China's urban communities

Peter G. Rowe Ann Forsyth Har Ye Kan

CHINA’S URBAN COMMUNITIES Concepts, Contexts, and Well-Being

BIRKHÄUSER

Graphic Design, Cover, and Layout: Reinhard Steger Maria Martí Vigil Proxi, Barcelona Production: Medialis, Berlin Paper: 150g BVS matt Editor for the Publisher: Andreas Müller, Berlin Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data A CIP catalog record for this book has been applied for at the Library of Congress.

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6

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

7 Urbanization, Housing, and Community 11 Contexts and Cases 14 Beijing 15 Shanghai 18 Shenzhen 21 Suzhou 24 Organization

28 31 33 34 36 38 40 43 47 50

52

CHAPTER 2

CONCEPTS OF COMMUNITY IN CHINA Early Chinese Communities Legalist and Confucian Influences Enclosed Communities in Medieval and Imperial China The Baojia System and Its Evolution Other Late Imperial Urban Communities Self-Governing Communities in Republican China The Danwei, Xiaoqu, and the People’s Communes in Communist China Building Community in Contemporary China: The Shequ Communities for Political Ends

CHAPTER 3

URBAN TYPES AND PROJECTS

53 Housing and Community Types 55 Parallel-Block Arrangements 59 High-Rise Developments 62 Garden City Neighborhoods 65 Traditional Forms 67 Projects in Contemporary Settings 83 Where Next?

86

CHAPTER 4

HEALTH AND WELL-BEING IN RESIDENTIAL DISTRICTS

CHAPTER 5

119 120 125 131 135 140 143 147

Choices and Changes Housing Blocks on Megaplots Skyward Communities Seeking Unit Diversity Retrofitting Opportunities Ecological Gardening Tradition Returned Retention of Chinese Characteristics

118

NEW PATHWAYS FORWARD

CHAPTER 6

150

CONCLUSION

151 154

Communities, Places, and Well-being Community Futures

156 APPENDICES 157

METHODS APPENDIX

157 Physical Surveys and Site Visits 157 Interviews and Focus Groups 158 Physical Representation 158 Locational Analysis 171 Modeling of Environmental Characteristics 171 Air Pollution Monitoring 171 Wind and Thermal Comfort Modeling 172 Walkability

191 NOTES 197

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

197 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 198

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

199 INDEX

87 Health and Well-being 89 The Role of Place 91 Well-being in China 92 Exposures 97 Connections 107 Supports 109 Conclusions

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CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

6

This book is about urban communities in contemporary China. At issue is what they are like as physical settings particularly in large cities, how they evolved from earlier beginnings, and how well they support the lives of their residents, including what some of the prospects might be for further physical development and redevelopment. Moreover, while addressing these aspects of community circumstances in general, the book primarily draws upon observations of 25 neighborhoods, a significant number of which were developed or redeveloped during the past three decades and sometimes longer. Some had garnered the attention of government leaders and professionals and were accorded special status or seen to be models worthy of emulation. Indeed, 10 were notable in these regards. Others are fairly ordinary although typical of many around them. Some are also quite new, while others are older. And some house families who are relatively well off, whereas others are more affordable. In addition, some are located near the center of their host cities, whereas others lie outside on the peripheries, with still others in-between. All, however, are relatively large, with a couple of exceptions, running from around 4 hectares in area up to a massive 1,000 hectares and more. All are also relatively dense overall developments, ranging again from as low as 20,000 people per square kilometer (200 per hectare) to upwards of 90,000 people per square kilometer (900 per hectare) at a city center, reflecting, if nothing else, variations in building type and arrangement. Spot density rose as high as approximately 2,800 people per hectare in one case, although it was also adjacent to a sizeable park.1 On the whole, most communities are good places to live. Generally, households inhabit relatively compact dwellings, although considerably larger than in previous decades. A range of services and opportunities, needed to support everyday life, are usually available and are often quite near at hand. Neighborly goodwill within communities is also often evident, together with a relaxed sense of belonging, even as older work unit-based ties have clearly diminished. Well-vegetated and leafy environments within communities are often more the rule than the exception, and some newer developments push towards being ecologically conservative of resources like elsewhere in the world. However, some typical patterns of Chinese development, including many walled and fenced megaplot enclaves, make it difficult to have a fully integrated and traversable city. Common area maintenance within communities is often poor, particularly at lower price ranges, and a subject of resident contention. Isolation from employment opportunities, especially in newer and peripheral areas of cities, often leads to overly long commutes and considerable social costs. Poor air quality and noisy environments are often prevalent, and some communities are prone to flooding and other natural hazards, again not unlike elsewhere.

URBANIZATION, HOUSING, AND COMMUNITY Having remained relatively stagnant after the early days of the People’s Republic of China dating from 1949, the nation’s urbanization has increased steadily, as have the construction of urban communities and urban housing. Over the same period, China’s population fluctuated appreciably but rose 2.4 times, from around 552 million inhabitants in 1950 to 1.34 billion in 2010.2 Although this may seem substantial, for in absolute numbers it surely is, it is only slightly higher but roughly comparable to the rise in the USA of 2.2 times over much the same period of time. China’s population is also expected to rise before peaking around 2030

7

1

Total and UrbanTotal Population of China 1950–2015 and Urban Population of China 1950 - 2015 Population x 1000p

1,500 1405 1356 1280 1318 1238 1165 1062 984

1,000 896 814

779

711 552

601

669

650 560 459

500 383 308

66 83

1950

105

129

1960 Total Population

141 159

1970

190

242

1980

1990

2000

2010

Year

Urban Population

Source: United Nations, Department of Economic and Social Affair, Pupulation Division, 2012.

1

to 2035 at around 1.45 to 1.50 billion inhabitants by most estimates.3 Primarily, this is a consequence of the ‘one-child-one-family’ policy instituted at the beginning of the reform period in 1979, and will also result in a rapid aging of China’s population in the relatively near future. In 2010, for instance, people older than 65 years of age comprised 8.9 percent of the total population, well up from 5.2 percent in 1985 when enumerations of this kind became standardized, while those less than 15 years of age declined from 30.2 percent in 1985 to just 16.7 percent in 2010.4 Apart from moving past the period of a demographic economic dividend, China now has begun to enter into an era when needs for housing and care of elderly will continue to rise, much as in other parts of East Asia like Japan and South Korea.

Population per household has also shrunk from 3.89 persons in 1990 to 2.88 persons today, adding to the aggregate demand for housing.5 Urbanization has followed a similar temporal pattern. Starting at around 12 percent of the total population in 1949 and slowly reaching 17.9 percent by the opening up to the outside world in 1979, the proportion has moved to slightly above 50 percent of resident population today.6 With some 350 million more people finding themselves in urban circumstances since 1978, rates of urbanization have been reasonably stiff in many places, like Beijing at 2.6 percent per annum from 1985 to 2010 and in Shanghai at 2.5 percent per annum over the same period, or a 3.4 percent per annum increase across all cities.7 However, these rates are not exceptionally high, particularly when compared to neighboring Seoul at ten to eight percent, respectively, during the periods of 1960 to 1970, and 1970 to 1980. Nor even to Tokyo between 1950 and 1960 when it was five percent per annum. Indeed, today the overall shift from rural to urban circumstances is on the order of from one to two percent per year. Significantly, China has a bipolar distribution of urban settlement with designated cities, of which there are about 660, and designated towns, of which there are around 19,500.8 Again, since enumeration became normalized in 1985, this distribution remained almost equal in population numbers until 2000, when cities gained an upper hand, before stabilizing again around 2005 to 2010. Also, the number of very large cities in China is relatively small. Living den-

8

sity is also high in China but declining overall in most urban areas. At present, the average density in cities is around 9,000 people per square kilometer, just below the long-established target of 10,000 people per square kilometer.

By 1956, most urban housing from prior periods in China was nationalized and, alongside new construction, was pressed into the service of danwei (work unit) or similar aggregations of dwellings. Ranked as lowly ‘means of subsistence’ within China’s industrial and development policy at the time together with other urban activities, housing units were usually small and, as time went on into the 1960s, of increasingly poor quality. Close proximity to fellow workers in almost all aspects of life also reinforced work-based social networks and strong senses of community, at least in many regards. Also facilitating this trend was the institution of ‘residents’ committees’ in 1954 to attend to the welfare and conduct of residents at a local level. Then, in the wake of opening up to the outside world and the reforms of 1978 and 1979, China fell into a three-phase strategy towards urban housing. First came the process of monetizing the housing delivery network and moving away from the danwei to market housing. Conspicuous in this was the Model of the Thirds Program, initiated in 1982, whereby sale of public housing subsidies to urban residents was shared equally by the state, the enterprise involved, and the individual. Also, by 1988, worker housing rented by occupants could be sold, followed in 1990 by use rights to land parcels. Slightly earlier, in 1986, ‘urban residential micro-district properties’ were introduced at the level of the xiaoqu (neighborhood) to enhance the quality of neighborhoods and to comprehensively consider the amenities and management of communities. In essence, these arrangements replaced similar functions under specific earlier work-unit responsibilities. Also, in 1986, the Ministry of Civil Affairs established ‘street offices’, continuing the transition from the baojia system of population organization of imperial into Republican times to the shequ (communities) of today.

2

A second phase of the overall strategy was allowance for commodification to open up and to occur in manageable increments towards broader levels of affordability. This certainly involved creating the program of Economic and Suitable Housing in 1994 for low- and middle-income families. On the demand side, this involved dual housing finance arrangements to combine social savings and private savings, including the establishment of China’s Housing Provident Fund.9 Further stimulus was given towards housing for lower-income and disadvantaged groups in 2004, followed more generally by the Double Reduction-Single Waiver Program, approved in 2008, whereby the down-payment ratio was reduced to 20 percent and interest rates on loans became reduced further, along with reductions in deed taxes and stamp duties, as well as waiver of land-value appreciation taxes.10 During the construction boom, particularly in the 1990s, low-rise and traditional housing from prior eras was torn down in many places and replaced by new housing, often at higher densities and with larger dwellings.

Then, into the new millennium, the third phase of a strategy began to deal in earnest with negative externalities brought about by the uptick in urbanization and the housing boom, especially with regard to housing affordability, speculation, and environmental performance.

