in a more detailed way, the dwelling unit. These five elements were selected as representative of the mutations in time of the lilong neighborhood and also because of the cultural relevance in the Chinese context. Along the history of the country for example, the wall always occupy an important role at every scale in the city: the city wall, the border surrounding districts, temple or parks, the edge defining the domestic courtyard. All those elements are repeating the traditional plan of Chinese cities.

Once structured the research method, we can use it for our case, the lilong residential urban block, of which will be first defined the historical context of birth, then reported the evolution phases, in which can be identified the different elements, and last the definition of the general form of lilong block and the description of its typomorphological features. A series of schemes is proposed to appreciate the change in proportions between the different kind of settlements; if the neighborhood ones are more synthetic, interpretative and proposed in a diagram form, the housing ones want to report the interior layout in a more defined way. Last, it have to be said that common in Shanghai are also the mixed lilong typologies quarters, a phenomena due on one hand to the extremely rapid succession of patterns in the city’s development, and on the other hand caused by the different requirements of the several social groups in the city landscape.

3.2

Lilong birth context

Lilong 里弄 housing was born in a period of urban expansion in the late nineteenth century’s Shanghai. Between 1855 and 1865 over 110,000 Chinese had moved from 32

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their homes to the city, seeking refuge from political conflicts in neighboring areas. In 1853, in fact, the Small Daggers Society, a rebel group proclaiming support for the Taiping administration, invaded the Chinese walled part of Shanghai and in early 1860s the Taiping Rebellion extended to the nearby regions creating even more panic through the population. These conflicts caused an urban migration from the countryside to the city, and especially into Shanghai’s Foreign Settlements, because those areas were considered an extraterritorial space under the jurisdiction of foreign powers, and therefore safer. At the same time, the rapid economic development of Shanghai attracted tens of thousands of poor villagers in search of job opportunities.

In a short span of time, the overcrowded Foreign Settlements started to experience serious problems concerning public security, sanitation and taxation. This alarming situation ignited a hot debate on whether the International Settlements should continue to accept Chinese refugees. Despite these problems, in 1854 the regulation between embassies and local government, encompassing a segregation policy in the city, was abandoned for a more profitable mixed residential solution. At that time foreign developers migrated to Shanghai with the only purpose to make money, so they quickly realized the financial opportunities created by the new residential policy and started investing in the new building market, focusing less on all other trades. As Edwin Smith, a British merchant, stated: “ my goal is to make profit in the shortest time possible by leasing land to the Chinese at a 30 to 40 percent profit rate. If this is the best way for me to collect money, we don’t have other choices”16. As a result, foreign investors started constructing on the International Settlements the cheapest and quickest kind of houses possible at that time. The buildings had a wooden structure, arranged in rows facing a narrow path joined with a main street. This type of housing was built in a similar pattern as the by-law dwelling used less than a century earlier by the same investors in London during the Industrial Revolution, but also incorporated the knowledge and experience of the native builders. These 16

Zhao, Chunlan. “From shikumen to new-style: a rereading of lilong housing in modern Shanghai” in

Narrating Architecture – a perspective anthology (Madge, James and Peckham, Andrew, 453 - 481.

Abingdon: Routledge, 2006), 460.

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buildings, quickly constructed to provide temporary shelters for the growing population, can be considered the predecessor of lilong housing.

This cheap dwelling rapidly became popular among the incoming refugees for whom life conditions were of secondary importance and hence, by the end of 1863 there were already 8,740 wooden houses in the center of Shanghai. Each estate was given a name ending in “li” 里, meaning neighborhoods, that when combined with the word “long”弄, meaning lanes, clearly describes an housing form which has characterized the urban structure of Shanghai.

At that time, the area of higher concentration of lilong was between the International Settlement and the French Concession. Another area of high dwelling development was in the north part of the city, over the Common Concession, meanwhile industries and exchange functions was distributed along the sides of Huangpu River. With the course of time the lilong typology spread in other cities like Nanjing or Hankou meanwhile in other port cities similar solutions sprung from the local traditional houses (bamboo-tube houses in Guangzhou, tapered-end-style houses in Tianjin).

According to the official classification made by the Housing and Land Bureau after 1949 and confirmed by Shen Hua in his “Shanghai lilong housing” of 1987, we can distinguish five housing types and two neighborhood structure (shikumen and new-style) of lilong, in dependence of the different historical context (we have about 70 years from the birth of lilong till the latest constructions) and the kind of users.

They are described and analyzed below.

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3.3 Old shikumen lilong Around 1870, out of fear of fire and to improve housing conditions, the municipal council banned the construction of new wooden houses. It started demolishing some of the existing structures and began using the “old shikumen lilong” typology for the new constructions till 1915. Because of their brick structure in fact they were easier to maintain, despite an higher initial cost. This compact solution perfectly responds of a situation of high land price, limited land availability and explosive population growth. Its layout was connected to the siheyuan dwelling solution, and especially to its adaptation of the Southern part of Yangtze River, and were used by rich extended families coming from the surrounding provinces. Because of their inadaptability to the current lifestyle and standards, very few of them still exist nowadays. Remaining neighborhood examples in Shanghai are the quarters of Hongqingli, Mianyangli, Hongdeli.

The layout of an old shikumen lilong plot generally included several internal rows of housing units and an outside street façade reserved for commercial activities.

At this first stage of the lilong development, the average number of units per district 35

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was around thirty, which was quite a small number compared to the upcoming period of greatest development of this type of housing.

The favorable elements of the surrounding are: - the presence of the 1933 and the Music Park creative centers. They are successful examples of renewed areas and can be a positive and propulsive force for the rehabilitation of the new neighborhood’s social functions; - the small public park. Even if is a small area, the presence of a green space in the dense Hongkou district can valorize the location of the new residential district; - the public transport network. The connection with even two line of metro and a lot of bus line make this area a favorable location for an housing developing plan, being the public transportation a primary requirement in the urban context; - the presence of a dense residential structure. The high-density solution will be well integrated in the compact urban textile of Hongkou district, also because of the fact that the new quarter will be surrounded by neighborhoods with a similar mixed-use composition.

The negative elements of the surrounding are: - the traffic congestion of Siping Road. The busy Siping Road, that connect the Bund area to the north part of the Hongkou district, is made by seven lanes and is cause of air and noise pollution during the whole day.

- subway and bus stops. The presence of the metro line will attract a lot of external citizens that will be temporary present on the area surrounding the residential core, affecting the privacy and security level of the community. The stops will also steal space to the residential and community functions.

1.

The whole neighborhood was surrounded by a 5.4 meter-high brick

wall, with a prominent opening by the main lane surrounded by a stone frame in which wooden plank doors were encased. This element, being the collective image of these housing areas, gave rise to the name “shi-ku-men” 石库门 that in Chinese means stone gate door.

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2.

The plot was oriented with the main lane on the north-south axis, in

accordance with the Chinese traditional philosophy, and secondary lanes running east-west. With this layout, the main spaces of the house can occupying the best orientation to the south. Because of the developer’s will, who want to obtain the maximum profit from the construction operation, the alleys were limited in number and narrow in size. It was not good for lightning and ventilation, that because of this relied mainly on the inner courtyard, but it was also a problem for traffic and fire control.

3.

Commercial activities were located along the edges of the principal

streets and were usually carried by the residents. Sometimes the shops occupied the ground floor while the first floor was used for the house ensuring also the double facing.

4.

The internal courtyard was the first space of the house. It functioned

as a filter from the outside world and played two key roles in the everyday life: it functioned as a meeting place for the family members, and it helped to mitigate the internal microclimate with a lower percentage of sunlight insulation and a cross-ventilation system. For this reason the building’s fenestration was mainly present in the internal side of the house, rather than on the outside part, which kept its integrity. Removable French windows were used to divide the main room and the inner courtyard. Light and ventilation on the rear side of the house was provided through the open-air corridor.

5.

The typical dimensions for a private dwelling was roughly twelve

meters in width on the east-west axes17 and a depth of sixteen meters on the north-south axes. Therefore, the resulting area was about 200 square meters.

These dimensions are relative to a three-bay solution, the standard one, but there were a lot of exceptions to this typical size. For instance, five-bay or seven-bay houses were built to accommodate larger or richer families and 17

The house was modulated on the structural grid. The structural bay changed in relation to the place

and the time of adoption. In Shanghai, for lilong houses, it measures about 3.6 to 4.2 meters, and so the standard three-bay solution corresponds to 12m in width, while the big five-bay solution to 20m.

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some double-bay units were also made to better match the dwelling line to the plot area. The old shikumen lilong house was a mixed technologies structure with hollow bricks walls and wooden beams supporting a sloping roof of wooden tiles, a particular characteristic of Chinese architecture. Typically the old shikumen lilong house had a symmetrical layout out to the left and right of a middle axes and its body was divided into two parts. The main block was made by a two-story building, with the major rooms facing the internal courtyard, and the accessory part was a one-story service construction located in the rear. The two parts were connected by a narrow open-air corridor of 1.2-1.5 meters in width. On the ground floor, the house comprised of a vast living room, known as Jian 间, placed along the central axis and directly facing the internal courtyard, and two secondary rooms, known as Shang, placed beside it, and used as bedrooms or library. A stair-case, generally located at the back of the central room, led to more bedrooms on the second-floor of the house. Behind the main structure, the secondary building comprised of a kitchen and storage-rooms, above which was usually placed a wooden terrace. Bathrooms were not yet included in the house layout and the inhabitants used a night-pot, typically placed in the open-air corridor, collected and emptied every morning by farmers. Heating, gas and electricity were also not available, but when possible a well was placed in the backyard to provide water for the family’s daily needs. Each house was accessible both from the front secondary lane, as a formal entrance, and the back secondary alley, for services operation such as cooking.

Around 1900, with another boom of population, rear chambers, some of which even in a two floors solution, were added to the basic old shikumen layout. In this way the backyard shrank considerably worsening the living conditions. To improve light and ventilation the external wall and the storey height were lowered, increasing the sense of openness. To deal with this situation of increasing demand of housing, some one-bay and two-bay 38

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solutions appeared meanwhile the biggest dwelling were found suitable for separate leasing by room. With the addition of more volume the construction coverage of residential plot reached the 80%.

3.4 New shikumen lilong During the second decay of the nineteenth century, because of the further growth of the local industries, a very large number of peasants from the countryside were attracted to Shanghai. Foreign investors quickly recognized the potential high profitable investment in the housing market and established real-estate companies founded using assets from the western world. With the booming of its population, Shanghai needed new dwellings, and the new shikumen lilong typology represented the ideal solution for a massive housing development. The new typology of houses was studied to maximize the use of space, both for a better internal plan and a neighborhood organization allocating a higher number of people in a smaller area.

The units were smaller, not only because of the increasing density condition, but also to conform to house to the transformation in the family composition started after the collapse of the Chinese Empire in 1911, when the original enlarged family started to separate itself in smaller cores going to constitute the kind of family we know today.

The neighborhood dimensions and the number of units increased compared to the old-shikumen block size, even reaching hundreds of houses in the biggest

lots. The

percentage of land coverage reached 70-80%, but despite this densification the new shikumen lilong organization appeared more spacious.

In 1949 the new shikumen typology accounted almost for half of the built lilong areas. However, with this higher densification and the shortage of services, the quality of life of the inhabitants decreased and most of these constructions were later demolished. Neighborhood examples in the city are Siwenli, Jianyeli, Meilanfang, Zhundeli, Tongfuli.

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1.

To increase the dwelling number without compromise the safety

situation, the external brick walls were lowered but kept its protection and representative function. Concerning this theme, a surprising syncretic attitude of new shikumen lilong was the use of ornamentation and carvings in different Western architectural styles for the outer walls and gates.

2.

For safety and densifying reasons, wider lanes were introduced. The

main ones reached 4 meters in width for the passage of cars, while the branch ones were enlarged to 2.5 meters. It produced a more reasonable and well-organized distribution system and an improvement in living conditions.

3.

Commercial function still remained along the external perimeter

serving the neighborhood’s people but decrease in quantity.

4.

To fit in the block an higher unit number, their dimension was

reduced, causing the resize and the shift of the central courtyard: it shranked to 6 square meters and moved from the central axes to a side, just in front of the entrance. The courtyard it is no longer the heart of the house. The rear separation between the main and service zones instead was maintained with a small backyard.

5.

The unit layout was reduced to a one-bay solution18 in width and to

12 meters in depth with both the buildings increased their height, giving to the new shikumen lilong a vertical layout. The accessory building became a two-storey construction that permit an higher grade of sunshine and ventilation, while the main building reach three-storey. With the aim of improve living conditions after the reduction of the courtyards, fenestration was increased along the outside wall. In this evolution an higher functional separation was applied to the housing layout so the ground floor was used for public functions, while the upper ones were used for family private activities. Thanks to this operation, some extra spaces were created in order to allow the first tenant to sublet some rooms ensuring itself an additional income. Moreover, to 18

Some two-bay solutions were also adopted, but due to the increase of dwelling unit, the dimensions

of the structural bay shrank from 3.6 – 4.2

meters to 3.2 – 3.9 meters, decreasing the living surface.

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consolidate the structure, the slabs were made with reinforced concrete while the bearing walls were still made with holed bricks. For the traditional pitched and gabled roof a wooden structure was kept.

3.5 New-type lilong During the 1920s, diversified form of urban housing started to appeared in Shanghai, based both on traditional models or imported forms. The booming city’s economy, the growing number of investments and operations and the increasing gap between rich and poor, originated a new middle class with different residential needs.

In response to this social transformation, new types of housing and neighborhood layouts started to be used in the city. Generally they were smaller dwellings in clustered solutions, mixing the traditional typology with urban needs. More flexibility and interior variations were allowed and the leading modern facilities, such as heating, electricity, gas and sanitary system, were added. Regard the business operation, these houses were usually constructed by companies in a acquired area and then sold or rent to the single family for whom built their own shelter was surely more inconvenient.