Green building standards, for instance, were introduced in 2006, followed by energy conservation regulations in 2008.11 Construction of single-family units was curtailed in 2006 and the so-called ‘70/90 Rule’ went into effect in 2008 in order to reduce building of large-sized units with attendant issues of affordability, whereby 70 percent of new housing in a project needed to be 90 square meters or less in size.12 Further clamps on speculation appeared, especially in Beijing in 2011, with restrictions on the number of houses an individual could possess. Moving further ahead in time, the central government clearly removed itself from further production of low-income housing by shifting responsibility for its provision to municipalities and allowing private developers into the market. Nevertheless, at least since 2000,

9

2 Age of Housing Stock by Built Area

1,600,000,000

Household Size and Elderly Dependency Ratio (1985-2010) People/Household

Build Area (m2 )

Dependency Ratio (%) 12.5

(3.89)

3.9

(11.9)

1,400,000,000 3.7

1,200,000,000

11.5 11

3.5

1,000,000,000

10.5

3.3

800,000,000 600,000,000

3.1

400,000,000

2.9

200,000,000

2.7

10 9.5 (2.88)

<10 Years

11-20 Years 21-30 Years 31-40 Years 41-50 Years 51-60 Years

>60 Years

National Total (Build Area)

Age of Housing Stock

9 8.5

(8.1) 0

12

2.5 1990

1985

1995

2000

2005

2010

8 Year

Household Size

Urban Total (Build Area)

Elderly Dependency Ratio Source: The Annual Report on Urban Housing Development in China 2009 & China Population and Employment Statistical Yearbook 2011

Source: China 2010 6th Population Census Data

Sale Prices of Newly Constructed Market-Rate Housing (2000-2010)

Average Unit Size of Housing Stock

Yuan/m2

Area (m 2 )/Unit

5,000

120

4,500

(114m2 ) 100

4,000 3,500

(103m2 ) (95m 2 )

80

(83m 2 )

3,000 2,500

(87m 2 ) (77m 2 ) (73m 2 )

(68m 2 )

60

(68m 2 )

(67m 2 )

(46m 2 )

(46m 2 )

(57m 2 )

2,000

(49m 2 )

40

1,500 1,000

20

500 0

0 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010 Year

<10 Years

Sale Price of Newly Constructed Market-Rate Housing

National Average Area/Unit

Total Urban Housing Stock in Area & Per Capita Floor Space of Residential Building in Urban Areas (2000 - 2010)

Economic and Suitable Housing Investment and Construction as a Percentage of the Total Housing Investment and Construction

Per Capita Floor Space of Residential Building in Urban Areas (m 2 )

Urban Housing Stock (billion m )

Urban Average Area/Unit

>60 Years Age of Housing Stock

Source: China 2010 6th Population Census Data

Source: The Annual Report on Urban Housing Development in China 2010-2011 & www. realestate.cei.gov.cn

2

11-20 Years 21-30 Years 31-40 Years 41-50 Years 51-60 Years

%

15.0

34.0

14.0

32.0

25.0

20.0 13.0

30.0

12.0 28.0

15.0

11.0 26.0 10.0 9.0 8.0

10.0

24.0 5.0 (7.706)

22.0

(20.3) 7.0 2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

2006

2007

2008

2009

2010

20.0 Year

2000

2001

2002

2003

2004

2005

Urban Housing Stock

Economic and Suitable Housing Investment

Per Capita Floor Space of Residential Building in Urban Areas

Economic and Suitable Housing Construction

Source: The Annual Report on Urban Housing Development in China 2009 & China Statistical Yearbook 2011

10

0.0 2006

2007

2008

Source: The Annual Report on Urban Housing Development in China 2010 - 2011

2009

2010 Year

there has been a sharp rise in the total floor space of urban residential building with almost a doubling, alongside of appreciable rises in floor space per capita to an average of around 32 square meters.13 This is also reflected in the rise in average unit size up to as much as 95 square meters. Overall, all but 4 percent of existing housing in China was built since 1980, with some 35 to 42 percent constructed in the past 10 to 20 years.14 Sales prices of market-rate housing have also risen between 2000 and 2010, if not before, with on average more than a doubling in price from a little less than 2,000 CNY per square meter to around 4,700 CNY per square meter.15 Consistent with the intentional pull-back by the central government from low-income housing provision, investment and construction of Economic and Suitable Housing declined sharply from close to 25 percent of all housing to around six percent between 2000 and 2005.16 Whether China can stay abreast with this important category of housing remains to be seen. Clearly, though, part of these market and modernizing processes has been a loosening of former community ties and a broader variety of choice for many households. Just as clearly, though, others also find themselves excluded from such benefits.

While the very idea of neighborhood is contested among observers as either a physical place or a perceived environment or a socio-economic unit, in China it does have a clear physical setting. It is a broadly residential area, usually occupying a well-bounded megaplot and often taking the form of a city block or two in the broader metropolitan scheme of things.

Invariably, a neighborhood as a physical entity is combined with a local organization involving the ‘residents’ committee’ referred to earlier. Members of this group are usually elected, although these elections are controlled by the Communist Party, meaning that governance is not strictly local but represents an interplay with higher levels of authority. Typically, in market-rate housing, owner and resident associations, allowed for at least since 1999, do provide some degree of self-governance, particularly concerning matters such as hiring and firing of the management companies that perform shared maintenance functions.

While these arrangements have not been fully developed everywhere, they also do show an emerging private-sector role in the communities. With these associations alongside the government shequ, neighborhoods function as both physical and political entities. Also, many under discussion here house or are adjacent to non-residential activities, mostly in the realm of community services like kindergartens, some schools, community halls, and recreational venues of one kind or another. However, some also host commercial consumer services, particularly on the outward-facing boundaries alongside major roads. Here, there are usually shops, restaurants, cafes and even fresh food markets. Indeed, consumer society has constantly been on the rise since the opening up of China to the outside, propelled by private businesses, which have increased in number enormously and are particularly visible in larger and richer urban areas.

C ONTEXTS AND CASES The broad geographic focus of this volume is on the four cities and metropolitan areas of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Suzhou. This was a choice dictated as much as anything by familiarity over considerable periods of time. As elsewhere in China, each city has its own particular history, citizenry, and physical features. All are sizeable and well within the top ten cities by population size in China and as measured by administrative area. This list is topped by Shanghai, with 23.02 million residents, followed by Beijing with 19.61 million,

11

and then Suzhou and Shenzhen close together with 10.46 and 10.36 million, respectively, in 2010.17 All are also located in the rapidly developing and now maturing coastal region of China, and proximal to its three major river systems. Beijing is squarely in the Bohai Bay area with associations to the Yellow River. Shanghai and Suzhou are both in the Changjiang Delta, and Shenzhen is adjacent to the Pearl River in the south and part of that broader region. Two of the cities are reasonably old, with Beijing, basically in the form we know it now, dating from the thirteenth century as Dadu during the Yuan Dynasty, and Suzhou emerging in some semblance of a recognizable form with today as Pingjiang, also in the thirteenth century. The other two cities are relatively young, with Shanghai only really beginning to exert its presence during the latter part of the nineteenth century, and Shenzhen being founded very recently in 1979, although with slightly earlier development at Shekou dating from 1975. Moreover, the cases of neighborhoods and projects under scrutiny within each city are representative of housing and community types, as well as representative of places within the cities, ranging from central to peripheral areas and with varying densities and styles of development. Depiction and analysis included mapping of physical environments, extending to locations of transportation and other services, modeling of environmental characteristics and performance, as well as 100 focus group and informal interviews.

3

Location of Projects in Beijing

2 3

1

Wangjing Business District Olympic Forest Park

6

4

5 CBD

Zhongguancun Science Park

Financial Street

Fengtai Lize Business District

12

4

Projects in Beijing

1. Huilongguan Cultural Residential District

2. Tiantongyuan Residential District

3. Wangjing (Wangjing West Gardens District 4)

4. Jian Wai SOHO

5. Juâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;er Hutong

6. Yilin Jiayuan

13

BEIJING

14

3

Beijing is the capital and administrative center of the People’s Republic of China, although this was not always the case when it was called Beiping during the Republican Period of the Nationalist Government between 1928 and the end of the Civil War in 1949. Of today’s 19.61 million resident population, 36 percent originate from elsewhere.18 The evolution of the city from imperial times to the present, and especially during the Ming and Qing dynasties, has given rise to an urban fabric that has retained parts of the old hutong and siheyuan configurations of courtyard houses within what was once the walled city. As the walls came down, first during the Republican Period that followed the Qing Dynasty and then during the early days of the People’s Republic, the city moved out into its periphery, more or less in sequential layers. The first master plan in the Communist era was finally ratified in 1958, following considerable discussion and debate, maintaining the earlier city’s symmetrical coherence around a virtual north-south axis and providing for a succession of urban districts around its perimeter. Perhaps more important, Beijing at the time was designated as an industrial city in addition to its administrative functions. Chang’an Avenue, the prominent east-west axis, was also constructed in 1958, following the planning and building of Tiananmen Square between 1950 and 1957. After a long hiatus during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution through to China’s opening up to the outside world, the next master plan was ratified in 1982.19 It also retained much of the symmetrical and axial arrangement of the city, as well as continuing the peripheral dispersion of satellite community developments. The prominent ring-road system was also expanded out to the Fifth Ring Road at the time. However, there was no longer any mention of the “socialist industrial city” as Beijing reverted back to being the “political and cultural center” of China. The 1991–2010 master plan which followed in 1993 added functionality to the city, especially with regard to tertiary sector development.20 Historic preservation and conservation were also reinforced, and a particular focus was placed on the center moving out to the suburbs, resulting in the Financial Street and Center on the western side of the historic core and the Central Business District in the Chaoyang District on the eastern side of the core.21 Another round of planning took place from 2000 around Beijing’s successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games, placing more attention on the north-south axis. Subsequently, additional employment centers have been developed, with the Fengtai Lize Business District in the southwest and the Da Wangjing Business District in the northeast, together with the vast Zhongguancun Science Park in the northwest stretching out to the Sixth Ring Road and including both the Tsinghua and Beijing University settings and research parks.

4

Within the variegated urban landscape of Beijing, six residential communities were selected, representing among them a variety of housing and community types and the circumstances in which they can be found. The six cases were: the Ju’er Hutong, a modern re-interpretation of community living located in the inner-city district of Dongcheng; the Huilongguan Cultural Residential District, a large-scale contemporary development focused on the provision of affordable housing within the broader Zhongguancun area; Tiantongyuan, another large-scale residential district from the 1990s located north of the Olympic Forest Park; Wangjing, a high-rise suburban development built in what is now becoming Beijing’s second central business district at Da Wangjing; Yilin Jiayuan, an upscale new development close by the Olympic Forest Park; and Jian Wai SOHO, a recent redevelopment of an industrial work unit on the edge of the Chaoyang Central Business District and operating as a live-work environment.

SHANGHAI 5

Shanghai, located at the mouth of the Changjiang River, is China’s largest city by population with slightly over 23 million resident inhabitants, of which 39 percent originate from somewhere else in China.22 Shanghai first came to prominence during the latter part of the nineteenth century, reaching over one million inhabitants in 1900 and then quickly on to two to three million by the 1920s. It first came to outside attention as a Treaty Port in 1842 on the heels of the First Opium War that opened China up to trade and resulted in concession settlements by the British, Americans, and French. Prior to that, Shanghai was something of a provincial outpost located on the Huangpu River, within a dense pattern of agricultural and market settlements known as Shanghai Xian, or Shanghai County, and with a population on the order of half a million people. During that era what became Shanghai was also a circular walled town aimed at repelling pirates and other coastal marauders. Under the joint dominion of the British, Americans, French and, of course, their de jure host, the Chinese, Shanghai was subdivided in 1863 into the International Settlements, the French Concession, and the Chinese town. During the 1930s, an abortive attempt was made by the Nationalists to ­establish their own community to the north of the city, with the Greater Shanghai Plan.23 At this time the Japanese had well and truly moved into the city also on the north, and there was no such thing as a formal plan for the city. Then, after World War II when the Japanese had attacked and finally occupied all of the city, the Nationalists now back in power initiated the 1946 Plan for Shanghai, adopting modern planning principles such as a ring-radial transportation system, a monocentric core of activities coterminous with the existing city center with satellite communities on the outskirts, and an extensive green belt framework in between.24 Plans for industry were also concentrated along the Huangpu River.

6

With the rise to power of the Communists, another master plan was prepared in 1953 under Soviet tutelage, which reinforced many aspects of the 1946 Plan, although with a sharper emphasis on form-giving devices like boulevards, round-point street intersections, and axial arrangements of buildings and roads.25 This was followed in 1959 by yet another plan that added areas for industrialization, as Shanghai was still the industrial center of China despite considerable interference and income extraction from the central government in Beijing.

The plan also remained largely confined to the western Puxi side of the Huangpu River.26 Then, again after a lengthy hiatus, stretching well into the Reform Period, the 1986 Plan was formulated with much wider functionality, a distribution of economic activities according to their comparative advantages, and with the aim of attracting foreign investment and making Shanghai an international showcase for China.27 The plan also resulted in the creation of the Pudong Administrative District, the establishment there of Lujiazui as the city’s financial center in 1993, and a round of significant infrastructure improvements including bridge and tunnel crossings from Puxi into Pudong, followed by construction of the Pudong International Airport in 1999. The 1999–2020 Plan came next in 2001, further expanding diversity of use types as well as the international focus for the city, alongside of the ‘1-9-6-6 framework’ for orderly decentralization with one core, nine satellites, 60 new self-contained urban areas and some 600 village revitalizations, in what was still part of the old agricultural hinterland.28 Much like the capital Beijing, Shanghai has also undergone considerable suburban and peripheral development, together with urban renewal and historic conservation. The cases documented here again relate to these varied conditions. They include: the Model Lilong and Siming Village, a project concerning the conservation of a historic lilong neighborhood that was once a model for dwelling during the Nationalist Government in the 1930s; Caoyang Xincun, a notable ‘new village’ built from the 1950s onwards on the western edge of the city, originally to house municipal and other model workers; Sanlinyuan, the exemplary mid-rise

15

5

Location of Projects in Shanghai

International Concession Lujiazui

1

4 3

Pudong Chinese Town

French Concession

2

Puxi

Hongqiao International Airport

Huangpu River

5

16

6

Projects in Shanghai

1. Top of the City I

2. Sanlinyuan

3. Model Lilong and Siming Village

4. Caoyang Xincun

5. Langrun Gardens

17

community built in Pudong in the 1990s to house inhabitants relocated from the demolition of overcrowded and dilapidated quarters in the central city in the wake of building the Chengdu expressway; Langrun Gardens, a contemporary private development on the western side of the city recognized for its landscape and other ecological features; and Top of the City I, another award-winning project involving the high-rise redevelopment of a mixed-use community in the very center of Shanghai.

SHENZHEN 7

8

Located directly to the north of Hong Kong in southern China, Shenzhen was first designated as a city in 1979 by the central government and the Guangdong Provincial Government, even as earlier settlement began to occur in Shekou around 1975. Then, in 1980, under Deng Xiao­ping’s economic reforms including opening the country up to foreign trade, several Special Economic Zones (SEZs) were established, including one in Shenzhen, no doubt because of its very close proximity to Hong Kong. There in a 327.5-square-kilometer coastal area, China was able to experiment with shifts towards a market-oriented economy guided by “socialism with Chinese characteristics”.

Since these early days, Shenzhen has grown rapidly in a linear fashion running roughly east to west close to the frontier with Hong Kong, effectively converting a collection of villages surrounded by paddy fields and hills into a modern industrial hub covering some 1,050 square kilometers of land. During this process, the population increased from approximately 70,000 inhabitants in 1979 to around 10.4 million residents in 2010, and approximately 10.8 million by 2013.29 For the most part, Shenzhen’s urban fabric is comprised of a loose grid of megaplots, linked by wide thoroughfares. A subway system in a linear arrangement also further reinforces nodal development in an east-west direction. Much of this development is adjacent to or near open green spaces and parks, including a lengthy stretch of linear park along the coastal and river border with Hong Kong.

A total of nine cases were selected in Shenzhen, most of which are high-rise superblock communities. The projects are clustered around two main areas of Shenzhen’s linear development. They are in the vicinity of Lianhuashan Park in the centrally-located Futian District and near the Shekou Industrial District within the Nanshan Administrative District on the western side of the city. Two of the cases – Lianhua Yicun and Cuizhuyuan – are social housing projects built in the 1990s during the early reform era, comprising mid-rise slabs and towers in a vegetated setting. The remaining seven projects – Meilin Yicun, Cuihai Huayuan, Shuixie Huadu, Weilan Hai’an (Côte d’Azur), Changcheng Shengshi, Bandao Chengbang (The Peninsula), and Tianjiao Huating – are mid- to high-end and market-rate housing. Among them, Meilin Yicun was notable as a model development deemed worthy of emulation. During early stages of Shenzhen’s development, housing was provided either by the Shenzhen Municipal Construction and Development Company for locals or by the Shenzhen SEZ Real Estate and Property Company for non-locals, in addition to China Merchants operating in Shekou.

However, with the exception of Shekou, this dual system of provision no longer exists.

18

7

Location of Projects in Shenzhen

9 2 4

1

Lianhuashan Park

3 Futian District

7 Hong Kong

6 5 8

Shekou Industrial District

19

8

20

Projects in Shenzhen

1. Lianhua Yicun

2. Meilin Yicun

3. Cuihai Huayuan (Gardens)

4. Shuixie Huadu

5. Cuizhuyuan

6. Tianjiao Huating

7. Weilan Hai’an (Côte d’Azur)

8. Bandao Chengbang (The Peninsula)

9. Changcheng Shengshi

SUZHOU 9

Also located in the Changjiang Delta region like Shanghai, Suzhou is a prefecture-level city with a population of some 10.46 million people in its broader administrative area, as noted earlier, and about five million inhabitants in the city proper. At present, it is the second most important city in Jiangsu Province next to Nanjing, its capital, being founded as early as the sixth century BCE during the Wu Kingdom. The present historic core,30 however, dates from the Pingjiang Plan of 1229, during the Song Dynasty, as mentioned earlier. This was a rectangular walled enclosure, surrounded by a moat and crisscrossed inside with a tartan grid of canals and streets offering access to goods and services from rows of shophouses along thoroughfares. Home to many wealthy merchants, Suzhou became renowned for its elaborate garden villas. Prior to the rise of Shanghai after the foundation of Treaty Ports, Suzhou was by far the most important city in the Lower Changjiang Delta region, with the population

21

of Suzhou Fu, or Suzhou Prefecture, rising to as much as two million people in the eighteenth

century.31 Since then, however, the city has lost its importance, particularly as the Grand Canal bordering the city forfeited its primacy as a transportation link to the north in favor of alternative sea and land routes. In the early days of the People’s Republic, this historic core became inundated, as elsewhere in China, with indiscriminate distributions of factories and other work places, generally throwing the urban fabric into a state of deterioration and neglect. In the 1990s, after the economic reforms, Suzhou began to recover its economic base and underwent strategic planning aimed at clarifying a future course of action.

One upshot of this was Deng Xiaoping’s blessing, during his historic southern tour, for the city to pursue global markets and for Suzhou to become integrated into the international economy. By 1996, Suzhou jumped to number five in the nation with regard to the value of Gross Domestic Product. It also coincided with the 1996–2010 ‘One Body – Two Wings Plan’ for the city, within which the historic core would be thoroughly renovated and two ­employmentbased extensions would be made to the west and east of the city.32 Indeed, both had already begun development, with the Suzhou New District on the west in 1990 and the much larger Suzhou Industrial District on the east in 1994 – a joint venture with Singaporean interests, based on the model of their successful Jurong Industrial District at home. Since then, progress has been uneven in the Suzhou Industrial District, although the local Suzhou New District has been largely fully built out.33

9

Location of Projects in Suzhou

Suzhou Industrial District

1

Historical Core

3 4 2 Suzhou New District

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Projects in Suzhou

1. Tongfangxiang Xiaoqu

2. Suzhou Garden Villas (Jinhuayuan)

3. Caixiang Xincun

4. Sanyuan Yicun

5. Sanxiang Xincun

23

10

Within this urban landscape, five projects were selected for study and analysis, reflecting some of the typological variation in housing and community development across the city.

They were: Tongfangxiang Xiaoqu, an award-winning re-interpretation and redevelopment of an urban block in the historic core; Jinhuayuan or Suzhou Garden Villas, a mixture of highrise towers and canal housing that also was a re-interpretation of historic Suzhou; and three former danwei projects that had undergone renovation in the post-reform period, namely: Caixiang Xincun, Sanyuan Yicun, and Sanxiang Xincun.

ORGANIZATION 11

With the exception of a short conclusion, this book is organized around four chapters, beginning with the concept of community in China in a constitutional, social, and programmatic sense.