When the unit was shared between two families, each of them would occupy a floor of the house and the internal layout could be modified to guarantee an independent entrance for both of them. Each households had an outdoor space because of the presence of the entrance courtyard and of a balcony at the upper floor. Despite an improvement in facilities, the overcrowding were problematic and to perform the daily chores the inhabitants frequently used the side lanes. Even if this community lifestyle can be considered a joyful way to share daily activities and space, it is also to recognize the life standard problems, with about 50-60% of site coverage.

The new-type lilong, responding with the adaptation to these new needs, was massively built between the 1920s and the 1940s, becoming the most successful lilong dwelling and representing the most prominent type of lilong still present in the city.

Most of them are still in use nowadays and were recently improved thanks to the 41

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municipal rehabilitation program. The development happened mainly in the west part of the city and examples locations are Jing’an Villa, Huaihai Village, Changle Village.

1.

Due to the technical improvements the outdoor wall was substituted

by an iron gate, even if accomplished the same function of defining the urban block. Also the stone gates were lost, but a new small box was installed at the entrance of the tenement to allow a warden to control the traffic of people entering and leaving. This solution kept the feeling of security among the residents. With the removal of the wall it happened also that some houses resulted in direct contact with the main streets. In this way, the neighborhood became a more open structure in connection with the city but to keep the integrity and the protection feeling more iron gates were added at the end of each branch lanes.

2.

If the main road was already widened in the previous solution, now

also the secondary lanes increased to allow the passage of motorbikes and cars that have to reach the newly introduced garage units built on the more uncomfortable residual space or attached to the private house.

3.

The space for commercial activities was drastically reduced in order

to build more residential units, the more profitable good.

4.

The inner courtyard was transformed in a front garden with the

installation of a railing or a framed structure instead of the front brick wall.

The use of the indoor spaces became more rigid reflected a western organization but keep the division of a main and secondary volume thanks to a tiny yard.

5.

The housing unit was usually a three-story building, with three

possible internal layouts between 150 and 300 square meters: the one-bay, the one-and-half bay and the two-bay solutions. If the width was highly variable, the depth was reduced to ten-twelve meters to have better light and ventilation.

The bearing walls were still made of bricks while the floors were constructed 42

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with wood from reinforced concrete. The sloped wooden-framed roof still remained as a traditional element but some flat roofs started to appear. Other changes in construction techniques were the replacement of wooden part by steel bars and the abandon of handmade bricks in favor of machine made ones or reinforced concrete structure. The resulting elimination of some of the traditional elements made this new lilong once again more similar to a Western house.

The one-jian layout measured 4.2 meters by 12 meters, and still had the entrance yard and the back open-air corridor between the main and the service parts. At the ground floor there were the common functions, with the persisting proximity between the living room and the courtyard, meanwhile in the upper floors there were the private bedrooms, bathrooms and library.

Balconies and roof terraces were added to increase the sense of openness and the layout still maintains the double access from the front and the back.

Trying to solve the problems of the lack of privacy and comfort, the one-and-half jian solution increased the outdoor spaces reaching the overall size to 6.3 by 12 meters. In this way the space for circulation raised, the functions was organized in a more effective solution and the physical features of the building improved. At the front, the half jian was used as a circulation corridor composed by an entrance and a stair-case; at the back, it was used as a service courtyard next to the kitchen instead of the open air corridor.

The two-jian layout increased in dimensions till 8 by 12 meters reaching a better proportion between width and depth that would permit higher lighting and ventilation. At the ground floor was introduced a dining room, a bigger and more livable front garden and a garage for the richest families. The stair case was located at the center of the service part improving the circulation fluidity, especially when the house was occupied by different households. This bigger solution was also enriched with better plants.

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3.6 Garden lilong With the increasing influence of the western culture and the accumulation of wealth in the hands of the new rich community, a new residential typology was developed and used between 1930s and 1940s. This solution, in fact, was studied for wealthy European families or Chinese high officials who wanted a bigger garden and a private house in a more prestigious location within the city. However, because of the small demand and the high selling price, this solution was adopted only in a small scale. The most of the neighborhoods were built in Xuhui and Luwan districts and site examples are Liyang Garden and Shangfang Garden.

1.

The outer boundaries of the block were defined only by the

buildings, but a security office, to control the pedestrian and vehicular traffic, and other common spaces are present on one entrance, while the others are freely accessible. In this case, the strongest separation between public and private space moved from the block level to the residential unit. In other cases the neighborhood is enclosed among other villages or buildings, result in being accessible only from one or two sides.

2.

The street network can present a main road from which departed

secondary branches, or it can be composed only by side lanes directly connected with the outer city road system. In both cases there wasn’t an high grade of traffic control, so strangers can freely walk into the internal lanes, downgrading their role from a neighborly semi-public apace to a purely connection function designed for vehicles. With this change the lanes have gradually lost also their functions as supplementary space for housework.

3.

The commercial activities were almost eliminated. The neighbor

became to resemble a mono-functional residential area, except of the cases in which the edges facing the main roads were occupied by shops or offices. The connection between these buildings and the residential area however always remain a physical proximity and not a real dependence as happened in the 44

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previous typologies, where the residents carried on the local commercial activities..

4.

The internal courtyard was abandoned in favor of a private garden,

usually located at the entrance of the property, where the owners organize parties, invite friends and play with the children. The residents have so moved their social interactions from the common space of the alley to the private spaces of their gardens, which were pleasant places because of their usual wideness and the presence of grass and plants. This change wasn’t only a modification of the urban settlement, but reflected also the difference in life style of the richest part of the population, who enjoined the tranquility of the private single garden.

5.

The neighborhood was made by detached or semi-detached houses

disposed in a lilong fish-bone pattern. Garden lilong had a lower density because of the larger plots reserved for each house, because of the big amount of space reserved for the gardens occupied larger lots and due to the enlargement of streets for car circulation. On average, the size of the dwelling was limited to two bay in plan and three or four storeys in height but the number of internal functions and the layout complexity increased. As an example, three different entrances were planned to be in the house: the main one for the owner and the guests, the side one as a garage, and the back one for the servants. Without any dimension restrictions the rooms were freely oriented and as the number of windows increased, some special views on the garden were specifically planned. The houses were also characterized by the presence of a more advanced technologies and an exterior international style that enriched the city’s landscape. One significant change in this sense was the diffusion of the flat roof.

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3.7 Apartment lilong At the same time, from 1920s to 1940s, another kind of dwelling was developed to accommodate small middle class families and foreign staff. With the increasing price of real-estate property, shortage in land availability and a growing housing demand, the new buildings grown in height reaching four to six storey. Functional and financial factors made these buildings simple and practical to be built by foreign companies, that usually rent these middle-grade and high-standard apartments to the private client. Examples in Shanghai are Shannan Village and Garden Apartment.

1.

As in the case of garden lilong, the apartment typology could or not

has a grating all around the edges, or it could be surrounded and defined by the urban textile. Here again we could find a guardian check-point near the main entrance.

2.

The hierarchy of alleys went lost in the internal organization of the

neighborhood. The decreasing number of buildings permits to keep arbitrary routes resulting in a more organic layout with a flexible disposition of the spaces. The streets are not forced to run east-west or north-south but were designed in consideration of the circulation needs. In the space resulting among roads and buildings, it’s obtained the common space for the neighbors, such as green areas or equipped zones, in substitution of the previous community interaction role accomplished by the branch alleys.

3.

Along the outer street the first floor of the building could be

reserved for commercial activities, ran or not by the residents of the neighborhood. If the block didn’t include services, they have to be found in the surrounding city.

4.

The original private courtyard, not being possible to occupy the

ground floor, disappear. In its place a balcony was introduced in every single apartment, even if their role is completely different. The court was the meeting place of the enlarged family, the balcony is mainly a functional space raising 46

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the quality standard. A symptom not only of an economic revolution, but also of the changed family composition.

5.

The layout of the building included common lobbies, staircases,

elevators and corridors that distributed the entrances of the single units. Each of them had an area between 40 to 150 square meters, comprising a living-room, a kitchen, a bathroom and a couple of bedrooms, with more expensive solution having a dining room, a servant’s room and a garage. The private apartment was designed to be on a single floor unlike the other lilong housing typologies. The structure of the buildings was strengthened using machine-made bricks for the first-floor walls and reinforced concrete for the other parts. The internal walls were made of hollow bricks to make them lighter and easier to build and the flat roof with waterproof layer became a common solution. The outer aspect of the building was influenced by western model including some foreign ornamentations.

According to the internal organization, the apartment lilong houses were divided into three categories. The row-patterned model had a rectangular shaped layout including two to six apartments on each floor and two to three units per landing. Beside the main staircase a secondary one was added as service access or emergency exit, connecting the facilities area every two units at the back of the building. In the unit layout the living room and the bedrooms, the main spaces, were usually south oriented. The dot-patterned building model had a more thin and compact layout that created a slimmer volume.

They had only two apartments on each floor, sharing the front and the back access. Free on the other three sides they could have windows and balcony freely oriented. The butterfly-patterned building model is an improved dot-patterned solution. It had four apartments each floor, connected by a central distribution core, with a north oriented access. Attached to the main staircase there were all the service functions while all the main rooms were placed on the more exposed corner. A secondary staircase was added for every two units.

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3.8 Conclusion on lilong typo-morphological analysis Since, as we have seen, the lilong neighborhood include 5 different subclasses, it is here need to understand its evolution, recollect the ideas and define a general scheme of its form. These typo-morphological principles will be later used to establish the design strategy.

As less representative and connected with an authentic Chinese background, the garden and the apartment lilong are less considered in the final diagram, while a weighted selection and calibration among the other three types are conducted, being also the most common housing practice undertaken in mid twentieth century in the outskirts of Shanghai.

1.

The peripheral wall represents the division between the outer city

and the inside residential are. It keeps the security of the community and even when substituted with an iron grating, it defines the neighborhood profile. The entrance gate is part of this control system, especially where improved with the guardian’s cabin, but represent also an architectural and decorative element recognizable from the outside.

2.

The circulation is composed by the network of main lanes and side

alleys. The main lane of the block is the connection of the neighborhood with the rest of the city being the major public passage and allowing the pedestrian and the vehicular traffic, reaching 4-7 meters in width. It is joint with the secondary system of side alleys, but does not accommodate any social function. The side lanes, the proper lilongs, are the ones used by every two rows of housing facing onto them, connecting these residences with the main path. These alleys are the most important semi-public outdoor space because are high used for community activities and neighborly interaction that cannot find space in the indoor rooms. This emphasized use of the inner alleys is favored also by the fact that there is not a specific communal space in the neighborhood and that the crowded life conditions pushed the people to 49

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occupy the outdoor space. They are thinner than the main alley, reaching 2-4 meters in width, and are usually east-west oriented because of the north-south orientation of buildings. Their intimate scale and their use reserved for residents make them a quiet and safe open-air place. The whole street complex looks therefore as a fish-bone-like circulation system, clearly defining the block structure.

3.

The commercial and service activities is disposed in as a strip along

the edges of the urban block, facing the outer roads and being accessible only from them. They served mainly the neighborhood community but accommodate also facilities for the other parts of the city. These small-scale businesses were usually small food and tobacco shops, family restaurant, everyday services, but also small schools or public services can be insert in the area without compromising the balance among the prevalent residential function. In the circulation space of the block we can also found different kind of temporary street vendors.

4.

The courtyard is the private outdoor space belong to the Chinese

traditional dwelling. It is used by the family for the everyday activities and is the element that guarantee a basic light and ventilation supply. During time its dimensions changed and if first was reduced to a minimum technical space, then it evolves in the private garden and at the end disappeared with the growth in height of the building. In the lilong we typically found a front courtyard, assuming also the function of filter between the street and the house, and a back light well, used basically as a technical vain in direct contact with the kitchen.

5.

The dwelling unit is organized in few rows of at least five attached

houses, having both a front and a back access. Originally thought as the reproduction of the traditional housing model, during the densification process its dimension gradually shrank and its outdoor spaces was filled with extra volumes. In this sense, we can say that the birth of lilong not only reflect the adaption to the urban context, but also confirm a change in the Chinese society.

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If the big siheyuan (see Appendix A) could accommodate the traditional enlarged family, the smaller lilong unit can hold a reduced group, a transformation causing the shift from a family-based courtyard-centered living into a community-based alley-centered one.

Approaching a standard lilong unit, we notice that it is surrounded by a brick wall, the element that separate the private space from the public or semi-public area. Crossing in the unit itself, we first arrive in the main courtyard, so the first space of the house is a void; for the family it represents both their house’s entrance and the private outdoor space for leisure or service activities. Later we will enter in the main room, the indoor place for the family activities as dining or chatting; it is the most public part of the house and is south-facing to receive the better light. The secondary rooms, including bedrooms and storages, are smaller and located in the middle of the plan or at the upper levels, in this case connected by a narrow stair that lays behind the main room. All these functions are located in the main building, that is the highest and covered by a sloping roof. The service rooms, as bathrooms and kitchens, instead, are served by an additional access and are separated from the main spaces forming a secondary building at the back of the plot, usually on the north side. The two constructions are separated by a backyard that permits light and ventilation provision. It is sometimes present a balcony, usually if we have the three-floor layout. The plan and the height of the unit are based on the structural modules of bay and jian.

To better understand the evolution of lilong block, and later pursue or modify its urban principles, we can trace its evolution trends: - from small to big communities / increasing unit’s number. Under the push of the growing population and the increasing urbanization, the city needed more and more housing. This caused the densification of urban areas with an higher unit’s number and the construction of bigger residential villages.

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- the reduction of the community services and commercial activities. In order to obtain an higher number of dwellings and more economic profits the space reserved for no-residential functions decrease. The small shops owned by the neighbors are sometimes replaced by offices, bars and restaurants.

- reduction of private outdoor area. Starting from the courtyard of the traditional Chinese house, through the community sharing solution of lilong, we assist to a transformation from an inward-looking neighborhood organization to an open structure of the block, with the loss of both the private and the semi-private space.

- increasing verticality. The number of floors raised during time from the one level siheyuan to the two-four storey different lilong layouts. This led to an higher dwelling density, corresponding to an higher income for the developers, but compromised some space qualities of the low-rise solutions with the loss of cultural identity for the neighbor’s community.