It starts with the chapter “Concepts of Community in China” about how ‘community’ has been translated in Chinese society and how it is defined. It then moves on to a historical survey of various community types and the institutional rationale and mechanisms behind them, including influences from Legalistic and Confucian philosophies. The communities are discussed in chronological order and include: the shizu of the Shang Dynasty; the li (hamlet) and xiang-ting (village-community) framework in the Qin Dynasty; the emergence of the cun (village) and wu or fortified stronghold in the Period of the Three Kingdoms; the lifang (neighborhood-ward) system that came into vogue during the Tang Dynasty as a precedent for the baojia that was formalized in the Song Dynasty and well beyond, into the Republican era.

Attention is also paid to the proliferation and role of native-place halls as places for urban communities involving sojourners in the late imperial to Republican eras to gather around.

This is followed by the transition to the danwei or work units during the Communist period, alongside the xiaoqu, ‘residents’ committees’, and the short-lived ‘people’s communes’ before the historic opening up to the outside world in 1978. Finally, the reframing of the danwei, xiaoqu, and ‘residents’ committees’ into the concept of the shequ or community in today’s post-reform China is discussed. Throughout, the point is that communities are understood fundamentally as territorially-based units that have mostly served political and administrative ends, more or less regardless of the regime in power. Along the way, descriptions are offered as to whether communities were enclosed, their population size where available, and the kinds of functions and programs that were endorsed and supported. The conclusion of the chapter draws attention to the fact that the communities were not utopian and can, in fact, also be seen as oppressive. It is also suggested that the present shequ system is likely to persist and, as before, also to help keep the current regime in power.

This chapter is followed by “Urban Types and Projects”, an account of the physical setting into which communities are placed in China. Rather than offering a full historical perspective, discussion begins with the onset of the current regime of the People’s Republic in 1949 and sets out four broad kinds of housing and physical community types that have been in play since then. They are: the ubiquitous parallel-block configurations of walk-up apartments that proliferated particularly during the first 30 or so years of the People’s Republic. Second, there are the high-rise developments in garden settings that came along sometime later, beginning in the 1970s, as well as the looser ‘garden city neighborhoods’ that came sometime earlier but still exert a certain presence even today. Finally, there are the traditional forms of housing including contemporary re-interpretations that have emerged, especially with regard to the

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CHAPTER 3

URBAN TYPES A ND PROJECTS

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As indicated in the introduction, substantial urbanization has only recently occurred in China and the proportion of residents in urban circumstances today is still just slightly above 50 percent. By the middle of the twentieth century, when this narrative starts in earnest, China had few large cities and there was little by way of modern urban development. Shanghai was perhaps the most prominent modern city with a variety of residential buildings including tall towers, even though most of the population lived in neighborhood lanes, shophouses, and attached single dwellings. Moreover, the proportion of the population living in cities and towns at the time was a meager 12 to 13 percent and remained only slightly higher well into the early years of the People’s Republic of China.1 What follows is an examination of the development and evolution of several housing and community types, some of which began in the early days of the Communist regime and set the physical pattern of much of the urban development from then on in China. Initially, this occurred against the backdrop of optimism and yet poor resources. Subsequently, conditions worsened through the periods of the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution, until the historic opening to the outside world in 1978 and the reforms that followed. Although not literally tracking these events, the typological development of China’s housing and physical communities was sustained by sporadic and then more constant improvements in socioeconomic circumstances. Indeed, when it moved forward, it engaged both the matter of a community’s territory and its types of housing. Specific projects are then discussed ranging across the most prominent types. All were constructed in the past 25 to 30 years, beginning in the 1980s, and all are at least ten years old, enabling some sort of assessment to be made particularly in subsequent chapters. Most of the projects are also large, although their densities vary from 20,000 to spot densities over ten times as high, well above the nominal standard set for urbanization in China of 10,000 people per square kilometer. Locationally, as mentioned in the introduction, they are drawn from four cities: Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Suzhou. As a collection, they include projects that have received acclaim, as well as those that have not but are typical of many of the physical settings in today’s Chinese urban communities.

HOUSING AND COMMUNITY TYPES At least since the onset of the People’s Republic, Chinese urban housing and physical community types have been defined largely by a co-mingling of community area configurations and various kinds of dwellings much like elsewhere. To begin with, community areas, often expansive in plot size, embraced danwei or work-unit organizations, as well as provision of public housing and related facilities for municipal workers close to their sites of employment. More recently, residential districts have emerged, now competing with one another in the real-estate marketplace. Housing units waxed and waned in size and appointments, from early low-rise apartments and dormitory configurations with ‘sleep-type units’ and shared kitchen as well as bathroom facilities, to larger units built for longer-term use and more prosperous times, back down to smaller units in efforts to accommodate one family per unit of accommodation. Ensembles of units have also proliferated both horizontally and vertically, as well as in alignment with Chinese characteristics of various kinds and at various times. Not that housing in either the sense of dwellings or in its broader urban configuration was entirely novel or without precedent. There were, for instance, corporate

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Kvartal and Sotsgorod

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Perimeter Block vs Parallel Block

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Housing at Changchun No.1 Automobile Danwei

worker compounds and tall buildings earlier in Shanghai. Nevertheless, the sheer scale of urban construction and typological development since 1949 has been unprecedented in China. Primarily, there are four conspicuous types of urban housing and physical communities. They are the ubiquitous parallel-block arrangements, the high rises in garden settings, looser and not-so-common ‘garden city neighborhoods’, and traditional forms both old and new in celebration of once-customary ‘lane life’.

PARALLEL BLOCK ARRANGEMENTS The prolific occurrence of parallel arrangements of north-south facing walk-up apartment blocks emerged from and was something of a reaction to strong Soviet influence during the early years of the People’s Republic of China. Certainly by 1953, if not before, the Soviet model of housing, largely as a means of subsistence in the service of industrialization, was being closely copied. Workers’ ‘new villages’, or xincun, were being built near places of employment to reduce commuting times and by 1956, a vigorous transfer of housing units into public ownership had taken place. For the most part, each enterprise constructed housing for its employees. Land was usually provided by local governments free of charge.

Rents were low as all efforts were aimed at industrial accumulation of capital, and high degrees of self-sufficiency were introduced into housing estates also in order to improve the efficiency of work forces, again especially in pursuit of primary production. Between 1949 and 1957, housing grew at a relatively rapid pace, resulting in some 110 million square meters of constructed space and 35.5 percent of all floor area in China.2 Not only was this a response to the new exigencies of industrial development, but also an attempt to make up for the acute housing shortages prior to 1949 on the heels of 12 years of armed conflict, if nothing else.

1

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3

The Soviet model that was adopted, at least at first, consisted of parallel blocks of apartments, usually facing south, at from two to five storeys tall. Referred to as hanglieshi, literally meaning ‘lined up in a row’, many were built on the periphery of cities.3 Soviet space standards were also adopted at 9 square meters per person. Even if these were more than double what China could realistically afford to build, they were seen as long-term targets, with two or more families sharing units in the meantime.4 Almost simultaneously, the basic building block of the community area of the Soviets, referred to as a kvartal and usually comprised of five- to seven-storey apartment buildings on a sizeable plot, was also adopted, often in the form of a perimeter-block configuration. This urban layout typically had a strong sense of order, with housing around the edge of large blocks, as well as towards the interior with public building and non-residential uses at the center. Stylistically, ‘socialist content’ was paired with ‘national form’, again like the Soviets, giving rise to the use of big roofs with upturned eaves and monumental socialist realist-looking façades.5 Both influences together were very striking in the Changchun No. 1 Automobile Manufacturing Complex, for instance, with its numerous well-ordered perimeter blocks of housing and residentially related functions, in the manner of the kvartal, adjacent to the factory itself and organized around a monumental central axis.6

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At the level of dwelling units, the other Soviet contribution was the standardized design of housing, first introduced to China in 1952. In many ways, this made sense in a country that lacked sufficient numbers of architects and where economies might be achieved with certain returns to scale resulting from standardized layouts. By 1953, approximately 34 percent of all housing constructed followed this format.7 More specifically, the Soviet model regarded the dwelling unit as the fundamental ‘cell’ in any configuration. Residences, in turn, consisted of several household units using the same stairway, also with compact arrangements of services. Slightly different unit configurations occurred at the ends and middle of buildings, resulting in the possibility of overall buildings of different lengths, shapes, and heights. Some standardized components, like wall panels, were produced in quantities in factories in an attempt to accelerate construction speed.

Large urban block arrangements served both worker housing and the self-contained danwei, focused as with the Changchun complex on specific kinds of production. Schematically, like the Soviet microrayon moving up in scale to more complete districts and ultimately to full-scale towns or gorodskoy rayon, the Chinese counterparts also operated as nested hierarchies of compounds with increasing levels of residentially related services ranging from kindergartens through schools of various kinds to clinics, community halls, recreational facilities and even hospitals, libraries and department stores. Boundaries of basic units were on the order of 650 meters by 400 meters, allowing them to function primarily as pedestrian environments.8 These spatial and programmatic concepts had been around in the Soviet Union since the 1920s and particularly in association with the sotsgorod, or compact city, and the zhilkompleks, or ‘living region’, and the likes of Leonid Sabsovich and the Vesnin brothers, who were among those of the so-called ‘urbanist ’as distinct from ‘dis-urbanist’ persuasion at the time.9 The genealogy of modern housing blocks also dates back to the assortment of foreign architects in the Soviet Union at the time, like Ernst May and his brigade, Bruno Taut, a frequent visitor, and Le Corbusier, who visited in 1928 before breaking off ties with the rejection of his Palace of the Soviets scheme in 1932. Specifically with regard to parallel-block arrangements, Walter Gropius, with his Zeilenbau speculations and built projects in the 1920s and 30s, was also one of the strong proponents of early precedents.10 4

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Then, in 1955 and after, architects in China began to reassess the Soviet experience and to imbue subsequent projects with Chinese characteristics, although this time with a pragmatic and functional agenda. Indeed, the ‘big roof’ ideas, such as at the Beihai complex in Beijing, were roundly discredited for reasons of waste by 1955.11 First, the issue of building for longer-term use and doubling up families during the interim was seen as “rational design but irrational use”.12 The Soviet model of building with its prominent central corridor was also regarded as being poor with regard to both ventilation and sunlight. This then led to the 2-2-2 composition of the standard housing design, with three two-bedroom apartments served by a single stairway and with all enjoying a southern exposure.13 Each unit also had a balcony facing south, and configurations of the format could be readily joined together to create longer buildings. Typically, the rise of these slab blocks was from three to five storeys and sometimes more with walk-up access. Open-corridor apartments also began to appear, with the corridor on the northern side along with toilets and kitchens effectively releasing the main habitable rooms to face south with good ventilation through the relatively narrow building width, which was usually under 10 to 12 meters. One or a few stairways provided access to all units, with considerable savings in construction. The Xingfucun Neighborhood Apartments in Beijing of 1957 complied with this layout and were constructed with concrete frames and masonry infill.14

Parallel Block Unit Configurations

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Early Standard Design Inner Corridor

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Standard Design Reduced Format Inner Corridor

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2-2-2 Arrangement Open Corridor

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Small-sized Units 8014 Configuration

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Debate about the efficacy of perimeter-block arrangements erupted in architectural and governmental circles in 1957, eventually being resolved in favor of the parallel north-south facing housing arrangements.15 Proponents of perimeter blocks maintained that they saved land, had a more complete urban form that led to a better cityscape, and were convenient for placement of public buildings. However, a majority who were in favor of parallel blocks criticized the perimeter blocks for being unsuitable for China’s climate and living habits, as well as incurring more nuisance from adjacent roads and streets. During the Great Leap Forward, a period rife with anti-rightist political sentiments, they also reacted against the architectural formalism of the perimeter blocks, and particularly to those associated with the earlier ‘big roof’ era. In the final analysis, it was conditions of limited budgets and the need for consistent north-south alignments of units that prevailed. More or less from this time onwards, large tracts of land were consistently developed with mid-rise walk-up arrangements of parallel blocks, spaced according to sun angles allowing penetration into areas between buildings according to the latitude of site locations. The general plan of Beijing was formalized in 1957 with broad residential plots on the order of as large as 600 by 600 meters. As one commentator put it at the time: “In big cities of a Socialist country, the social and political life of the people should be organized around areas that were facilitated by a complete network of institutions that provided socialist culture, education, as well as other necessary provisions, and that such an approach, in spatial terms, would occur in residential areas.”16

View of Danwei Housing in Beijing’s Western District

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Xuhui Apartments

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Qiansanmen Complex

Development of parallel-block arrangements did not stop there, however. Smaller-sized units within the standard model were adopted by 1958, abandoning completely the inner corridor of the Soviet approach and opting for one flat per family with two rooms on the order of 13 to 14 square meters in size. The “8016 Standard Design” for open-corridor versions also had three-room apartments with a modestly sized living and dining room combination providing the link within the apartment to the other rooms.17 This then became the precursor of the so-called ‘small square hall’ or ‘bright square hall’ configurations that were prevalent in later, more contemporary times. By 1959, there was also a movement away from the unified standard design to reflect local conditions. This led to adjustments in room alignments and balcony areas in tune with local climatic conditions, although little departure from the parallel arrangement of housing blocks. During the period of political adjustment to the excesses of the Great Leap Forward around 1961, a more practical and realistic atmosphere pervaded the production of housing, finally settling the issue of short- versus long-term views around smaller apartments but served by several rooms within each unit.18 Around the same time, shops and related community facilities also became incorporated into ground-floor levels in efforts to animate streetscapes around and within developments.

Moving forward in time towards the contemporary era and over the suspension of most architectural activity during the Cultural Revolution by the 1980s and into the reform period, residential district development continued to draw upon the parallel housing block type from earlier times. Projects on the order of 50 hectares or greater, like the Weifang Housing Estate in the Pudong area of Shanghai, were not unusual, housing some 10,000 residents.19 Indeed, well into the 1990s and onwards, residential districts continued to be built within large-block configurations, and supporting levels of mixed use, coarse-grained networks, and at considerable building scale. Comparisons among upscale developments—‘starter housing’ on the outskirts of Beijing, for instance, under the 1998 Economic and Suitable Housing Program targeted at middle-income households; and Anju, or Comfortable Housing dating from 1995 with similar targets—all reveal many typological similarities.

HIGH-RISE DEVELOPMENTS 6

7

High-rise residential buildings were relatively late in coming to the People’s Republic of China.

One of the first among them was the Three Gate Complex along Qianmen Street in Beijing, completed in 1976. Another was the North Caoxi Road Complex on the outskirts of Shanghai, also in the early to mid-1970s. As elsewhere, scarce land resources and the need to house people closer to employment increased the demand for higher-density housing and, therefore, the prospect of high-rise building. The Qiansanmen Complex was ambitious and occupied a 5-kilometer-long site on the southern perimeter of the old city, covering 22 hectares of land and built to a height of 45 meters, housing 30,000 inhabitants.20 The Xuhui Complex on North Caoxi Road, now referred to as Caoxi Dalou, was comprised of nine 12-storey towers, built perpendicular to the road so that those in each tower could enjoy a north-south orientation. Unlike Beijing, Shanghai was no stranger to high-rise apartments. Between 1928 and 1938, during the so-called ‘Nanjing Decade’ of Republican rule, around 38 residential buildings were constructed above 10 storeys with elevator service. These included a number of elegant Art Deco structures in the French Concession, like Willow Court and Eddington House

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1980s - Y-shaped Arrangements 1990s

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Butterfly and â&#x20AC;&#x153;#â&#x20AC;?

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Point Tower 0

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of 1931, as well as the massive Embankment Building by Palmer and Turner along Suzhou Creek rising to a height of 12 floors.21 These early precedents were built in the manner of high-rise residential buildings in New York’s Manhattan and in Chicago at much the same time. In Shanghai, use was made of what became known as ‘American technology’, consisting of masonry-clad steel frame construction and the use of elevators, first introduced to Shanghai a decade earlier.

8

Early attempts to build high-rise housing during the Communist period also placed considerable emphasis on narrow buildings for ventilation and southern exposures for habitable rooms. Generally, this meant that tall buildings were basically of slab-block configurations in plan, served by elevators and stairs at intervals along their length. Indeed, the Qiansanmen Complex incorporated a run of three units in plan to a stairway, followed by two more units to the elevator core that, together with the stairway access, served units via a short north­facing corridor and balcony area. In the Xuhui Complex, open-corridor access across almost the entire northern façade provided ready access to units, which were also served by elevators at one end and stairs at both ends of each block. While the use of industrialized building systems in housing had been a goal roughly since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, by 1970, little progress had been made due to poor economic conditions, the scarcity of mechanized construction, and the relatively low cost of labor.22 In fact, one of the rationales behind the standardized design of units in the parallel-block arrangements was the potential use of factory-made components and prefabricated elements. However, it was not until high-rise construction commenced in earnest that use was made of framed, light-weight panels with steel frames, as in the Xuhui Complex with few load-bearing walls.

With the historic opening up of China to the outside world, a boom period of housing ensued between 1979 and 1982 during which 310 million square meters were completed.23 Following a hiatus in tall building construction on the heels of the earlier experiments due to the costs, lack of experience, and poor reliability of mechanical services such as elevators, the pace of high-rise residential development increased. By 1981, some 416 high-rise housing complexes had been built, with fully 75 percent taking place in Beijing. By 1985, this number increased appreciably and became more widely distributed to other large urban centers, with Beijing’s proportion dwindling below 45 percent.24 Another trend in this development was not only the building of high-rise residential estates, but combination of taller buildings with mid-rise slab blocks in efforts to relieve the sheer monotony of row upon row of similar houses.

With improvements in economic circumstances, a diversity of housing types emerged and could be afforded. Indeed, during the period of the ‘Planned Commodity Economy’,25 roughly from 1985 to 1991, the planning of residential areas came under closer scrutiny, characterized by three levels of consideration, namely: the residential building, the neighborhood cluster, and the overall residential area.26 Outdoor living environments were generally made more pleasant and often bucolic alongside greater emphasis on enrichment of the profiles of buildings in these landscapes. Non-orthogonal and curvilinear alignments of units, particularly in high-rise developments, were explored in search of more varied and graceful spatial effects within large residential estates. High plot ratios but relatively low-to-medium overall building densities were also investigated.

Also, from the mid-1980s onwards, a substantial number of different building profiles in highrise construction were developed. These ranged from the use of duplex units to Y-shaped, cross-shaped, and frog-shaped plans, all extruded in height around compact vertical cores of elevators, stairways and other services.27 Some use was also made of so-called ‘inner yards’ or light courts at the centers of buildings, although this practice was generally aban-

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doned because of the nuisance caused from neighboring kitchens and other service facilities. Tower- rather than slab-like profiles began to emerge, with Y-shaped tall buildings being comprised of only four units per floor, and frog-shaped plan patterns with six units to a floor.

Expansion of space standards to 60 to 80 square meters and beyond per unit also occurred.

Further, the use of concave and convex plan forms also emerged to tackle the inner light well issue, pushing further in the direction of purer Y-shaped and frog-shaped forms, and away from cross-shaped configurations with light wells almost invariably at the center.28 Within Beijing and to a lesser extent in Shanghai, high-rise development was controlled in and towards the city center, lending a wok-shaped profile to the broader urban area, with higher-rise construction out towards the periphery.

From 1992 well into the contemporary era, high-rise residential development at increasing heights and frequency had become commonplace in many of the higher-tier cities in China. Largely, this was a response to the market demands across increasing land prices, as elsewhere in the world. Prejudices against high-rise living from a scant 20 to 25 years earlier had well and truly fallen away. In addition, so had the rather tightly held concepts of residential areas planned around housing estates as basic units. Spatially, this had meant roughly 500 households per cluster, approximately commensurate with some 100 to 700 households in a neighborhood. Put another way, this was about equivalent to four tall residential towers. Nowadays, with advances in housing estate management and more anonymity among residents in larger complexes, the desirability or even need for interim levels of management in the manner of the former housing clusters has disappeared.29 If anything, at the level of neighborhood services, this appears to have been replaced by a stronger emphasis on the outdoor space within complexes and the complement of recreational, sports, and shopping facilities. The Chunyuan Neighborhood in Beijing from the late 1990s clearly illustrates this trend, as do a number of newer projects in Shanghai and Shenzhen discussed in the next section.

GARDEN CITY NEIGHBORHOODS 9

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Although criticized early on in the People’s Republic for being at odds with stricter, more formulaic Soviet influences and smacking of capitalist planning, several ‘garden city neighborhoods’ have made and continue to make an appearance as a third broad housing type.30 The most prominent was Caoyang Xincun, or the Caoyang ‘New Village’, built on the western edge of Shanghai beginning in 1951. Ultimately comprised of nine large plots of living quarters, the initial phases of construction designed by Wang Dingzeng, an American-trained architect, radiated outwards in a fan-shaped plan reminiscent of Greenbelt, Maryland, built earlier in 1935.31 This as well as subsequent planning was carefully made in relationship to natural features of the site including topography, existing waterways, and vegetated areas.