With the first preservation laws enacted between the end of 1990s and the beginning of 2000s, the value of these area was unanimously recognized and this particular feeling perceived in Shanghai lilong was better defined and safeguarded.

Here an extract from the novel Song of Everlasting Sorrow: A Novel of Shanghai by Wang Anyi, a contemporary writer from Nanjing, in which she describes the lilong atmosphere: “Looked down upon from the highest point in the city, Shanghai’s longtang – her vast neighborhoods inside enclosed alleys – are a magnificent sight.

The longtang are the backdrop of this city. Streets and buildings emerge around them in series of dots and lines, like the subtle brushstrokes that bring life to the empty expanses of white paper in a traditional Chinese landscape painting. As day turns into night and the city lights up, these dots and lines begin to glimmer. However, underneath the glitter lies an immense blanket of darkness – these are the longtang of Shanghai”.19

19

Anyi, Wang. La canzone dell’eterno rimpianto. (Original title: 长恨歌) (Trento: Einaudi, 2011), 5.

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The typical Shanghai landscape, made by walled residential blocks defining the streets, full of narrow and busy passages between the lilong rows, spread through the multiform and surprising urban textile, covered by sloped grey and red roofs, is here recognized as a community heritage, as was already made for the ancient hutong neighborhoods in Beijing.

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Part 4

Contemporary urban housing

4.1 An historical gap To explain Chinese housing evolution it have to be pointed out that between 1950s and 1970s no major improvements were made. The main goal of Maoism policy was the economic development of the country, giving to all the other fields a minor importance and bounding the house to a mere place to sleep. In this situation the living standards worsened and the soviet-influenced solutions of danwei (see Appendix A) and communes spread all over China. “Although a large number of houses had been built since the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the level of urban housing had not been improved greatly, primarily because of the initially poor conditions of cities, and a rapidly growing population”.20 After the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, in which only some apartment buildings were constructed, trying to solve the lack of housing, the urban dwelling conditions were disastrous. “Starting from the middle of the 1960s, the urban planning and housing management system suffered serious damage. Offices at various levels were paralyzed or closed. In November 1960, at the Third Conference for National Planning, it was proposed that there would be “no urban planning for the next three years”. […] Funds for urban maintenance were badly misappropriated and urban housing […] fell into dis-repair.”21 We have finally to consider the sharp change in the central policies before and after Mao’s death. If the great leader promoted the development of the country and a rural model, an urbanization choice directed the later political decisions, pushing millions of people in moving to cities. This condition took the urban housing system to a collapse, and only with 1980s Deng Xiaoping’s intervention the urban dwelling

20

Jie, Zhang and Junhua, Lü and Rowe, Peter G. Modern urban housing in China, 1840-2000.

(Munich: Prestel, 2001), 158.

21 Jie, Zhang and Junhua, Lü and Rowe, Peter G. Modern urban housing in China, 1840-2000.

(Munich: Prestel, 2001), 172.

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conditions improved. With his policies of openness to the West and liberalization of the properties, a new era of urban housing started. To understand the latest development of the city, and to better appreciate the differences with the conclusive proposed model, we need here to study the new common residential settlement and its typo-morphological features basing our analysis on the same structure and elements used for lilong neighborhood.

4.2 Actual overview In an era of demand-driven housing design, reflecting the increasing disparity between rich and poor and the extensive range of lifestyle, the number of dwelling typologies raise in a disproportionate manner, especially in comparison to the one-solution Chinese housing history. Reading the latest statistical data, in fact, among all the new constructions we can identify different residential typologies. If private villas remained on a stable low value, apartments more than doubled their floor area from 2000 to 2010, while another important trend is the increasing number of high-rise buildings, with a rise of 10 000 new samples between 2011 and 2012.

In mid-1990s the new housing reforms specified minimum floor area standards and defined five points for the construction of a comfortable house: excellent habitability in terms of energy performance, comfortableness in having an adequate unit’s equipment, structural safety, durability, and finally an economic analysis for establishing a viable cost. All together, these requirements fall in a general trend of increasing per capita living space, a better functional separation and an improved equipment. This legislative renovation however, didn’t fixed a maximum flat area, a choice that left big freedom in the development of new unit’s layout for different social classes, but also open the way to the waist of space in huge flats.

The construction process of these new mixed functional areas in high density urban context, start from Chinese specialized big estate who based their new residential typologies on market researches. Big societies as Vanke or SOHO China have purchased and developed big centralities in the major Chinese cities with the 55

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collaborations of famous architectural firms, such as Zaha Hadid or Steven Holl. New developing models and housing solutions appeared. HOPSCA, for example, is the acronym used to describe a new developing model for large-scale mixed-use urban areas. It is the abbreviation of Hotel, Offices, Parking or Park, Shopping Mall, Convention Centre or Culture, and Apartments, namely the different functions included. These quarters are usually comparable to a small city with high-tech facilities and well-designed green spaces that with their iconic architecture have huge influence on the economic and social behaviors. These solutions especially fits the needs of that part of the population composed by wealthy and well-educated white-collar workers or self-employed individuals.

Other numerous experiments instead were made with the foundation of small satellite towns around the main centers. In Shanghai foreign firms, in collaboration with the municipalities, studied the development of new sectors of city’s suburban context. This is the case of Pujian new town, settled in Minhang district and designed between 2001 and 2004 by the Italian firm Gregotti Associati with an eye to the shared and community space, or the case of the foundation of Songjiang Themes Town developed by the Atkins group characterized by a distinctive traditional English style.22 In these later years also, more interest has aroused for the environmental condition of residential areas and, to improve the ecological sustainability of the quarters, some measures were adopted, such as the integration of water reuse systems in the landscaped outdoor spaces, a more strict control on heating plants, and the application of new technologies for energy saving. Due to this new “green” features the neighborhood’s names changed in “Garden”, “Plaza”, “Mansion”, with which each compound wanted to underline its elevated quality. For distinguish themselves from the other complexes, and in response to the new citizen’s tastes, each compound is also dressed with a different architectural style, both local or foreign, with the result of an high-rise building with an outer eclectic aspect.

22

den Hartog, Harry. Shanghai new towns. Searching for community and identity in a sprawling metropolis. (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2010), 118; 148.

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Recurring the recent political history of the country, we can understand that for the new generation of Chinese architects the house is a new issue. The government had the absolute control of on housing design and construction for about forty years, and the professional could started only recently to work on the housing theme. Even if the house is still controlled by a restrictive set of laws, they started researching on it (Urbanus studies on urban villages23) and to experiment its architectural possibilities (Father’s House project by MADA s.p.a.m.24).

4.3 High-rise birth context Despite this various scenery, the most representative subject of contemporary housing is the high-rise residential compound. Before describing their presence in Shanghai, it is hence to define what is an high-rise building. There is not an international agreed definition, but an high-rise, or tower block, can be described as a multi-story structure in which most occupants depend on elevators to reach their destinations.

For Wikipedia “is a tall building or structure used as a residential and/or office building“.25 In the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary it is defined as “a building having many storeys”.26 In the U.S., the National Fire Protection Association defines an high-rise as being higher than 75 feet (23 meters), or about 7 stories.27 In China a high-rise is defined by codes as a building with more than 10 floors or above 24 meters in height over ground level.

Some 8-10 storey residential buildings were erected in Shanghai in the first half of the twentieth century, but only during the 1970s they knew a great diffusions 23

“Urbanus Research Bureau” Urbanus, Architecture & Design. http://www.urbanus.com.cn/urb.php

24

Cachola Schmal, Peter and Wenjun, Zhi. M8 in China. Contemporary Chinese Architects. (Berlin: jovis Verlag GmbH, 2009), 100.

25

“Tower block” Wikipedia. Last modified October 11th, 2014.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tower_block 26

“High rise” Oxford dictionaries. Last modified 2014.

http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/high-rise?q=high+rise 27

Craighead, Geoff. High-Rise Security and Fire Life Safety. (Burlington: Elsevier, 2009), 2.

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because of the central government promotion that intent them as an effective method to prevent the waste of arable land. These first kind of high-rise were therefor studied with an industrialized method of construction, as the sliding molded-panel technique, to be faster and cheaper reproduced. In the urban block, they were usually regularly organized as slab blocks having the first floor reserved for commercial activities. The building itself presented an open-air corridor to serve the highest number of families.

An example of the period is the residential complex located in North Caoxi Road.

After the 1978’s social and economic reform, a more capitalistic-oriented China were outlined and also the real estate market changed. An enormous booming in urban housing development was caused by a new urbanization era. The purpose of housing shifted gradually from a welfare supply to the satisfaction of a demand of higher comfortable dwelling. The lifestyle of Chinese people changed over a more westerner model and so they asked for more modern approach and facilities. Urban-residential projects were developed following the slogan “high standards with relatively low cost, high quality with relatively low space standards, complete functions in small areas, and a pleasant environment despite limited land coverage”. 28 Despite a heated discussion about the adoption or not of the high-rise typology, the apartment solution were confirmed to be the predominant choice, a decision that transpire also from the government standard regulation.

4.3 High-rise typomorphological analysis In comparison with the traditional urban block, nowadays it considerably increased in dimension with the integration of other functions. In the area are introduced schools, bank and communal facilities grouped in one or more civic centers while on the outer border of the plot, or even along the main internal roads, few commercial spaces are planned. The sunlight restrictions imposed by the law

28

Jie, Zhang and Junhua, Lü and Rowe, Peter G. Modern urban housing in China, 1840-2000.

(Munich: Prestel, 2001), 230.

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caused the departure of the buildings with huge spaces among them in order to do not shadow each other and instead of the slab layout, the punctual tower solution is preferred because of the possibility of not having a continuous shadow reaching. With the adoption of this layout the buildings reach 20-30 storey and a FAR higher than 2.

Adopting this solution there are plenty of space at the ground floor, where is hence common the presence of a garden or some outdoor facilities used mainly by elderly people. Despite the elaborated landscape and the elevated environmental quality however, the absence of a real sense of community was perceived between inhabitants.

As reported in a study organized by the Pratt Institute of New York, some neighbors revealed the lack of social interactions: “Shi (one of the compound’s inhabitant Ed.) reports that there is actually little individual interaction between residents. For example, the interaction between his household and his next door neighbors does not go beyond saying hello and exchanging a few words when they meet in the hall”. 29 Being directly connected with the outer part of the city, also the sense of security is lost. To mitigate this deficit some iron gate were installed and a set of guardians are asked to control the incoming and outgoing traffic. Due to these operations the neighborhood changed its shape, from the walled lilong block innervated by small paths, into an open big-scale complex.

1.

The iron gate and a railing usually substitute the original brick wall

all around the urban block. The entrance is often reserved for vehicles with the pedestrian flux just pass through them. In correspondence of the entrances there is the security personnel that keep the community safe monitoring the traffic. This happened especially when the compound is inhabited by the wealthy class with the consequence of the creation of a segregated bubble.

2.

The internal circulation is freely designed on the functional needs

and the roads are reserved for the private use by inhabitants or office’s workers. The streets are organic shaped and narrow allowing the passage of 29

“Experiences” Housing Shanghai. Last modified 2014.

http://ericengdahl.com/housingshanghai/experiences/shi-20-undergraduate-student/ 59

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just one car; they usually lead from the outer circulation to the underground parking. Over the car circulation system, there are pedestrian paths, smaller passageways that conduct from the parking exit or the main roads to the entrance hall of the residential buildings. With this kind of organization the hierarchy of streets we found in the lilong block is lost and only a separation between cars and pedestrian street is perceived.

3.

The commercial function is still located along the outer roads but

instead of being small activities carried by the residents, they usually transformed in facilities or market chains at the service of the whole city. The commercial and retail space tend to occupy the street level, but the newly introduced office functions can be located at every floor and sometimes even occupy an entire tower building in the block.

4.

The common open-air space is the ground floor area at the service of

the compound’s residents. It can be an equipped space including a little outdoor gym, a fountain, a green space with seats, a swimming pool in dependence of the wealthy level of the inhabitants. These leisure spaces are mainly used by children and elder people to play and chat but the intimate scale that permits a real social share cannot be found among the hundred-meters-high buildings and the cultural identity of Shanghai’s residential area is vanished.

5.

In the high-rise solution is introduced an intermediate level between

the outdoor and the private unit. The access is in fact mediate by the presence of a collective building that contains in itself different apartments. It has a small footprint area with an irregular shape caused by light and ventilation needs, and a huge growth in height. The entrance lobby at the ground level and the connection spaces are the only shared spaces in the building; being the first room to welcome the residents and the potential buyers it is well furnished to create an atmosphere as much welcoming as possible. The distribution is composed by at least two elevators each building, one main staircase and usually a service one that connected the dirty rooms of the house with the 60

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ground. It is located in the core of the building because it do not need a large amount of light neither a continuous air exchange. From each landing, there are from two to six residential units every floor, that are the proper private part of the building. New housing layouts were introduced to obtain an higher density and to fit the different family sizes. They employed an higher functional separation and better comforts. Each apartment is therefore developed on one level and include the south-facing main part, including the living room and the bedrooms, and the north-oriented service part with bathrooms, kitchen and dining room. The average unit also includes one or two balconies, one served the main rooms for leisure activities, the other having a service role. The building usually has a flat roof hosting the plant’s equipment.

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4.3 High-rise / lilong comparison The passage from lilong neighborhood to high-rise compound is seen by the author as the case of an imposed external solution instead of a natural the evolution of the residential typology. The market pressure and the wealth desire of an emergent investor class combined with the fear of a collapsing livable situation in cities, took to the indiscriminate importation of the Western cluster model.

But despite a qualitative reflection, it can be also useful to consider and compare the quantitative data and goals of the settlement typologies to understand the real advantages and criticalities of both. The low-rise pattern of lilong surely maintain those intimate features of the tradition, but what is the price to paid in density and profitable term? That’s the reason why some information were investigated during a field and bibliographic research and later elaborated as following (see Appendix B).