Unlike the parallel-block configurations described earlier, the inner road structure adjacent to rows of housing units provided a finer grain of circulation that was generally admired as being effective.32 The situation of non-residential buildings at the center, although not uncommon among other housing types at the time, also lent a village-like atmosphere to the development by virtue of consolidated but relatively localized and informal spatial arrangement.

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Caoyang Xincun Neighborhood

Plan of Caoyang Xincun in Shanghai

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Indeed, if anything, it is the looseness of building arrangements on sites and their specificity to local site conditions that set this broad type apart from others. Superficially, to be sure, there was a roughly parallel alignment of housing blocks in early phases, becoming more rigid as development progressed until Caoyang became a veritable town within a city with a population of over 100,000 inhabitants at build-out in 1984. Nevertheless, the early impetus of the block arrangements resonated closely with Clarence Perry’s ‘neighborhood theory’ of the late 1920s, with core principles such as easy walking distances, adequate space for recreation, shopping, and other more public functions adjacent to wider roads and traffic junctions, interior streets no wider than required for local access, and a population of about 5,000 to 6,000 people centered primarily on elementary school enrollment.33 Early development was also intended to be relatively low in density. Most of the early row housing was three storeys in height, rather than the five storeys and up associated with the parallel-block arrangements. Single-family units were also provided from the beginning, with simple room layouts and relatively spacious accommodations.

As mentioned, garden city neighborhoods such as Caoyang were not common and, overall, short-lived. However, in the reform period of the opening up of China to the outside world from 1978, traits of the earlier prototype also emerged. These included, for instance, more informal and less strictly orthogonal spatial organizations of rows of housing on sites, smaller blocks of development, and finer street networks within development areas. The ever-present bucolic ingredients of the garden city concept, including allotment gardens within estates, also appeared strongly. Of course, historically speaking it is clear that there are considerable overlaps between many of the Soviet dictates in residential planning that were passed on to China and internationally available ‘garden city principles’, and ideas about pedestrian neighborhoods. If anything, however, outcomes in China were more ‘modernist’ in an orthodox sense and across conditions of standardization, replicability, and programmatic coherence than ‘garden city’ types of applications, at least until recently.

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Gateway and Plan of Lilong Housing

TRADITIONAL FORMS Traditional forms of housing in today’s China are either legacies from earlier eras of urban construction or efforts to create housing complexes that blend into the traditional fabric of cities for reasons of conservation primarily. All in one way or another are imbued with the lane life that materialized within large urban blocks behind bustling commercial thoroughfares. This lane life, in turn, varied from place to place in the specifics of scale and modulation but was essentially about bringing familiar village-like circumstances into cities and fostering good relations among neighbors living closely together. Rather than the relatively open field between parallel housing blocks, the large urban block was finely subdivided into a network of narrow lanes with adjoining rows of housing. Densities without overcrowded conditions could be quite high and on the order of 200 dwelling units per hectare.

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In Shanghai these lane configurations were referred to as lilong, or linong—literally meaning ‘block lane’ or ‘neighborhood lane’. Entered usually through a gateway from the adjoining thoroughfare typically lined with shophouses, sometimes referred to as shikumen, or decorated gateways, the lanes were from 4 to 5 meters across and laid out in patterns that varied from simple grids to fishbone patterns and spine-like networks. Mostly, the network of lanes either dead-ended or returned one back to where they started on the thoroughfare outside and in a somewhat labyrinthine manner. Each lilong was lined with housing usually rising from two to three storeys, and sometimes a little higher, with around 4-meter-wide frontages entered through a shallow courtyard into what was otherwise a row house, typically with a gable roof and attic space. Under conditions where parallel lanes prevailed as in Shanghai, houses were not aligned back-to-back but rather from lane-to-front-to-back to lane-to-front,

Siheyuan and Hutongs of Beijing

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and so on. Similar configurations could be found elsewhere and in Wuhan, for instance, referred to there as lifen, they were aligned back-to-back in a more conventional manner.

Broadly synchronous with foreign concessions from before the turn into the twentieth century onwards, many of the lilong resulted from speculative real-estate ventures. Generally, each of these ventures was on the order of 50 to 100 units although some, like Siwen Lane dating from 1916, were as large as 3.2 hectares and accommodated around 600 units.34 Lilong houses also varied in size and opulence, with basic units on the order of from 60 to 100 square meters in floor area, with two rooms per floor. As typological arrangements evolved, many became closer to European townhouses like the so-called ‘new lilong’ and then the ‘garden lilong’ incorporating side yards and occupying larger plots of land. Ubiquitous in Shanghai prior to World War II, over 200,000 units were built, housing most of the city’s population.35 Moreover, many still exist in various states of repair.

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Historically much older, the hutong of Beijing date from the city’s founding in the thirteenth century and typically ran east-to-west between larger streets and roads, again running through sizeable rectilinear plots of land. Usually wider than the lilong at as much as 9 meters, the hutong were often more continuous and well traveled. The term hutong probably originates from the word hottog meaning ‘well’ in Mongolian. In essence, villagers dug out a well and lived there, pointing to the early evolution of Beijing as having a strong agricultural base inside its great walls.36 Like the lilong, the hutong were lined by houses and, indeed, it was the housing alignment that shaped the hutong and not the other way around. Invariably, these houses were single-storey, four-sided courtyard dwellings, or siheyuan, with the so-called ‘reverse rooms’ facing the street with blank walls. Typically, entry to the siheyuan was on the right-hand side of the south-facing dwelling compound, through a gateway ornamented according to rank and then through a small courtyard, sometimes referred to as the ‘lotus gateway’, forming something of a foyer to the dwelling, leading thence to a major courtyard or courtyards, again depending upon the occupant’s relative wealth and rank.

These courtyards were aligned perpendicular to the hutong, with symmetrically disposed pavilions and arcades around the edges. In the northern latitude of Beijing, the courtyards were also wide, and sometimes called ‘heaven’s well’, to allow for adequate sunlight penetration. During the dynastic periods, a hierarchical arrangement of room and pavilion occupation was also in play among various members of a family according to seniority and gender.

Servants often moved between rooms through a service corridor system running along the boundary of the siheyuan.37 In summary then, most housing in the urban areas of the People’s Republic of China takes place amid large plots of land, often on the order of 400 meters on a side. Within these megaplots, the arrangement of dwellings varies from parallel blocks usually at from five to seven storeys in height for walk-up units, although higher for elevator-served blocks. One particular variation is the ‘garden city neighborhood’ that, while occupying a megaplot, is usually transected by streets and has a looser arrangement of low- to mid-rise housing units comprising aggregations of up to 1,000. Nowadays, high-rise housing and towers within megaplots are another common arrangement, especially with rising costs of developable land within a maturing market system. Traditional forms of dwelling either persist or are re-interpreted mainly in larger tier-one and tier-two cities and often provide variety in the marketplace, sometimes even for wealthier owners.

Throughout, common characteristics across the four basic types include sites with nonporous boundaries and limited numbers of points of access from the outside; substantial investment in vegetated landscaping with the possible exception of the lanes, although there the courts are often planted; preferences for south-facing orientations even with today’s

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reliance on mechanical conditioning; a presence of non-residential facilities within the overall complex, sometimes at a substantial scale; and evolution within the unit types themselves from small numbers of rooms to compact organizations, to ‘small square hall’ abridgements from entrances to other rooms; to more completely zoned arrangements between common living spaces and more private self-contained accommodations. Kitchens were and still are invariably vented to the outside and can be closed off from the remainder of a dwelling.

Also throughout, space standards have risen and are now on the order of 20 to 25 square meters per person or higher overall in many marketplaces.

Finally, several other housing types from the perspective of both plots and units do have a presence in China, although they are not discussed here. Urban villages, for example, are prevalent especially in some broader urban locales. They are, however, constitutionally separated from urban areas as the domains of village collectives and, therefore, part of a different system of administration and, typically, occupation. Single-family villas also exist and, indeed, the Garden Villas in Suzhou (Jinhuayuan) were a part of the household survey conducted as a part of the research behind this volume. Nevertheless, the type as such has been banned or seriously discouraged by government authorities as being too consumptive of land, particularly when constructed in large numbers.

PROJECTS IN CONTEMPORARY SETTINGS 13

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Seen within the context of contemporary urban settings, examples of all four broad housing and community types adhere to both the central tendencies of each type while also showing variation. Among the parallel-block arrangements, for instance, Caixiang Xincun in Suzhou is located on a former danwei that produced aluminum products and was redeveloped in the 1980s by the local government, through the Jinchang District Urban Development Investment Company, to provide affordable new residences for migrants and blue-collar workers engaged in nearby factories.38 Today, it is a moderately priced neighborhood located just outside of the historic Pingjiang center of Suzhou to the west. Bounded on the north, south, and west by major roads, and on the east as well as the west by a canal, the neighborhood occupies a rectangular superblock, or megaplot, measuring some 600 meters by 400 meters, the perimeter of which is largely fenced off. Entry is gained through two streets on the north, one on the south and west, and three canal crossings on the east into an adjacent neighborhood.

There are a total of 1,000 six-storey walk-up units housed within numerous gable-roofed slab blocks and at an overall floor area ratio of 1.6. Each housing block is nominally 75 meters in length and 12 meters wide with, on average, 12 units per floor accessed by shared stairways in the manner of the parallel-block housing type. All units face south, often with screened-in balconies, and range in size from 50 to 90 square meters accommodating two to three bedrooms. These units, in turn, are typically of the ‘small square hall’ variety. At 20,270 people per square kilometer, the density on the 14.8-hectare site is fairly typical for this type and age of development. Some amenities are provided on site, located on the ground floors of buildings, although primarily in an east-west zone running through the center of the neighborhood. These include retail space, also with a large supermarket, a post office, as well as a

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Caixiang Xincun in Suzhou

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kindergarten and a jiedao community hall and adjacent park space. The Caixiang Elementary School is close by, within 50 meters of the edge of the project. Caixiang Xincun is also well served by public transportation, with several bus stops within 200 meters and three subway stations along Lines 1 and 2 within 600 meters of the neighborhood. Car parking is provided within the grounds at a ratio of 0.7 lots per apartment unit. The complex’s green space coverage is 23 percent and comprised mainly of tree-lined streets and well-vegetated pathways, often marked at intervals within the complex by traditionally influenced gateways within walls demarcating areas to either side of streets. More recently, improvements have been made to the internal pedestrian circulation, including the construction of curvilinear paths and mounding, creating a sense of linear parkways. Overall, the neighborhood’s atmosphere is relatively leafy and serene. Similar situations can also be found in the more westerly neighborhood of Sanyuan Yicun in Suzhou, also from the middle 1980s.

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Similarly orthodox in its parallel arrangement of housing units, although covering a much greater area, is the Huilongguan Cultural Residential District located 16 kilometers to the north of central Beijing. It is a major shequ in the Changping District of the city located in a peri-peripheral area, certainly during its initial development, beyond the Fifth Ring Road.

Housing some 306,000 residents, Huilongguan occupies 11.57 square kilometers of what was once agricultural land. Indeed, nowadays a number of urban villages press up against its northern border. With a roughly rectangular overall layout, stretching from the Badaling Highway leading north-west out of Beijing on the west to Huangping Road on the east, the development is comprised of over 50 megaplots each of 400 meters plus by around 300 meters in dimension. Each functions in a semi-detached manner and is a gated community, certainly as evidenced by the secondary roadway network within each megaplot terminating often in dead ends. Some provision of community open space and landscaping is made within each megaplot, although most of the development within the overall organization is primarily residential and mono-functional. Beginning as Economic and Suitable Housing in 1998,

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Langrun Gardens in Shanghai

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construction of Huilongguan was originally undertaken to serve the needs of lower-income residents. The pace of development was very slow, until Line 13 of the Beijing metro system was introduced to open up the area for urban settlement. This metro line soon proved to be inadequate to serve the burgeoning needs of residents, however, who also resorted to bus transport, as well as the use of private cars. Recently, Line 8 of the metro system also has a station in the development, although as a whole, it still remains relatively isolated. Over time, Huilongguan also saw establishment of several elementary and middle schools, hospitals, as well as retail and commercial centers. Recently, a commercial strip has emerged through the center of the community along Huilongguan West and East Streets, respectively, including ‘big box’ retail and mixed uses catering to lifestyle needs of residents. In 2010, Huilongguan was administratively incorporated into the Zhongguancun National Science Park, along with neighboring towns, in an effort to offset the lack of viable and sufficient employment opportunities. In keeping with the Economic and Suitable Housing Program, residential areas were largely comprised of five- to six-storey walk-up apartment blocks in parallel arrays facing south, and varying from 70 square meters in unit area to as much as 200 square meters. There are also several high-rise buildings and most of the housing is architecturally not very distinguished, although some of the ‘starter housing’ for younger couples, often with members of extended families, exhibit above-average spatial organization and general appearance. Again the density is moderate at 25,531 people per square kilometer. Also, over time, a mix of developers have been at work in the megaplots, all under the aegis of Beijing’s Municipal Commission of Urban Planning. Market-rate units have also been introduced over and above the early staple of Economic and Suitable Housing.

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Langrun Gardens in the western area of Shanghai, dating from 2004 though completed in 2006, is also a relatively orthodox arrangement of parallel housing blocks, although the specific apartment configurations exhibit spatial arrangements not unlike Le Corbusier’s ‘Villa Immeuble’ with balconies and patios running through the rise of the buildings. A private development by Vanke, Langrun Gardens, designed by Fu Zhiqiang, is the final stage of a larger project initiated in 1992 in the vicinity of Hongqiao Airport in Shanghai’s Minhang ­District and follows Vanke’s business model, at least at the time, of seeking relatively lowcost property suitable for residential development.39 Occupying a site of 9.6 hectares that is more or less rectangular in shape, the project accommodates 1,020 dwelling units with a floor area ratio of 1.28 and a density of 37,187 people per square kilometer, which is quite high for mid-rise residential development. Parking is provided underground for 1,000 cars, conveniently accessible through pedestrian entrances and stairway head houses throughout the complex. Housing is provided primarily in two forms: five-storey slabs and 11-storey towers, with the latter grouped towards the center of the project. A variety of unit types are offered, with 25 percent rental and the remainder for ownership. Fully 70 percent of the units are three-bedroom apartments, with the rest ranging from studios to four-bedroom units.

All apartments are relatively commodious, starting from 55 square meters for studios and up to 158 square meters for a four-bedroom unit, with an average size of 110 square meters.

Clearly also a selling feature are the south-facing balconies and side terraces, mentioned earlier, that punctuate the overall block form of the housing. These provide spacious private outdoor space to units and both animation of the façades of the buildings and a strong landscape quality to the scheme. In addition, Langrun Gardens has been well recognized for its ecological features, including a high green space coverage of 40 percent, as well as the incorporation of six to seven themed landscape areas facilitating a variety of uses, such as children’s playgrounds and areas for practicing Tai Chi. Many of these features center on a canal running through the middle of the project in an east-west direction to which sections of artificial wetlands have been created for the purpose of purification, by circulating water through stands of aquatic plants in different ponds. Also incorporated into the landscape is a rainwater collection and recycling system, comprised of ponds and man-made swales.

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Other environmental aspects include green roofs, vertical greening, use of solar power and natural gas, reuse of old building materials, and double-glazed, high solar gain and low-E glass windows, as well as permeable pavements.

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Finally among parallel-block arrangements, there are examples where the orthodox uniformity of the south-facing alignments is less marked and subordinated to some other form of overall spatial organization. Sanlinyuan in the Pudong District of Shanghai, dating from 1995, is one such example, located between the Outer and Middle Ring Roads in the south-western portion of the district.40 Occupying a site area of 13.8 hectares, the project is bounded by Sanlin Road to the north, Yongtai Road to the south, Dongming Road to the east, and Huanlin West Road to the west and is roughly square in plan. Although most of the apartments, usually in long bar buildings seven storeys tall, are south-facing and more or less parallel in alignment, the central portion of the plan is also shaped by a semi-circular roadway with blocks of units radiating from it, bisected by a central axis in the manner of Caixiang Xincun although more pronounced, all centered on a large community center and well-vegetated park. Also within the site programmatically are an elementary school towards the north-west corner, a row of commercial office buildings along Sanlin Road on the north and a kindergarten, xiaoqu office as well a nursery adjacent to the community center on the western side. Both the planning and architectural design was entrusted to the Shanghai Tongji Construction Company headed

by Wang Zhonggu, a master architect. Recognized early on as a ‘model residential district’, the project gained multiple honors for both its planning and architecture in 1995 and 1996.

Most of the mainly residential buildings are raised on pilotis and are topped by two-storey maisonette units with mansard roofs giving them a haipai, or Shanghai style look from the 1930s. A total of 2,092 dwelling units were built, housing a population of 6,000 to 7,000 inhabitants at a density of around 50,000 persons per square kilometer, which is rather high.

Apartments range from 72 square meters to 120 square meters, averaging around 75 square meters. Constructed under the ‘Housing Model of the Thirds’, which was very successful in the early commodification of housing in China, Sanlinyuan initially housed inhabitants resettled from central Shanghai as a part of the Chengdu Elevated Road construction, as well as some working class residents of the inner Luwan District. With a green space coverage of 37 percent of the site, Sanlinyuan is yet another case of a well-vegetated setting. Indeed, over the years, in spite of relatively poor maintenance, property values have increased ten-fold.41

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In the realm of high-rise developments, Wangjing in Beijing , which began as public housing in 1995 and then transitioned into market-rate housing shortly thereafter in the later 1990s, is located between the Fourth and Fifth Ring Roads on the north-eastern side of the city.

Also close to the Airport Expressway, Wangjing is accessible via subway Lines 13, 14, and 15, and is approximately 11 kilometers from the center of the city. Occupying an overall site area of 8.36 square kilometers, the district was planned to accommodate a population of some 250,000 to 300,000 inhabitants, or roughly the same scale as Huilongguan further to the west. Comprised of megaplots of relatively enclosed residential communities, Wangjing is dominated by high-rise towers with many on the order of 30 storeys in height. Early development also featured retail and other commercial uses on the inside of the semicircular band of roadway that inscribed the area outlining its development. Very much a case of towers in a well-developed and vegetated landscape, open space facilities include children’s playgrounds, paved plazas, areas of public art, and several water features. Since its completion, Wangjing has become a popular residential district for middle-class dwellers, as well as Japanese and Korean expatriates. It also has gained additional traction in the marketplace with the subsequent maturing of nearby tertiary sector development. In fact, the general area of Wangjing is a prime location for employment away from central Beijing, including Da Wangjing, or Greater Wangjing Commercial District, on the northeastern corner of the original development and planned by Skidmore Owings and Merrill.42 The art spaces of Beijing 798

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Sanlinyuan in Shanghai 18

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Wangjing (Wangjing West Gardens District 4) in Beijing

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are also nearby. Apartments within Wangjing were primarily organized into cruciform buildings and curvilinear south-facing bar buildings. With the rapid transition into market-rate housing, dwelling units were generally spacious and the overall density of the project, at around 36,000 persons per square kilometer, was moderate. The primary developer within the broader Chaoyang District was the Beijing Capital Development Holding Company, a stateand municipally-owned enterprise.

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Somewhat less conventionally a ‘towers in a park-like setting’, Meilin Yicun of 1998 in Shenzhen quickly became a model high-rise development for China. Indeed, when it was first completed it was known as the ‘first village of Asia’ and attracted considerable attention, including visits by Chinese leaders like Zhu Rongji and Wen Jiabao.43 Built as social housing or under partly-subsidized commodity housing (weili shangpinfang), it was undertaken by the Shenzhen Municipal Housing Bureau and was designed by Tao Ho and Partners, a distinguished architectural firm at the time from Hong Kong. In fact, the Housing Bureau conducted an international tender to ensure a well-designed proposal. The project occupies a site area of 38.4 hectares and houses some 6,840 dwelling units in slender, curving eightto 10-storey bar buildings with a rather high density of 62,840 persons per square kilometer.

Access to the units is provided through semi-enclosed garden courts via vertical stairways and elevators, each serving four units per floor with an average size of 90 square meters.

As elsewhere in China, most dwellings are owned, although 22 percent of the project’s total are for rental. The overall development was built in three phases and furnished with two elementary schools, one middle school, three kindergartens, a grocery store, also alongside of a full complement of recreational and sports facilities including a swimming pool, and tennis, basketball, and badminton courts. Running east-west through the center of the project is a broad green corridor some 80 meters wide and 900 meters in length. In addition, a Lychee tree grove on the northern edge of the original site was conserved and the development has a total green space coverage of 46 percent. By contrast, the well-landscaped courts between facing arrays of buildings are made more in the manner of gardens with curving pathways, open pergola structures, shrubs and clumps of tropical trees including species of palms.