LILONG NEIGHBORHOOD DATA - dwelling/km2 : 5 873

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- people/km2 : 46 984 (1 household/dwelling; 8 people/household30) - FAR : 1.3 - void ratio : distribution space 25% (lilong lanes 47%, main lanes 53%), building coverage 75% - functions : housing in the core area 78%, commercial on the outer borders 22%

HIGH-RISE NEIGHBORHOOD DATA - dwelling/km2 : 39 620 - people/km2 : 106 975 (1 household/dwelling; 2.7 people/household31) - FAR : 3 - void ratio : unbuilt space 79% (distribution path 8%, generic outdoor 71%, leisure area 21%), building coverage 21% - functions : housing 95% , commercial 5%

Density comparison As we see the density values of lilong cannot reach the contemporary high-rise standards, nor in people nor in volume terms, but we have to consider that the technologies and facilities available at that time also played a certain role in the construction development. We have to compare these data also with a more wide scale to understand that both the solutions are in a satisfactory range, having the lilong FAR similar to big residential building solution, such as Robin Hood Gardens by the Smithson in London or the Spanish Mirador building by MVRDV, while the high-rise settlement has a FAR value just superior to that of most European city centers (see Appendix B). The choice to increase the volumetric amount is related to the economic

30

“Back in 1932, one extended family occupying one unit was typically composed of one-to-two elderly, two adults, one-to-eight children and one-to-two servants, resulting in a family size ranging from four to thirteen people. We assume an average family size of eight.”

Density atlas website, url: http://www.densityatlas.org/casestudies/profile.php?id=60 31 Household size calculated as 2.7 persons per family in 2012. “Shanghai Statistic -上海统计” www.stats-sh.gov.cn.

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profit that the developer will earn and to the increasing housing demand, but for sure come in contrast with the traditional typo-morphologic principles. As showed by the building coverage percentage in fact we understand that the lilong solution, with its high footprint, is a dense low-rise mass, as a full horizontal slab from which the outdoor spaces are carving out, while the high-rise developed its volume in height.

The relation between buildings and soil is the one that define the behavior of the inhabitants, and with its modification also the social life and the role of the house changed.

The use of outdoor space Even if on one hand we can relate the passage from apartment lilong to the western high-rise model following the sign of vertical growth, on the other hand we have to underline the different situation this evolution caused in the use of outdoor space. The discriminating factor between the two solution in fact is the presence or not of the semi-public area, a fundamental feature of the typo-morphologic structure of the Chinese residential neighborhood. Having only few high buildings above a surface we will have a lot of free ground space. Even if it sounds like a favorable point, it happens that the unhuman scale and the waste of space make those gardens an unsuitable place for social interactions. It is full of technical objects, crossed by car roads, shadowed by the towers and therefore inhabited by the residents. In an opposite way the lilongs, the proper side alleys, even if not specifically planned for people’s staying and in overlap with the circulation network, create the right scale and feeling to attract residents. For sure in the lilong neighborhood we perceive the shortage of communal greenery and public open space, but the life nestled along its streets go to create a positive, joyful feeling. Is this semi-public outdoor space that absorb in itself the specific character of lilong everyday life.

Composition of functions Considering both the cases as a prevalent residential area, the different percentage of commercial or other functions is not the real issue. The real difference stay in the 64

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relation the neighborhood has with these spaces. In lilongs in fact the retail activities are carried on by the residents, who create a mutual exchange between inside and outside, the city and the neighborhood, introducing some urges from the outside and serving the inhabitants. In high-rise compound instead happened that the other functions, commercial activities but also private or public offices, have a completely separated life from the rest of the block; they are not satisfying the neighborhood’s needs, use different entrances, have separated fluxes of people and cars, and belong to different owners. The inner residential core results in this way a close, introvert and segregated kernel.

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Part 5

Design strategy

5.1 Summary on Shanghai housing Among the housing typologies analyzed there are some principles that, even modified in final result, are constantly present. These elements are not just simply repeated but deeply rooted in history and traditions in relation to Chinese notions of ‘family’ and ‘home’. During housing evolution they changed in their form and some result compromised in the latest development.

- the disposition of streets and alley in the urban blocks are dictated by orientation principles. The neighborhood structure include a general north-south main lane and a series of secondary alleys, the proper lilong, along the east-west axes. The resulted buildings will occupy the space between two small lanes, usually around twelve meters, with the main courtyard on the south side.

- a hierarchical organization in the outdoor spaces of the neighborhood, with an increasing privacy moving from outside to inside. If the outer streets are used almost exclusively by vehicles, they are not allowed to enter in the block of siheyuan and in the first phase of lilong development. The main lane were 4 - 7 meters wide and have a primary distribution function, while the side alleys, 2 – 4 meters wide, were used by the inhabitants as quiet and safe community places. The entrance courtyard represented the first private space of the household.

- the presence of commercial land use in periphery of urban blocks. Also small schools, parks and leisure facilities can be found near the streets to establish a balanced relation with the residential function. The small businesses as groceries, family restaurant, cigarette stands, barber and tailoring shops favored the community interaction.

- a shared sense of identity and community and belonging to the local culture.

Reflecting the traditional model of the enlarged family, the local community is seen as a unique group based on social relationships. The alleys are the place where the local traditions are transmitted to the young generation and the human scale proportion of 66

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this space make it perfect for community activities. Its size, the protection role of the wall and the repetition of the same housing unit are all architectural elements empowering the community identity. As psychological studies reveals, human beings prefer private and safety spaces for neighborly interaction rather than a vast undefined garden. In conclusion, if traditional lilong pattern had eliminated the waste of space by maximizing the land use, the high-rise solution has a lot of underused public open space.

- the use of modular units for housing. The single dwelling in fact was divided in jian, a word that represents the bay of the wooden structures but expresses also the unit of living space with a quadrangular base between floor and ceiling. Its size varies between three and five meters in width and length in the north of the country, but reaches the eight meters in width with a double or triple proportion in depth in the south. One of the characteristics of Chinese architecture is in fact its tectonic clearness.

- the importance of the and orientation of buildings. To provide for light and ventilation in the humid city of Shanghai a crossed ventilation and the presence of direct solar radiation was of primary importance. The orientation of the buildings, by the way, reflects also the traditional rules of fengshui.

- a strong relation between closed and open spaces. The complementary creation of full and void in the house composition reflect the observant felling of Chinese people to the nature and the shrewd use the made of its resources to improve their living conditions. The courtyard represent also a social value because is lived as an extension of the building interior. In particular, this effect is highlighted by the presence of gates, courts, galleries, verandas. Under an architectonic point of view it is to highlight the specific fact that the courtyard is the first space meet in entering the house, thus passing form an outdoor to an outdoor place but with a marked difference: the first is part of the community system while the second one belong to the family one.

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5.2 Proposal of new typomorphological features After the study of typo-morphology literature and the elaboration of an application scheme, we understand that the potentialities of the use of such principles in a settlement strategy lies in the relation between urban form and cultural identity this method can reveal.

The force point of typo-morphologies then, can be found in

its abstraction process that identify elements out of a definitely material or technology, because meanwhile they change with society development, the spatial order they produce are the one involved in the evolution process responsible in give cultural meaning to a space, the one that is fundamental in create a new coherent and meaningful design. After having separate and understand the elements composing lilong neighborhood and the hierarchy existing among them, we reorganize them in light of a new context situation. This strategy will hence be specific for the contemporary Shanghai case, even if, reflecting the general scheme of the traditional house spread all over the country, can be referred to a wider area.

It is finally to be avoided a non-site-specific approach involving the reproduction of the same efficient unit, typical of the Modernist Movement. If we pursue the study of the perfect dwelling in regard of its livable standards and efficiency, we will fall in the utopic repetition of the ideal prototype, an operation that is based on the addition of the singular unit and not from the study of a complex organism as the urban block is. 32 The general strategy adopted so is a low-rise high-density approach that resemble the historical urban massiveness, but at the same time satisfy the contemporary needs of density with an elevated number of inhabitants.

32

This is the principle of a research that has emerged with the industrial development and the growing demand for housing in a urban context. Starting from the row of workers’ houses, it produced the reflections on the existenzminimum at the 1929 CIAM meeting by Walter Gropius, Hans Schmidt and other important figures, and later the implementation of this extreme life standards lead to the Le Corbusier studies on the Unité d’Habitation, till, for example, the studies of Atelier 5 about the unit’s aggregation in a village.

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According to the five elements considered in the previous analysis, the design strategy proposed to maintain the cultural identity of Shanghai, is here defined as:

1.

The wall is virtually keep to define the block edges: no residential

function is located at the ground floor level facing the outer streets neither other common spaces are planned in a peripheral area. It will help to divide the outer city and the inner community, keeping also the residential core more safe.

The entrances are designed in connection with the metro station and opened in correspondence to the outer streets incipits. The accesses are created directly by the holes among the buildings, as happened in lilong neighborhoods.

2.

The internal area is reserved for pedestrian traffic and only includes

small paths among the buildings, while the underground parking is accessible by vehicles from the outside. The inner street design takes the outside’s orientation prolonging the directions of the existing roads. The internal distribution network works not only as a mere connection, but is integrated in the urban system becoming an enjoyable space. By the way, the interactive role of small lanes is moved to the new urban spaces introduced in the urban structure (see point 4).

3.

The neighborhood has to keep mainly the residential function, but

can integrate some facilities as the original lilong block does in order to achieve a balanced mixed-use solution. What we surely want to avoid is a “Xintiandi solution” in which the quarter become a commercial and touristic pole. The commercial and service activities therefore are maintained and face the external roads as in the studied case, including facilities that will serve both the community and the external users. Offering houses for different users, moreover, other spaces such as artist studios and galleries or student’s residence are added.

4.

Reflecting on the Chinese use of space, we introduced different

grades of privacy between public and private areas. The real public space is the one outside the borders of the urban block, but that enter in connection 69

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with the neighborhood in presence of strong elements (in the case study the metro exits, the public park and the school). Moving toward the inside, a set of community areas are proposed in the center of the block. They are semi-public elements that never appeared in the Chinese urban system, but do not represent the western imposition of a structured public space as a big commercial road or a plaza can be. They are designed as smaller centers that will be used by the community and occupied with their usual activities such as hawkers, children’s plays and elder’s dances. These places go to satisfy the implicit demand of shared spaces found in the vivid use of lilong’s branch alleys.

Inside each single sub-blocks then, some other semi-public spaces are designed for the specific use of the inhabitants (in the following example we will found a protected courtyard for the elder group, student’s terraces, shared working space). Finally the single unit will include an outdoor private space, an hybrid room as describe in Alvar Aalto’s writing From doorstep to living room: “The garden wall is the real external wall of the home. […] The garden (or courtyard) belongs to our home just as much as any other of the rooms”.

Later he explain how an outdoor space can remind a covered room and vice versa: it can be made “changing the direction of one’s perception of space, so that the walls are experienced as external walls, planes belonging to the solids behind, rather than as enclosing walls”. To explain his point of view he propose the Fra Angelico’s “Annunciation”, “the perfect trinity of man, room and garden”.33

33

Schildt, Goran. Alvar Aalto, the early years. (New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1984), 214-230.

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In search of this equilibrium between indoor and outdoor space, a study on full, void and their combinations was made. (in the following pages the study models). The possibilities born from this work will represent both the interaction of the building in the space and its adaptability to different social and technical requirements.

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5.

The dwelling units are organized in small clusters responding to the

different user’s needs, later assembled in a way to reach an high density. The selected target of inhabitants wants to reflect the actual social composition of the city. Instead of being a place of illegal subleasing, it is proposed a new community composed by families of two or three members, groups of young people sharing the same apartments (students, friends, collaborators), elder people sharing some spaces and activities, single people who need working space next to their homes. In the last category are included specifically artists that, attracted by the renovation of the area, chose to establish their studio and home here.

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The residential unit is thought as developed in height, both to increase the population density and to add privacy to each house. The architectural principles that will guide the design of the house type will be: (H1) the unit is usually made by more floors; (H2) alternation of full and void spaces, and so each unit has an outdoor uncovered private area; (H3) the entrance of the single unit is private and leads preferably to an outdoor space; (H4) the first indoor room is the main shared room; (H5) each unit has at least a double facing to ensure enough light and crossed ventilation.

Consider the different elements composing the house, we can say that the wall, when presents, is the element that separate the private space from the community one. The outdoor area is used for private for leisure or service activities and can be present under different forms (a front garden, a patio, a terrace, a green roof). The main room is located next to the outdoor space and is the place for the shared activities and the most public part of the house. The other rooms, including bedrooms, kitchen, bathrooms and storages, are shared or private depending on the user’s composition, while the distribution system become one of the principal element of the house and reprising the role denied to it in the high-rise buildings.

Summarizing, the design process has therefore followed these steps: (N1) The neighborhood comes from the principles “low-rise, high-density”, it means the buildings will not exceed seven floors in height; it comes from the architectural principle of the excavated plate.

(N2) The urban structure is based on the connection of small community spaces between the buildings; they are located in the central part of the area to keep the sense of security while the border ones are connecting spaces with important elements of the outer city. There are only pedestrian lanes.

(N3) The enclosure of the neighborhood is given by the buildings themselves and the presence of a different function, not by a proper wall.

(N4) Housing is kept as the main function but declined on the needs of different targets; commercial activities are integrated along the external edge of the 74

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neighborhoods to emphasize the vitality and the use of the area; new common indoor spaces are added in a small percentage to serve the local community.

(N5) The area is subdivided in smaller blocks creating as many sub-communities differentiated by different kind of users, who are better served by a specific dwelling type.

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For the final solution, a volumetric study of the building on the selected area, FAR and other standards values are not fixed a priori, but during the work some energies were spent to have them at least higher than the lilong, and as close as possible to the high-rise ones. The standards values are calculated as for the previous cases, after a volumetric simulation on the area, and are defined as following:

PROTOTYPE NEIGHBORHOOD DATA - dwelling/km2 : 7 701 - people/km2 : 21 396 - FAR : 2 - void ratio : void 44% (ground private space 9%,community space 20%,distribution space 71%), building coverage 56% - functions : housing in the core area 78%, commercial on the outer borders 19%, community space 3%

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5.3 Project area Hongkou district 虹口区 is one of the central district of Shanghai. It extends northward and has a land area of 23.48 km2, a population of 84 560 000 and a density of 36 014 people/square kilometer in 2012. 34 Together with the Old Bund and Lujiazui, Hongkou forms the “Golden Triangle”, the core of central business districts of Shanghai. The district occupy a good position in the city structure because it is near the central areas of the Bund and Nanjing Road, but accommodate also in itself a lot of new developing core. The North Sichuan Road area in fact it was chosen by the municipality as one of the new commercial city cores and has seen the construction of a lot of new buildings for shopping and leisure in the last few years. Another development pole is the Zhangjiang Hi-tech Park, where high and new technologies are studied. Being rich in architectural heritage, it includes several cultural landscape zones, four historical and cultural sites protected at the national level and 303 historical sites and cultural relics defined by the city’s regulation. As examples the Broadway Mansion and the Shanghai Jewish Refugees Museum arose here, and also the Duolun Lu culture street, a project of lilong renovation and art promotion, is located in Hongkou district. At the beginning of the 20th century the area become the main industrial center of the city because of it richness in waterways, that were preserved nowadays no longer as commercial routes, but for their scenic waterfront landscape. The area is well served by the infrastructural system thanks to the newly developed subway lines 3, 4, 8, 10, 12, while a lot of urban busses crossing the quarter.

Both the Inner Ring Road and the Middle Ring Road cross Hongkou, connecting it with the airports and all the central areas of Shanghai. During history the district was first occupied by the Japanese who establish their concession and later in its territory was defined the Shanghai Ghetto, the area that hosted the European Jewish refugees during the second world war persecutions.

34

Shanghai Municipal Statistical Bureau. Statistical Yearbook of Shanghai 2012. Beijing: China Statistical Publishing House, 2013.

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The site project is located in the southern part of the district, just over the division of Shanjing Port, an inner canal of Huangpu River, in two branches. It is surrounded by different urban textures made by different residential typologies, reflecting the city’s development. The project site is bordered on the west side by the busy Siping Road, that held the stops of the bus line 14, 50, 61, 100, 123, 147, 307 and the Hailun Road metro stop of line 4 and 10. In front of the site project, over Siping Road, there is an high-rise hotel that represent the landmark of the area. Between the hotel and the lilong blocks an high-rise compound was erected. Over the north edge, defined by Tianshui Road, some medium-rise residential buildings and an irregular urban village define the area. On its east side, over Tongjia Road, there are a small public park, a school and some messy medium-rise constructions. On the south side of the site project, facing Hailun Road, there are the lilong neighborhoods of Ruikangli and Ruiqingli that are well conserved and are still nowadays occupied by their communities. The third lilong block, Ruiyuanli, lost almost everything of its original plant to accommodate a branch of the China Music Industry Park, the first officially approved music industry agglomeration on the national level. This area is part of a bigger development project, the “Shanghai Music Plan”, supported by the municipality of Shanghai and especially the government of the Hongkou jurisdiction. 35 The operation started in 2011 and will transform 281 000 square meters comprising the regeneration of the canal waterfronts and seven development areas that will hold several companies and industries of the cultural and art sector.

Three of them, the China Music Industry Park, 1933 Shanghai, and 1913 Shanghai, are already finished, while the remaining four, that are the Exhibition and Experience Center of the music valley, Sanjiaodi Art Park, Jiaxing Theater, and Peninsula Bay Project, are still under construction. Among them, the most well-known is the renewed cultural area of 1933, a former slaughterhouse now fill in with commercial activities, bar, restaurants and small creative companies. After being abandoned and falling into disrepair, the building was extensive restored in 2008 and with its special 35

News reported on the district website: Hongkou, Shanghai > Industry park. Accessed November 29, 2014. http://hkq.sh.gov.cn/ 81

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layout made by a central atrium from which a lot of staircases and interlocking slopes departed, it become the perfect place for creative work and promotional and cultural events.

The project area, that is about 30 000 m2, with an average extension among the north-south axes of 200 m and 140 in the opposite, is actually under construction. In the last two years it was involved in the works for the Hailun Road subway station and as this operation will be concluded another residential complex will be built. As we can see from the renders and promotional picture posted all around the area it will be a multi-storey group of buildings with a mixed post-modern and western style outer aspect. On the area will be take in consideration the future presence of the metro exits, calculated as the underground encumbrance and the four metro exit buildings over the site. The choice to select an empty area was dictated by the will of confronting this research with a new settlement strategy, and to fall in a restoration operation.

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The favorable elements of the surrounding are: - the presence of the 1933 and the Music Park creative centers. They are successful examples of renewed areas and can be a positive and propulsive force for the rehabilitation of the new neighborhood’s social functions; - the small public park. Even if is a small area, the presence of a green space in the dense Hongkou district can valorize the location of the new residential district;

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- the public transport network. The connection with even two line of metro and a lot of bus line make this area a favorable location for an housing developing plan, being the public transportation a primary requirement in the urban context; - the presence of a dense residential structure. The high-density solution will be well integrated in the compact urban textile of Hongkou district, also because of the fact that the new quarter will be surrounded by neighborhoods with a similar mixed-use composition.

The negative elements of the surrounding are: - the traffic congestion of Siping Road. The busy Siping Road, that connect the Bund area to the north part of the Hongkou district, is made by seven lanes and is cause of air and noise pollution during the whole day.

- subway and bus stops. The presence of the metro line will attract a lot of external citizens that will be temporary present on the area surrounding the residential core, affecting the privacy and security level of the community. The stops will also steal space to the residential and community functions.

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5.4 Prototype drawings

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Part 6

Conclusions

6.1 Reflections on China / Europe comparison I would like to begin this conclusive part with a confrontation between Western and Chinese culture of dwelling. First it is to be said that every Chinese vernacular architecture is characterized by a striking consonance among built forms. Although significant geographical variations, the morphology of traditional houses, important palaces, imperial tombs and any other type of building, share a number of architectural, spatial and cultural elements. This happened because the symmetry and the strict order of the layout reflect the hierarchy of Chinese family and nation, the most important principles at each grade of the society. The presence of a significant element was defined only by its position in the general plant or its bigger dimensions.

Contrariwise, in the western culture to each function is associated a specific layout of the building that reflect the function or the importance of the occupants, giving birth to an infinite number of construction type.

Another basic difference stand in the approach to the change of urban environment; the western culture is based on a “continuity in the transformation” meanwhile the Chinese one is founded on a “continuity in the permanence”, showing a strong character in conservation. These principles caused a diversification in the dwelling evolution; if in Europe the a priori typology on which every new dwelling was based changed in time, passing through the domus, the insula, the attached house, the linear solution and a lot more, in China we only found a typological reference, the courtyard house, the siheyuan, that adapt itself to different climate, period and lifestyles. The contemporary Chinese problem is that this adaptation process stopped and, instead of an hard research work, an uncritical adoption of the western models have been made.

Another difference stay in the role of the architect. Unlike the individualist western tendency that classified the architect as a recognized professional, in China this figure occupied a position in between the role of a scholar and a craftsman. All 101

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the buildings in China in fact were more built than designed and there isn’t in Chinese history a treaty including morphological or typological instructions. Because of the strict rules and rigid traditions, transmitted first by the local culture and then by some technical manuals, the foreman and the craftsmen could meet the demands of the buyer without a designer, causing the late birth of the architect’s role.

One of the main differences, finally, is the different kind of urban spaces and the perception of it. If in the Western urb the street network is interrupted by a range of plazas, widening, churchyards, squares, flight of steps, in the Eastern city it has a pure distribution function while the life takes place within the single urban block, as the case of lilong’s alleys. It caused the absence of real public spaces in the original structure of Chinese city, a fact influenced by the tradition but nowadays accentuated by the rapid accretion. With the foreign intervention on the city development some hybrid spaces as enormous pedestrian streets, no-functional squares or huge parks were introduced but, despite their decennial history, these spaces are still misunderstood and unused by the population. Examples can be found in Shanghai in Nanjing Road, a cut that starts from the Bund and reach People’s Square covering 1.6 kilometers, or the numerous office’s plazas used as meeting place by the elders, or the beautiful but giant Century Park. The kind of spaces actually used in the city are therefore the inner lanes of the residential quarters or the small-scale community spaces in which the citizens can recognize their cultural identity.

6.2 A chance for typomorphology application After researching about Chinese context, that is nowadays trying to face an increasing urban population, under the pressure of an ever-profitable but ruthless real estate market, in consideration of a unique and difficult housing policies history, knowing the traditional principles but also the actual approach to architectural heritage, we are now searching for another settlement strategy.

During the past years the main approach to the housing problem in China was to develop big residential villages with the aim to obtain the highest density and 102

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accommodate the major number of people, to have therefore a profitable sale or rent.

The model of high-rise compounds perfectly fits these requirements and seems to be well integrated into a developing city, but like argued before, this “slab in the park”43 typology found a lack in the connection with Chinese tradition and the urban surrounding, giving a sterile solution. The everlasting principles on which the Siheyuan dwelling and its neighborhood are based are denied.

During city’s history, the only solution that really fit in Shanghai environment is lilong, the symbol of a syncretism between the east and the west, a typology that only now has been re-taken into account. Its origins, rooted in the same values of the traditional house, and the perpetuation of urban settlement principles, have made these neighborhoods a friendly spot and a place to identify with.

The work of recognize and synthesized these values has led to the redaction of some principles used as guidelines for the design phase. This operation of absorb and adapt the basic rules of the traditional form of residential Shanghai, in consideration of its actual needs, has allowed to achieve a satisfying density value and a urban structure that respect the community life and its handing down. Even if the proposed solution will not be neither the unique nor the final one, it is anyway trying at least to give an example of the application of the discovered typo-morphological features, while the other contemporary operations realized in the city seems to be only an updating of lilong’s facilities or functions.

Forty years ago, in 1973, the New York State Urban Developed Corporation, a short-lived but significant public housing authority, and the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies, a non-profit think tank formed by young architects, started to face an issue with which probably China will be forced to deal with in the next future: high-density housing. In that year the MOMA organized an exhibition and a real field-research work with the construction of a residential quarter in Brooklyn had started. The proposed solution was a low-rise high-density dwelling, with similar values and forms as the ones proposed in this work.

Feeling the lack of any other clear alternative, the reproduction of identical giant buildings seems the only solution, but is now the time to call on architects and 103

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planners in find a new proposal, based both on traditional values and contemporary needs, that will make Chinese cities and dwelling environment a more livable, homelike place.

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Acknowledgments

This thesis is one of the first products of the new born double degree exchange program instituted between Politecnico di Milano and Tongji University. I am deeply grateful to this two institutes who made me possible to discover new places and cultures enlarging my knowledge.

I wish to thank my supervisor prof. Remo Dorigati for his constant push to move forward and for the reflections shared with me. I am also grateful to him for its commitment to cultivate the exchange agreement with the Chinese faculty. I thank my tutor prof. Zhi Wenjun for the hospitality and kindness shown to me during my stay in Shanghai and for the precious suggestions that let me able to clarify my investigation.

A special thanks to prof. Lorenzo Consalez who supported my departure and still encourage my choices.

Thanks to Serena and Ettore, precious counselors for the hardest choices. Thanks to Leonardo, Chiara, Giulia and Serena for the discussions and the goals achieved together. Thanks to Laura, for the time spent in revise my drafts and for the heart shared despite the distance. Thanks to Nicoletta and Irene, for the fights and games that keep us together.

Finally I want to thank Irma and Walter, my milestones and examples, who silently shown me the passion in doing ordinary and extraordinary things and who never stop believing in the person I am. This work is dedicated to them.

2015 年 6 月

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[2] Bracken, Gregory. “The Shanghai Alleyway House: A Threatened Typology” in Future Publics: Politics and Space in East Asia’s Cities Issue # 12 | Spring 2013, edited by Architecture Theory Chair (TU Delft), 45-54.

[3] Brandi, Cesare. Diario cinese. Torino: Einaudi, 1882.

[4] Cachola Schmal, Peter and Wenjun, Zhi. M8 in China. Contemporary Chinese Architects.

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[5] Del Zendeh, Elham. Kashfolayat, Siamak. Aguirre, Mitzi Liszt. “RETHINKING SHANGHAI. Sustainable Intervention on the Suzhou Creek” Master thesis, Politecnico di Milano, Lecco, 2013

[6] Denison, Edward and Yu Ren, Guang. Building Shanghai. The story of China’s gateway.

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[7] “Density atlas” Density atlas. Last modified 2011. http://www.densityatlas.org/

[8] Denti, Giovanni. Cina, morfologia e scala dello sviluppo urbano. Firenze: Alinea Editrice, 2005.

[9] Economist Intelligence Unit. “Building Rome in a day. The sustainability of China’s housing boom” The Economist Intelligence Unit Limited 2011, 2011.

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[12] Gazzola, Luigi. La casa della Fenice. Roma: Diagonale, 1999.

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[19] Liangyong, Wu. Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing. A Project in the Ju’er Hutong Neighborhood. Vancouver: UBC Press, 1999.

[20] Marzi, Luca and Liu, Xinyan. “Conservation and Recovery in the district of lilong Tianzifang in Shanghai” Costruire in laterizio, no. 135 (2010): 50 -53.

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[22] MVRDV. FARMAX. Excursions on density. Rotterdam : 010 Publishers, 1998

[23] Novelli, Luigi. Shanghai. Architettura & città tra Cina e Occidente. Architecture & the city between China and the West. Roma: Edizioni Librerie Dedalo, 1999.

[24] Qian, Guan. “Lilong housing, a traditional settlement form” Master thesis, McGill University, Montreal, 1996.

[25] Qijun, Wang. Vernacular dwellings. Ancient Chinese architecture. New York: Springer, 2000.

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[27] Santi, Ettore. “Apparatus China. The mechanism of contemporary chinese architecture” Master thesis, Politecnico di Milano, Milano, 2014

[28] Shanghai Municipal Statistical Bureau. Statistical Yearbook of Shanghai 2012. Beijing: China Statistical Publishing House, 2013. http://www.stats-sh.gov.cn/data/toTjnj.xhtml?y=2013e

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[30] Shen, Hua. Shanghai lilong minju (Lilong dwelling in Shanghai). Beijing: China Architecture & Building Industry Press, 1993.

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[34] Tsai, Wan-Lin. “The Redevelopment and Preservation of Historic Lilong Housing in Shanghai” Master thesis, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 2008.

[35] Xue, Q. L. Charlie. Building a revolution. Chinese architecture since 1980. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2006.

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[37] Yu, Zhou. “China’s urban housing reform – with specific emphasis on property ownership” Master thesis, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, 2009.

[38] Zenou, Yves. Housing Policies in China: Issues and Options. Bonn: IZA, 2011.

[39] Zhao, Chunlan. “From shikumen to new-style: a rereading of lilong housing in modern Shanghai” in Narrating Architecture – a perspective anthology, edited by Madge, James and Peckham, Andrew, 453 - 481. Abingdon: Routledge, 2006.

[40] Zhu, Jianfei. Architecture of modern China. A historical critique. Abingdon: Routledge, 2009

[41] Zhu, Linchu and Qian, Zhi. “The case of Shanghai, China” in The Challenge of the Slums: Global Report on Human Settlements 2003, edited by UN-Habitat (Nations Human Settlements Programme), 195-228.

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Appendix A – Case study projects Tulou 土楼 Another interesting vernacular architecture diffused in the southern provinces with tropical moist monsoonal climate (hot summer and mild winter), and especially in Fujian province, is the tulou dwelling, literally “earth building”. This is a communal living structure elaborated by Hakka people, a group of Han Chinese people with their origin from central China, to fit better the climatic conditions of the region. The overhanging roofs and the open air corridors in fact want to promote natural ventilation and shading.

As the siheyuan, tulou is based on an inward-looking structure with a close outside appearance and an internal open space, an organization that favored the harmonious coexistence of few hundred households as a community. For this reason they were known as “a little kingdom for the family” or “bustling small city”. They can have different shapes, such as rounded, rectangular or elliptical, different dimensions (the rounded one can have a diameter between 15 and 70 meters) and can be made by different ring of buildings. Furthermore outside the main building can be built some auxiliary constructions that all together create a small village.

The earthen houses are usually made by three or four floors reaching up to thirteen meters in height for defensive purposes. They have high fortified mud walls with only one entrance covered by tiled roofs with wide over-hanging eaves, and the windows are located only above the first floor. The wall is at the base 3 meters thick while at the first floor it shrinks to 1.5 meters, as the thickness of the wall was reduced higher up in the structure. The rammed earth structure is combined with an interior timber frame and partition walls addition while the floor is made by paved stones on top of compacted earth ground. The first floor is used as the kitchen or dining room, the second level as a store, and the third and fourth

ones as bedrooms. The building is

then divided vertically between families with each possessing two or three rooms on each floor. The different floors are connected with a corridor about one meter wide and usually four staircases to distribute the over 800 people that can live in the tulou.

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In contrast with their plain exterior, the interiors are built for comfort and are often highly decorated; in the middle of the courtyard and along the main axis, there is the ancestral hall, the private school and the stage. The ancestors altar represents the respect for the traditional values and the connection with the roots of Hakka people.

A particular kind of earthen house, the earliest one, is the Wufeng typology, that has a rectangular shape and consist of three main halls built along the axis. The first building is for the entrance and is the lowest one, then there is the ancestral hall for guests and ceremonies and at the end the tallest one reserved for the elders members of the family. The three halls are connected by two courtyards and many corridors resembling the structure of the traditional courtyard dwelling.

Tulou building can be seen as a model of community housing. The facilities, as the well or the bathrooms, are in common and located around the central courtyard, and all the rooms have the same size, material and decoration, showing the equal grade of residents. Earthen building can be the archetype of a modern apartment building, with the distribution part in common, but also represent the life style of the family clan that use to share the everyday activities in an outdoor space. For these characteristics the tulou layout was recently redesigned by some Chinese architectural studios to experiment new form of social housing.

Work Unit

- Danwei

单位

Between 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took power, and 1978, when Reform and Opening began, an additional housing typology joined the lilong in urban Shanghai, the danwei 单位 or work unit.

The danwei of the Maoist period mixed the European utopian socialist tradition and the ancient Chinese unit disposition giving birth to a new form for the modern Chinese city.

This typology was introduced to control inflation and reduce consumption in a difficult period of economic change. Its principle was to promote the primary and secondary sectors and for this reason the units distribution was related to the industries’ one around the main developed cities. These units were typically walled 112

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and gated compounds inside which employment, housing, schools, welfare and commerce took place. They were strong controlled through central government agencies whom can take primary decisions about the unit’s inhabitants. Socialist planning ideology, focused on the “uniformity” of socio-economic characteristics, in fact promoted the idea of neighborhood as a self-sufficient entity based on the development of work activities, that became the basic unit of urban spatial organization. Satisfying all the main needs of its inhabitants, they could spend their entire everyday life without leaving the danwei.

The use of walls has a long history in China, and this enclosure aspect of the danwei fits that tradition. The walls accessible through one or more gates in fact correspond with China’s traditional style of city and building layouts.

The primary facilities such as bathrooms, kitchens and yards are shared sacrificing comfort and imposing a more dismissed lifestyle. Since this organization the housing building only has to accommodate the sleeping and living functions and can reduce its thickness to the minimum increasing its FAR. Those buildings are identical repeated slabs with equal height and south facing. They have six or seven storey and are disposed one after the other at a standard distance corresponding to at least 1.2 the height of the building for the sunlight regulation. The private courtyard and common spaces disappear because every flat has its own entrance faced a corridor united to the other floors by some staircases. The new connection spaces result unsuitable for community activities and cannot be considered as an extension of dwelling space.

Also the outdoor common spaces lose their intimate feature because could be directly connected with the city and are not well defined by the building’s volumes. The increase in size of the city cause the loss of the comfortable human scale of the neighborhood.

According to the function can be classified three types of danwei.

Qiye danwei, or enterprise units, cover all units engaged in production or profit-oriented. Then the Shiye danwei, or nonproduction units, that includes scientific research institutes, educational institutions, health services, cultural and athletic organizations. This is the more diffused type, employing more than 24 million people.

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Finally, the Xingzheng danwei, or administrative units, a category often confused with

shiye

danwei

because

administrative

units

are

also

nonproduction

entities. Sometimes in fact it is consider a subcategory of the shiye danwei. This type includes government agencies, mass organizations (e.g., the Women's Federation, Communist Youth League, Federation of Trade Unions), and other organizations that receive regular budgets from the state.

Siheyuan traditional dwelling The siheyuan 四合院, literally “home with four sides”, is the configuration of the traditional dwelling that belong to the northern China culture and is typical of Beijing city of XII century. Even if this usual localized recognition, the siheyuan origin come from the basic rural house used in all China, made by a wall fence in which the one room accommodation of the farmer was leaning against the north wall to dominate the farmyard.

The dwelling layouts, based on length, width, opening and screenings juxtapositions and relations were regulated by the orientation and the fengshui principles. Such as philosophies and considerations affect also the subsequent addition of volumes, making the Chinese house an archaic example of what we now call “passive architecture”. Basic regulation in this regard are the north-south orientation of houses, causing the east-west flux of the roads, the use of a massive technology for the outer walls, the constant location of the main rooms facing the south to let the sunshine heating the house, but the shielding of this side with a veranda for the summer season.

The basic solution was then declined to fit better each climatic situation; for example in the Southern provinces the courtyard houses were long and narrow to screen from the stronger sunlight and keep the house cooler.

The siheyuan is distributed all over the country and, with its history of over two thousand years, ranks first among Chinese vernacular dwellings. It represents beauty, wealth and luxury in the dignified life of the traditional enlarged family, reflecting its religious and moral principles. A courtyard house is built on the idea to have a solid 114

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external mass, that produce a closed outer appearance with usually no windows, and a spacious internal void, the core of the system. The dwelling is based on a symmetrical layout with a main north-south axis where only the main gate brake this order. Usually in fact the entrance gate is placed in the southeastern corner of the house, the wind corner, in accordance with principles of fengshui and the “Eight Trigrams” that consider that direction the most auspicious one to bring wealth to the household.

The central position of the entrance door along the central axis, was reserved for the higher grade of the society, such as the imperial family, as we see in the Beijing Forbidden City. > housing layout In ancient China all the dwellings were divided in three principal elements. The base, made with beaten earth and then covered with stone, needed to ward off the rising damp to the wooden columns; for a common house it was around fifty centimeters high and its size was almost like the roof dimensions. The masonry had usually load-bearing function in the small residential buildings and it was construct with beaten earth pressed in wooden formworks. The coverage was made by the traditional two slopes pitched roof with the typical curved shape; it had a wooden beams structure covered by tiles made with cotto or other local materials.

While enter in the house, the first element is the main gate, after which we find a crafted screen wall, the yingbi, having the traditional function of warding off evil spirits but helping also to keep the privacy of the household. Between them it was therefore to create an open air vestibule in connection with the road via the external door and that had, over the practical function of deposit of the means of transport, especially that of filter between the privacy of the family life and the public activities of the district. Turning westward we will cross the front courtyard, a small and narrow space which gives access to the south to a row of daozuo rooms, serving as guest or storage rooms, private school, or even dormitories for servants. To the north of the front yard we will pass through the middle gate in the longitudinal axis. This inner passage is defined by two elaborated pillars that will be a symbol of the entire compound. Behind this gate there is the main courtyard, enriched with trees and 115

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flowers, bounded on the north by the main building and flanked by the eastern and western wing rooms, with all the one-floor buildings linked up by verandas. The main building on the back includes the principal rooms facing the south and is reserved for the elder members of the family, while the wings provided accommodation for the younger generations. The principal room accommodate an altar and is the center of the community life, where the family’s spirit is symbolized in respect to the ancestral.

On its sides there are two auxiliary rooms and behind it there is a second smaller and narrow courtyard, after which stands a second building. It was made by a kitchen, some storage rooms and a toilet and close the house structure. The structure was usually made with brick walls and a frame of timber beams while the roof was usually of gabled type. The floor was paved with square tiles and the decoration was mainly added with carved gates and artistic rood ridges.

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> neighborhood layout The urban texture that siheyuan constitute in the city is not a simple juxtaposition of urban blocks, as it happens with lilong neighborhood in Shanghai, but is a more complex system of streets in connection with the all city, as it is clear in the Beijing structure. The urban blocks in the capital in fact are bigger than the Shanghai irregular ones, counting around 700 meters each side, and are not defined by any wall as it happen in Shanghai. This create a more open city structure with a neighborhood that have a direct access to the street. Along these edges are located the small traditional shops and facilities while other retail activities are carried out in the inner lanes by people offering their own products or services.

It follows a clear hierarchical organization that include a big main street (DaJie) of 19-36 meters wide, a small street (Lu) of 10-18 meters wide, and the small alleyway named hutong of 1-9 meters wide. The city structure is based on the traditional orientation principles that usually dispose the Lu, small streets, along the north-south axes and the hutongs along the east-west one. Sometimes smaller hutongs can run north-south in between housing plots, that with this organization are arranged north-south lengthwise and having the main rooms facing the south. A hutong is the alleyway that lays in between two rows of siheyuan in parallel lines and occupies the same social role as lilong in Shanghai. As well as having a circulation function, the lanes serve as open spaces providing venues for daily community activities but cannot hold commercial activities protecting its original residential function.

The accretion method of siheyuan in the urban block can be reported in two basic solutions. The first one regard a growth in depth with the addition of principal courtyards in between the peripheral service’s ones. In this way the house will occupy the complete depth of the city block. This cluster layout of individual buildings centering on a series of courtyards is typical of the Yangtze Delta region and is still 117

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visible in the structure of the water towns, for example Suzhou. In the private house more courtyards can be created in parallel with the growth of the family, connecting the existing structure with the added part thanks to new corridors and walls. The other solution is the juxtaposition of another courtyard cell next to the previous one having both facing the street. The dwelling is doubled along the secondary axes and while the austere principal courtyards were used for the ordinary operations, the new yards accommodated the recreational activities for the guests.

In its organization the siheyuan is completely different from a western house because it is founded on the importance of outdoor space, in a principle of alternation of full and void connected by side paths (just think of the fact that the home had usually at least three courts of which the largest could come to occupy 40 per cent of the total area of the residential lot). Conversely a western residence, as the domus romane, is constructed on the idea of a full and compact volume. Despite this and some other differences, between these two model can be seen some analogies in layout, orientation and evolution. One example of all, the parallelism between the central role of the atrium with the impluvium as outdoor space in the domus, and the crucial element of the courtyard in siheyuan.

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> densification During the central decays of the last century ah high speed process of urbanization caused the densification of siheyuan system. The rooms in courtyard houses were assigned to different residents or even subdivided in more units to accommodate more families. This phenomena included the growth of self-made housing volumes as informal unit extensions constructed by residents to deal with overcrowded living conditions.

This urban process, connected to a social and economic transformation, is called “pluris-familiarization”. As reported in the study of G. Caniggia36, who studied these phenomena in the Italian cities, it may occur in three different manners: the “re-modulation” of the original house in smaller units, each including one courtyard; the “fragmentation” of the plot with the penetration of the public roads, usually along a central axes; the “insularization” of the block with the widening of the existing volumes at the expense of the former court, thus forming autonomous units against the boundary. Due to these spatial modifications the inner courtyard was transformed from a private outdoor room into a semi-public route of circulation. An additional operation spontaneously happened is the “tavern-isation”, id est the creation of commercial structures along the external side of the blind wall with the transformation of the street in a community place (a typical feature of lilong neighborhood, see next paragraph). These are all transformation still clearly visible in Chinese cities since the modern transformation started just a couple of century ago and because in some inner area the original dwelling typologies are still built and used. Analyzing these process of densifications, they can be recognized as an evolving process which has led to the overcrowding condition recorded nowadays in big cities as Beijing or Shanghai. Over the years of urbanization, when the bureaucratic difficulties and the presence of a new real estate market undermined the traditional organization of dwelling, the siheyuan gradually evolved in the dazayuan (big mixed tenement) and started to disappear.

36

Gazzola, Luigi. La casa della Fenice. (Roma: Diagonale, 1999), 79.

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> siheyuan summary

HOUSING - number of floors: 1 - m2/person indoor : 20.6 - m2/person outdoor : 23.2 - void ratio : outdoor space 53%, indoor space 47% - architectural principles : full and void alternation among the north-south axes with a first open-air space; south orientation of main rooms; double symmetry on the two central axes; separation of the main and the service functions in different buildings; the unit is enclosed by a wall.

- elements : The house is surrounded by a wall (1) that has the important role of separate the private space from the public one. It is broken by the entrance gate (2) that is the only visible element of the house from the outside and represent the wealth of the household. The first service courtyard (3) need to store the means of transport and to receive the minor guests. The arcade (4) have the function to filter sight of the family’s activities in the court from the entrance. The main courtyard (5) is the core of the dwelling and is the main open air space that accommodate the daily routine operations. The main building (6) is the indoor part of the house that is more used because it include the jian (7), the main room for family’s events and the shang (8), the side rooms used both as bedrooms or for leisure activities. Beside the main building there is another courtyard, the backyard (9) that is necessary to separate the dirty functions and improve light and ventilation, at in the end there is another service building (10) that incorporates kitchen, bathrooms and other facilities.

- outdoor spaces : the most important space in the house is the main courtyard, while the front courtyard sign the entrance in the house and the back courtyard has mainly a technical function.

- common spaces : main courtyard as the family core for everyday life, central room as center for religious or important ceremonies.

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NEIGHBORHOOD - dwelling/km2 : 1008 (half area with one-court layout and half with two-court layout) - people/km2 : 19 840 (one-court layout: 3 households/dwelling; 5 people/household / two-court layout: 5 households/dwelling; 5 people/household) - FAR : 0.4 - void ratio : distribution space 4%, building coverage 96% - functions : housing in the core 86%, commercial on the edges 14% - urban principles : east-west hutong orientation; a fish-bone-like circulation system; attached houses.

- elements: The small street, Lu (1) connect the inner part of the block with the main street 121

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crossing the area north to south. It have a distribution function and hold the commercial and service activities and for these reasons is wider than the hutong.

The hutong (2) are the side lanes with an exclusive residential function in which the community share the everyday life. They are thinner than the main alley and are usually east-west oriented to maintain the north-south orientation of the main rooms of the house.

The dwelling unit (3) is organized in parallel rows divided by the hutong. It is the private space of each household that occupied both the indoor and the outdoor rooms.

It have the main entrance gate on the south side and in the south region is present also a back exit facing the water canals.

The small commercial and service activities (4) are located on the borders of the urban block and are accessible from the outer roads. They can also rise as punctual intervention inside the residential area.

- outdoor spaces: hierarchical organization of the streets. The outer roads serve the vehicular traffic, small streets can be crossed by cars but are mainly for the inhabitants needs, while the hutong are for the pedestrian traffic only. There is no gate or restrictions around the urban blocks.

- common spaces : hutong are the place of social interaction

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Appendix B – Reflections on density In order to develop an effective solution, we need to identify criteria and indexes that will be used to describe and compare the different typologies of housing. The first four indexes presented here describe the density of a built area with respect to four different aspects and their combination will represent the morphology of the city (a character especially defined by the FAR). Finally, the last two criteria will give us some information about the quality of life.

NUMBER OF FLOORS – pure number It is an indicator that describes both an architectural and an urban feature. It represents the height of a building and the relation that it has with the ground, the streets and the open-air functions. It is also useful to understand the generic volume covering a specific area. It can be used both in an analysis phase and in a design process and it is related to the shape of the building.

DWELLINGS/SURFACE - dwelling/km2 Spanish and Americans scholars in the urban planning field typically use this index. If employed for an existing project, in order to be correctly interpreted, the function of the building has to be known, and this can be a difficult information to find. For this reason, it is best used as a design or analysis tool. It is an important parameter if used in combination with the each-person living space data for the definition of life-quality standards. This criteria does not influence the shape of the building because the same number of dwellings on a defined area does not change in relation to the apartment layout or the distributing criteria. This parameter is related to the height of the building, to the cover index, to the distance between the constructions and the number of roads needed.

PEOPLE/SURFACE - people/km2 This is the index that is mainly used in Italy and by landscape architects, geographers or technicians on sizing the infrastructure networks. It is used to understand the settlement load on a specific territory and also as an investigative tool on an existing 123

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area of the city to obtain the number of inhabitants and the density of a specific area.

The resulting value will be more accurate, larger is the area considered, because it is based on average data and because its error is related to the number of unused apartments, offices, or oversized housing layout.

FAR Floor Area Ratio = gross floor area/buildable area – pure number This index was initially used in North Europe, Netherland and United States, for example for the New York building regulation, and subsequently introduced in the design phase because of its highest grade of flexibility, precision, connection with economic factors and relation with bioclimatic objective. This number represents “the ratio of the total floor space of a built area to the total size of its lot”37. This is the definition given by MVRDV in their 90s study Farmax, a publication that investigated the density issue and in which great importance is attributed to this parameter. This index will not give us a description about the functional organization of the area, but it is quite useful to give us an indication about the volumes, representing the relation between density and built shape. It is, in fact, its distance from the social and demographic aspect that make this data so useful in the design phase. This index can be used as a tool to experiment with the shaping of the city starting from the urban planning, from a general and shared plan, and not from the architectural features of the single building, as it was done in the past.

LIVING SPACE/PERSON – m2/person This is an index used in Italy to describe a living condition in terms of the indoor space reserved

to each individual. In fact, in this country there is a regulation

defining the minimum living space for each dwelling layout, or even the minimum space for each function in the house. The parameter is useful in the design phase to define a standard that has to be kept, meanwhile, when it is calculated for an existing neighborhood, it describes the actual living situation of the area. Usually, the highest the index, better is the lifestyle of the inhabitants, even if it cannot fully describe the life situation because it does not take into account quality factors that can influence 37

MVRDV. FARMAX. Excursions on density. (Rotterdam : 010 Publishers, 1998), back cover.

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the everyday life of a person. The presence of some comforts may, in fact, compensate, in an excellent manner, the loss of space.

VOID RATIO - % of outdoor spacesThis percentage describes the quantity of ground surface free of buildings. Only recently it had been added to the Italian regulation and it is related with the index of permeability, which indicates the percentage of land capable of absorbing rainwater without any canalization. High density and compactness are necessary conditions to maintain a high portion of free surface. The index is here used as an indicator of a standard; a minimum level of outdoor livable space will be in fact guaranteed in the design solution because related to a traditional quality feature.

1.2.4 Criteria for the calculation of the indexes The first three indexes (dwellings/surface, people/surface, FAR) can be calculated using as denominator of the ratio either the buildable area, comprising the area of the single block, or the land area, including the buildable surface and the area used for the primary and secondary urban works. In this study will be used the buildable area, since we are investigating the relationship between building shape and urban morphology at a neighborhood level and not at a more wide urban scale that includes the welfare buildings. The ratio will be the one between gross floor area and buildable area.

The analyzed neighborhoods for lilong typology are the one presented in the master thesis “Lilong housing, a traditional settlement form” of the Canadian McGill University and the ones directly investigated in Shanghai. In these last cases the number of dwelling units per plot will be obtained counting the civic number of residences, while the number of inhabitants will be calculated multiplying the number of units by the average number of household members, as given in the 2012 Shanghai Statistic Bureau (calculated as 2.7 persons per family)38. For the final report of the 38

“Shanghai Statistic -上 海 统 计 ” www.stats-sh.gov.cn. Last modified February 26, 2014. http://www.stats-sh.gov.cn/tjnj/nje13.htm?d1=2013tjnje/E0201.htm 125

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data, only the values of old shikumen, new shikumen and new type lilong neighborhoods are considered, wanted to be report the original situation of the residential plant. For the siheyuan the data are based on an author’s 3D simulation and its comparison with the Wu Liangyong publication on Ju’er Hutong neighborhood, keeping in mind that that block was subjected to an overcrowded situation, and with the aim to obtain the values of a block made by the traditional siheyuan dwelling. For the calculation of high-rise compound values it was made a direct detection

in the

city and the examples found in the bibliography. For each of them the comparison with the Density Atlas website39, developed by a team of MIT faculty, it has been a good verification.

The considered urban blocks will be mostly or exclusively occupied by residential buildings and the other functions considered in the study will be the one spontaneously born to satisfy the needs of inhabitants. Commercial and service functions will never exceed the 50% of the buildable area.

The delimitation of the buildable area will be defined by the external profile of the buildings but will also include the internal distribution, since that is a crucial element in our investigation. Therefore, the void ratio will consider as outdoor spaces, both alleys and courtyards.

The procedure to calculate the FAR is the following: find the delimitation of the footprint of the buildings, multiply by the number of floors, sum the gross floor areas, and finally divide the value obtained by the buildable area. We will obtain a pure number strictly related to the neighborhood and not translatable in a parameter for the city structure. The average capita living space will be calculated dividing the gross floor areas by the number of inhabitants.

The void ratio will be calculated as distribution space and building coverage at the neighborhood scale, and so without considering the courtyards of the house, meanwhile it will express the comparison between the indoor and outdoor space in the residential unit.

39

“Density atlas” Density atlas. Last modified 2011. http://www.densityatlas.org/ 126

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1.2.4 Reflections on density “Density is the city’s third dimension and a vehicle for provocative statements.

Stronger means than just housing are required to produce a truly compact city with a density comparable to that of New York or Hong Kong. […] Urban density, then, is more than simply upping the Floor Area Ratio. It also entails densifying and stacking functional, social and economic systems and levels in the city”40.

In a perspective of densification and modernization is necessary to define what do we mean by high density, at least in this research. Luca Reale41 in his volume define low density FAR < 0.5 medium density FAR 0.5-1 high density FAR 1-3 very high density FAR > 3 But this classification would work in a developing situation in which are present examples like the Hong Kong compound having an average FAR of 10? And in a non-stop worldwide trend of increasing density, especially in the urban context?

In the context of this work is not set a scale of density value, while the notion of high density is here used with a positive accent, under the presumption that a compact city will be a more effective model for the future development, saving our countries and their landscape from an unregulated and unjustified abuse caused by the sprawl.

In this research we do not fix a-priori a value of density to be reached, but the elaboration of a model that have a FAR value comparable with the contemporary housing development will be desirable. This is made in order to avoid the risk of lost in quality life only to obtain an higher profit.

These are some example of FAR values relative to housing typologies relevant for the study. They are selected because of the context or historical relation, the study on the

40

MVRDV. FARMAX. Excursions on density. (Rotterdam : 010 Publishers, 1998), 126.

Reale, Luca. Densità, città, residenza : tecniche di densificazione e strategie anti-sprawl.

(Roma: Gangemi Editore spa, 2008), 111.

41

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typology, as a comparison to understand the scale of intervention.42

43

1. Sprawl in the USA – FAR=0.15

42

The values are calculated by the author or collected from:

- Reale, Luca. Densità, città, residenza : tecniche di densificazione e strategie anti-sprawl. (Roma: Gangemi Editore spa, 2008), 114-129.

- MVRDV. FARMAX. Excursions on density. (Rotterdam : 010 Publishers, 1998), FAR catalogue.

- “Density atlas” Density atlas. Last modified 2011. http://www.densityatlas.org/ 43

Images available at:

- 1, 3, 7, 8, 10, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 18 : http://www.bing.com/maps/ - 2: http://w3.uniroma1.it/strappa/?p=1517 - 4: http://www.beijingxiantour.com/beijing-tours/beijing-day-trip-to-hutong-beijing-zoo-panda-hall-lama-temple/

- 5: http://www.festivalarchitettura.it/festival/It/ArticoliMagazineDetail.asp?ID=66&pmagazine=5 - 6: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bras%C3%ADlia - 9: http://www.0737weal.com/d/lhlwlul/ - 13: http://map.baidu.com/ - 17: http://housevariety.blogspot.it/2011/02/linked-hybrid-by-steven-holl-architects.html - 19: http://lunettesrouges.blog.lemonde.fr/2012/12/05/ - 20: http://www.truecondos.com/time-to-rethink-the-mega-tower/ - 21: http://www.pinterest.com/archiobjects/metabolism/ - 22: http://www.aadip9.net/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=65&tag=collection&limit=20 - 23: http://oscartenreiro.com/2010/11/07/palabras-de-louis-kahn/ 128

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2. Patio house project by M. van der Rohe – FAR=0.33

3. English working-class dwelling, 1875 - FAR=0.58

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4. Beijing Hutong - FAR=0.6

5. Horizontal city project by G. Pagano, I. Diotallevi, F. Marescotti – FAR=0.77

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6. Superquadras Brasilia, 1960 – FAR=0.8

7. Robin Hood Gardens by A. & P. Smithson, 1966-70 – FAR=0.86

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8. Cite des Fleurs, Paris, 1847-1890 – FAR=1.1

9. Jing-An Villa, new-type lilong neighborhood, Shanghai, 1932 – FAR=1.5

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10. Mirador by MVRDV, Madrid, 2001-2005 - FAR=1.75

11. Karl Marx-Hof by K. Ehn, Vienna, 1927 – FAR=1.87

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12. Gallaratese quarter by C. Aymonino & A. Rossi, Milano, 1967-73 – FAR=2.42

13. Dushixinyuan residential village, Beijing, 2003-2011 – FAR=2.7

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14. Plan Cerdà, Barcelona, 19th century – FAR=2.88

15. Historical center of Milan – FAR=2.96

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16. Manhattan, New York, 19th century – FAR=3.5

17. Linked Hybrid by S. Holl, Beijing, 2004 – FAR=3.82

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18. Historic center of Genova – FAR=5.18

19. Plan Voisin project by Le Corbusier, Paris, 1922-1925 – FAR=7.2

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20. Hong Kong residential tower - FAR=10

21. Bridge-building project for Tokio by K.Tange, 1960 – FAR=11.35

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22. Kowloon walled city, Hong Kong – FAR=12

23. Design proposal for Philadelphia city center by L. Kahn, 1956 – FAR=13.6

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Appendix C – Shanghai urban history

A favorable condition Shanghai 上海 is the economic capital of China. At the end of 2012, its total area was 6 340.5 km2 and its population was almost 24.2 million, occupying 0.06% of the national area and housing 1.31% of the national population. At that time, its GDP per capita reached US$ 14 687, which was 2.15 times higher than the national average.

Shanghai, with an average altitude of 3-4 meters above the sea level, has a typical North Asian subtropical monsoon climate, mild and moist, with two long seasons, summer and winter, and two shorter ones, spring and autumn. The average minimum temperature in January is 3 ºC and the average maximum temperature in July is 27 ºC, with an average annual precipitation of 1 164,7 mm.

The geographical location of Shanghai, literally “above the sea”, has played a central role in its future development. Being on the Chinese east coastline and at the crossing of two important rivers, the Huang Pu and the Yangtze, Shanghai represents a focal point in the greatest water network of China, the Yangtze Delta region. The city is also crossed by the Suzhou Creek (also named Wusong River) and a high number of minor waterways and canals. Shanghai was originally a water town. The city, in fact, lies in the middle of the provinces of Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Anhui, a region made of cultivated agricultural lands, innervated by lakes and waterways. At the same time other cities, like Suzhou, Zhujiajiao or Tongli, developed a similar morphology made of crossing canals and bridges.

The three main rivers crossing the city were also commercial roads, connecting by boat the inner part of China with the East China Sea. Although the Yangtze river originates in the Tibetan Plateau, its navigable part starts in the Sichuan province, connecting Chongqing to the coast. It also allows the steam provision of the area and the mail and passenger carrier. In terms of land transportation, Shanghai plays a central role in the two main Chinese north-south railway-lines connecting Beijing and Guangzhou. Nowadays its infrastructural system also includes the Hongqiao airport 140

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for the internal flights and the Pudong International Airport for the international traffic, serving millions of passengers and distributing tons of goods. Shanghai also represents an interchange point in the highway network both at a national and municipal level.

For this reason, since the 18th century, Shanghai has become an international trade port and a crossing commercial point dominating large part of the internal and external markets, hence attracting the foreign attention and becoming one of the biggest metropolis in the Far East.

The city origin The earliest record of a settlement around the Shanghai area dates between 770 BC and 476 BC, when the Wu Kingdom built He Lu, a city on the bank of Wusong River, to protect themselves from the frequent wars with the neighboring people. Later, around 220-280 AD, the primary settlement in the area was the city of Qin Long, approximately 40 kilometers north of the actual city center, used by the emperor as a military port serving as the region’s gateway for trades. After some changes in the regional administration of the area, the city with the name Shanghai was founded during the Song Dinasty (960-1279 AD), thanks to the positive influence of the near Southern Song capital Hangzhou. Shanghai was not just an important seaport, its economy was also boosted by the introduction of salt and cotton industries. In 1291 Shanghai became a district administration and started to become the important cultural, economic and political center that is today.

By the end of the 15th century Shanghai had become culturally rich, attracting talented poets, musicians and scholars in the newly opened schools. Unfortunately, its richness also caught the unwelcomed attentions of the Japanese, who launched continuous assaults to the city in conjunction with Chinese pirates. In response to this unbearable situation, Shanghai’s citizens decided to build a city wall, which was the first main physical change made to the city until that time. The wall was 4 kilometers in circumference, 35 meters high and surrounded by a 45 meters ditch. At first, it 141

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included six access gates and four arrow towers, subsequently converted in temples, and later it was enriched with four water gates. The wall had a ring-shape indicating the lower political status of Shanghai compared to a rectangular imperial walled cities as Beijing or Shenyang.

The original structure of the city was modeled around five major creeks, with the roads built just next to them and crossing the settlement from east to west and north to south, but over time the number of streets increased and became a denser weave. After 1681, since the foreign attacks were averted, some roads were also traced outside the wall promoting the river trade and commercial functions. As a result the area between the ancient center and the Huangpu river soon became a highly constructed trade center. Since the city was founded on a ground with a very dense water network, the problem of river’s flooding increased with the expanding of the city. To contrast these events many wharfs and jetties were constructed, starting with some smaller private one, but soon followed by a large system of 20 public and commercial wharfs. In the 18th century the main inner street was connected to the riverside by an increasing number of roads. North of this area there was a smaller suburb with many warehouses owned by merchants coming from the southern cities of Fujian and Guangzhou who started establishing guilds grouped by region or trade.

Due to its historical development, Shanghai does not have an orthogonal street structure as the traditional foundation city, but instead shows a completely different organization, which was dictated by the trade needs and directions. Differences can also be found in the buildings disposition and arrangement; instead of an individual component including one function, we see a more organic growth with mixed functions elements. These cultural and commercial openness was present in the Shanghai structure long before the arrival of the foreign influences.

Establishment of foreign concessions In 1756 the earliest foreign merchants immediately recognized Shanghai’s potentials to become an international power, but the largest companies, still involved in the 142

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profitable but illegal opium trade in Guangzhou, didn’t pay much attention to them. In the 1830s, due to the Chinese restrictions and condemnations of drugs, the situation in the Pearl River Delta area became problematic also from a legislative point of view.

Between 1839-1842 the Emperor and Britain fought the “First Opium War” at the end of which the victorious United Kingdom of Great Britain signed the Treaty of Nanjing, a preferential agreement with the Chinese administration, and established a permanent settlement. During the first year, while the definition of the acquisition of the appropriate land was established, the consul and the people in charged lived in the ancient city. However, after the treaty was signed, in November 1845, the British established their own territory in the southern corner between Huangpu river and Suzhou creek. Other nations quickly followed Great Britain and came to Shanghai to develop some agreements, such as the Treaty of Wanghia, signed in July 1844, that allowed the Americans to occupy the land over the Suzhou creek. In October of the same year the French signed the Treaty of Whampoa, settling in the remaining area between the walled city and the British concession.

Both in 1853 and in 1860 the Small Sword Society, an unruly group supporting the Taiping Revolution, conquered the Chinese city and established their head quarter in the British Consulate. Due to the unlivable conditions, the Chinese population started asking asylum in the foreign settlements and with their acceptance in these territories, the signed agreements languished. Furthermore, the frequent misunderstandings and problems among the three foreign powers in the city, promoted the need to develop a stronger set of laws. Consequently, the principle of extraterritoriality was created and every single concession became a foreign island, with foreign laws, established in the Chinese territory. The extraterritoriality had also produced a higher degree of life and property safety and offered more protection from excessive taxation from the Chinese power. Offices, banks and financial institutions were built on the Bund, forming one of the distinctive places of Shanghai. While for the latecomers French this was an improved solution, for English and Americans this was the worst possible situation, so they decided to join their territories and formed the International Settlement. In 1944-1945 China got also involved in the First Sino-Japanese War for the control over 143

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Korea. Thus after signing

the Treaty of Shimonoseki, an additional foreign

settlement arose in Shanghai, the Japanese Concession, located in the northeast part of the Hongkou district, over the two rivers. The city was then working as a multi-parts system and this is clearly reflected by its irregular development. The characteristics of the Chinese and the Western areas were noticeably different. The ancient part had narrow streets and buildings were constructed with local materials and traditional techniques, while the foreign area was adapted to the European standards, with bigger roads and imported constructive habits linked to a more massive technology.

Pre-modern era The 20th century started with the Boxer Rebellion in northern China, which was stopped by the foreign forces, increasing their power over the Chinese empire. All of the concessions grew in dimension and economical weight, welcoming a new round of refugees. In January 1912 the last Chinese emperor dynasty was bowed out

and

the foundation of the Republic of China was proclaimed. Shanghai's political status was raised to a municipality in 1927 and at that point it was decided to destroy the city ancient walls, that were seen now by the original population as a symbol of their feudal past.

During the colonial period, the city increased the number of roads and infrastructures, creating the main roads that are still in use in the center of the city (Nanjing Road, Beijing Road, Henan Road, Sichuan Road and many others). In addition, Shanghai was enriched by an incredible number of significant buildings inspired by the international style. Not only the Bund area, but also the majority of the churches and a lot of service buildings, such as schools and hospitals, can be traced to that period.

During the same years also the industries were developing and the Hongkou district, just over the north bank of Suzhou river, was chosen to become the city’s industrial center. That area was in fact considered an unattractive location because of its unhealthy swampy conditions.

Contrariwise the area below the foreign concessions and behind the Bund, because of 144

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its low economic value, was occupied by the Chinese people, who started developing their own businesses, and becoming densely populated in just a few years. Yet in the opposite side of the Chinese city it was developed another kind of commercial street with a more western character; not the intimate commercial experience of Fuzhou Road, made of small retail shops and restaurants, but the shining and stately Nanjing Road with its big shopping mall and colorful electric lanterns. Along the Huangpu river, in the northern part of the Bund, it was also instituted a public garden where at first there was a sand-made artificial little island, and the first steel bridge over the Suzhou creek was built, connecting the American part with the center.

By 1920 Shanghai’s physical form was defined. The main roads and settlements were outlined, the foreign concessions stopped their growth, and the use of the in each area was established.

Shanghai prosperity lasted until the end of 1920s. In that period the city became the most coveted port of perdition across all Asia, assuming the name of “the Paris of the East”, attracting merchants and men of good fortune from all over the world. In her book Harriet Sergeant said that “in the 20s and 30s Shanghai became a legend. No world cruise was complete without a stop in the city. Its name evoked mystery, adventure and license of every form. In ships sailing to the Far East, residents enthralled passengers with stories” about the heyday of a city that will inspire novel and films with its atmosphere.44 In 1927, Shanghai became a special city directly under the Executive of Government of the Republic of China. At this time, because of the increasing demand of houses, the real estate market started to become one of the most profitable investment, and the new Lilong typology was therefore born. The building activity in the Chinese area was in fact very prosperous, fuelled by the development in 1929 of a government’s plan for a new district.

In the 1930’s, conversely a political fermentation cracked the fortunate life of Shanghai. In only two decades in fact the China’s Communist Party was founded, the

44

Sergeant, Harriet. Shanghai: collision point of cultures, 1918-1939. (New York: Crown, 1991), 3.

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Nationalist government was established, the Great Depression and the Second World War damaged the European region and ultimately Japan invaded China occupying Shanghai in 1937. Up until the Japanese invasion, Shanghai, due to its extraterritoriality, was once again the destination of a continuous flow of Chinese coming from the turbulent north region and of Jews escaping from the European Nazi persecution. However, under the pressure of their ally Germany, in late 1941, the Japanese forced the Jews to move to the Shanghai ghetto in the east part of Hongkou.

Following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the Japanese took total control over the city, ending all foreign concessions in Shanghai except for the French, representing the neutral Vichy government, which eventually ceded their privileges in 1946, following the end of the war.

Maoism era The colonial occupation of Shanghai lasted for about one century (1842 - 1949), until China went under the control of the Communist in 1949. In that year, in fact, the whole China over the Yangtze river was under Communist control and with the Battle of Shanghai the Nationalism forces were completely eliminated, liberating the city from a semi-colonial and a semi-feudal society. On October 1st Mao Tse Dong announced the foundation of the People’s Republic of China and launched his political campaign based on village organization and rural administration. With the suppression of the privatization of land and the consequent confiscation of properties, the construction operations in Shanghai halted. The foreign powers couldn’t see a future in a country with such a central organization and moved all their properties back to their motherland or to Hong Kong colony. All of the foreign properties became state assets and mansions, villas, lane houses were then used for government offices or assigned to landless peasants. The realized part of the master plan drafted on a soviet city model include the transformation of the former racecourse in the actual People’s Square system, crossed by one of the largest intersection of urban elevated roads and represented the municipal power, and the new Soviet-style 146

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apartments surrounding all of the previous construction.

Even if Shanghai wasn’t incorporated under another province, its economic freedom was still suppressed in a different way, for example from the southern region of Guangdong, generating severe damages to its infrastructural and economic development. During the 1950s and 1960s, Shanghai became an industrial center and still kept its international character, forming the vanguard against Beijing’s power elite. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution movement had one of its major concentrations in Shanghai, resulting in the destruction of most of its history and culture.

From 1980s till now In 1976, with the dead of Chairman Mao, and the beginning of the Open Door policy

by Deng Xiaoping, the Guangdong province was chosen as the favorite area for international businesses and Shanghai lost its primacy. During 1980’s there were not big changes in the city and the only action taken was the improvement of some existing residence structures. At that time the overcrowding was extreme and the 5.86 million people in Shanghai only had less than 5 square meters each.

At the end of 1980’s the central government started giving financial privileges to Shanghai, but the city would have to wait until 1991 for its big redraft as “the head of the dragon”, China’s leading connection with the rest of the world. In this year, in fact, Pudong, the area on the eastern bank of Huangpu river, was chosen as the site for the new Central Business District (CBD) and a big international architectural competition was held between five important firms. The mission was to develop an area of about two square kilometers, with 50 per cent used for office function, that would convey to the world Shanghai’s desire for revenge. Even if the official winner of the competition was the Richard Rogers Partnership architectural firm, the development of Pudong started using at the same time all and none of the five proposals submitted. The designed planning of the new area failed, but the actual skyline of the CBD is still one of the worldwide recognized symbols of a powerful city.

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In 1994 the Master plan for Shanghai was revisited defining a poly-nuclear network strategy in order to disadvantage urban sprawl and create a system of compact cities and agricultural land. This resulted in the destruction of the central historical buildings, the rising of prices in the inner area and a gentrification process with a new emerging elite.

In 1999 the State Council approved a new Shanghai Urban Comprehensive Planning including the strategy “one city, nine towns”, that emphasized the previous policy and focused on the development of nine new towns, each assigned to a foreign architectural firm, with the reduction of central urban congestion and the rehousing of 50 000 to 100 000 people a year. The plan pointed out also that in 2020 Shanghai is expected to be built into an international economic, financial and trade center. In this perspective of international development has been organized the Expo 2010 with the theme "Better City, Better Life”.

In this period the city was also supplied with all the newest infrastructures, such as the international airport of Pudong, the bridges over the Huangpu river, the Elevated Inner and Outer rings and the highways network, the subway system. Another time of astonishing growth in construction was started and the whole city was filled with high-rise buildings, which definitively cancelled the previous image of a low traditional settlement with few elevated structures.

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