Maintenance of the estate appears to be high and longstanding, although with a relatively low standardized fee of 2.3 CNY per square meter per month. Served by numerous bus lines, Meilin Yicun, some 4 kilometers from the city center, is still without close subway transit access.

However, once Line 9 is completed in 2017, the neighborhood will enjoy improved access to other parts of Shenzhen from a station stop on its doorstep. Other conveniences like shopping are nearby, including a farmer’s market that is set up for business each morning.

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Located further west in the Shekou area of Shenzhen, Weilan Hai’an (Côte d’Azur) is a large-scale neighborhood built in three phases.44 A private development built by Excellence Group Property Developments, it was completed in 2003 and houses 1,638 dwelling units, ranging from studio apartments to four-bedroom units and with three-bedroom units around 120 square meters in size. Modern in layout, units are generally divided into two zones: one for living, dining, and cooking, and the other for sleeping, bathing, and repose. With a residential density in a mid-range of 43,763 persons per square kilometer, the development is relatively spread out into a mixture of 30-plus storey towers linked together at several floors and lower 12-storey housing blocks. Throughout, the architecture is contemporary, rising in the form of both shafts of units and curvilinear alignments all striped by deep balcony reveals.

The north-south orientation is predominant but by no means as complete as in the earlier parallel-block organizations. Moreover, the plan forms of the apartment blocks are shaped primarily to create broad elliptical landscaped courts and other garden and plaza settings.

In fact, aspects of these landscapes vary in character from symmetrical formal arrangement and planting amid central pools and fountains, to streams, rocky areas, and boardwalks meandering among buildings. A comparatively self-contained community, Weilan Hai’an is

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Meilin Yicun in Shenzhen

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Weilan Hai’an (Côte d’Azur) in Shenzhen 24

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Top of the City I in Shanghai

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well supported on site by stores, kindergartens, community facilities, a swimming pool, and an ensemble of other recreational and sports facilities. The design of many of the high-rise buildings on pilotis also allows residents to enjoy the convenience of having sheltered exercise stations, supermarkets, shops, cafés, and restaurants on the ground floor, and adjacent to abundant outdoor space. Next to a station stop on the Shekou subway line, the project is also surrounded by the Houhai Minxin Park, the Beijing Normal University Nanshan Affiliated Elementary and Middle Schools, and the Shenzhen Nanshan District Houhai Elementary School. Management of the project has remained in the hands of the development group, with a moderate 2.5 CNY per square meter fee per month. The smaller and more luxurious Tianjiao Huating development of 2004 is located nearby and is also comprised of high-rise buildings enclosing a well-mannered arrangement of gardens and pools, as well as enjoying many of the same off-site services and facilities as Weilan Hai’an.

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Closer to the center of a city and roughly double the density is Top of the City I in Shanghai, at around 90,000 persons per square kilometer.45 Located in the Jing’an District, once a part of the International Settlement during Shanghai’s Treaty Port and Republican eras, this area constitutes a part of the urban core of the city. Top of the City I was developed by the Calxon Group, a state-owned enterprise, and was completed in 2005 before receiving China’s top prize in real-estate development. Planned in four phases, the project involved demolition of an old lilong development in 2000 and relocation of 3,000 people. The old lilong flooded frequently and had become a health and safety hazard. Designed by B+H Architects from Canada, the project covers a site area of 6.6 hectares and is bounded by Dagu Road to the south, Chengdu Road to the east, Huaihai Road to the north—a major thoroughfare in Shanghai—and Shimen First Road to the west. With some 2,000 dwelling units, the project is also located opposite the remarkable Yan’an Expressway Park, providing pleasant pedestrian access to the center of the city. Overall, the development is comprised of a number of apartment towers ranging in height from 29 to 24 to 16 storeys and offering a range of unit types with one to four bedrooms, some sporting rooftop gardens and terraces. These units range in size from 60 square meters at the smallest, up to a medium size of 200 square meters, and 500 square meters at the largest. Across the range, the average is 131 square meters and given both the quality of the apartments, the amenities of the development, and its location in the city, average prices are high even by international standards. Located on a roughly rectangular site, the apartment towers are grouped around a central ecological lake and adjacent landscaped areas, designed by Jing’an Garden Landscape Architects. The shallow lake covers an underground car park and features soft edges as well as purifying wetland areas. Other ‘green’ features of the project include solar panels installed for the community center, centralized utility rooms, and off-peak electrical storage units. The community center is open to the public on a paying basis and offers a range of activities with a pool and wellequipped gym. Children’s play areas are located by the central lake and the project is laced with pedestrian paths and jogging trails ensuring separation from vehicular traffic. Commercial and retail services line the first two floors along Dagu Road and the complex houses a dental clinic and is supported by a large fresh-food market on the opposite side of the road.

Centrally located in Shanghai, access to a full range of good schools and health services is also relatively close.

Among projects built in more or less contemporary time with traditional forms, the Ju’er Hutong , designed by Wu Liangyong, dates from field surveys in 1987 but was not completed until 1992. It was built in what was formerly known as Shaohui Jinggong Fang, a neighborhood block dating back to the Yuan Dynasty in thirteenth-century Beijing.46 Situated within 400 meters of the venerable Drum Tower in the northern section of the Dongcheng District of the old city of Beijing, the project was a part of an urban redevelopment effort initiated in the

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Juâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;er Hutong in Beijing

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District to alleviate poor, dilapidated, and overcrowded conditions. In addition, the 8.2-hectare site selected for experimental renewal suffered from poor utilities and frequent flooding.

It was home to some 3,180 residents, all of whom were given the option to move into the new project. Originally organized to be carried out in four phases, only two were completed.

Trees planted in and around the site were scrupulously preserved and housing was provided in apartments organized in two- and three-storey clusters around courtyards, mirroring the idea of courtyards inherent in the original siheyuan dwellings along the hutong and respecting a height limitation within the old city of 9 meters. Basements were also introduced in the second phase, once the drainage problem was resolved. Built at a floor area ratio of approximately 1.0, the area of apartments was about 2.5 times that occupied before the redevelopment. Some 208 dwelling units were constructed in the first two phases of the project, ranging from 28-square-meter one-bedroom units, through 41-square-meter two-bedroom units, to 61-square-meter three-bedroom units, and with an overall density of 38,780 persons per square kilometers.47 Implemented under the popular ‘Thirds Program’, where a third of the cost was borne by the state, local work unit, and household, respectively, 27 percent of the households returned, while the remainder moved, some renting out their units to others as a source of income. During phase two of the project, a community center was included.

Over time, apartments were also converted into office spaces or work-live spaces, no doubt prompted by proximity to Beijing’s commercial areas. While the project’s architecture was a bulkier departure from the single-storeyed courtyard house, units were, nevertheless, clustered around courts along with figuration that incorporated heavy gabled roofs in a traditional manner and venerable embellishments of doorways, entrance screens, and doorway details.

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Another example of urban renewal and housing in a traditional form took place in the north-eastern corner of the historic Pingjiang block of old Suzhou with the Tongfang­ xiang Xiaoqu neighborhood of 1992. Located almost immediately to the south of the classic Lion Grove Garden, this neighborhood occupies a single 3.6-hectare block within the city that was slated for demolition due to poor and dilapidated living conditions. Designed by the China Urban Planning Institute in Beijing based on an earlier proposal and survey from 1987, the project was subdivided into four parcels to maintain the continuity of Tongfang Alley that ran in an east-west direction, as well as to incorporate part of the Suzhou Historic District Conservation Plan within its boundaries.48 Comprised of 96 buildings, of which 45 exclusively for residential purposes, the overall form of the development was a more or less continuous perimeter-block arrangement, rising up to six storeys in height, within which a generally south-facing array of shorter buildings, lanes, and gardens were provided. Occupied in 1996, the area saw some of the former residents opting to return to what had been transformed into a mixed-income neighborhood with apartments usually sold as market-rate housing. In total there were 25 1.5-bedroom units, 89 two-bedroom units, 18 2.5-bedroom units, 58 three-bedroom units and 26 single-storey houses, somewhat in the manner of lilong dwellings. The half a bedroom convention is unique to Suzhou and is equivalent to an area of around 6 to 7 square meters. Generally units ranged in size from 60 to 90 square meters and those who returned were typically housed in the smaller units, although an improvement above the 40 square meters they were crammed into in the original neighborhood. With a total of 216 units, the density was a modest 21,000 people per square kilometer, although well in keeping with the surrounding urban fabric and the aims of the conservation plan.

Other uses, especially in the taller perimeter block included office commercial and retail commercial space. Also within the block, several historic sites were restored, including the Shaomo Hall, Dujiao Pavilion, and the Mengmei Hall. Throughout its life Tongfangxiang has been a government-controlled project, run by the Suzhou City Government.

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Tongfangxiang Xiaoqu in Suzhou

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WHERE NEXT? As narrated here, there has been a substantial evolution within at least two of the most prominent housing and community types in China – namely the parallel block arrangements and the high-rise developments. Without surrendering the more or less strict southern orientation and east-west alignment of housing blocks, the parallel arrangements advanced considerably with regard to how the space in between the units was made, how the projects were supported with regard to non-residential functions, and the general articulation and architecture of the housing blocks themselves. In all cases, the thrust of this evolution was towards less architecturally-reduced models of dwelling and more opulent and varied combinations of unit types, other uses, and architectural expressions. One only has to contrast Caixiang Xincun in Suzhou from the 1980s with, say, Langrun Gardens in Shanghai from 2006. The same may also be said of high-rise developments in scale, scope, and architectural embellishment and even accomplishment. The Top of the City I project in central Shanghai, for instance, is very much in the realm of ‘first-world’ development compared to earlier examples like those in the Wangjing district of Beijing.

Another prominent aspect of this typological evolution is the role and type of landscape that takes place in conjunction with towers and slab blocks. In more contemporary examples, it is far less a generic arrangement of trees and grassy areas as it is a case of gardens. One only has to contrast Sanlinyuan in Shanghai with Weilan Hai’an or Tianjiao Huating in Shenzhen for this to be apparent. Indeed, it seems like the ‘towers or slabs in the park’ have been supplanted by ‘towers or slabs with gardens’ as the prevalent building and landscape ensemble of the times. Then, there is also the recent trend towards more real ecological contributions, as evidenced most strongly by Langrun Gardens, in which an entire repertoire of so-called ‘green solutions’ were harnessed in the service of water harvesting, water purification, green-building surface relief, solar energy capture, and simply fitting into local environmental circumstances of canals and wetlands. A remarkable feature of China’s housing and community development is its often bucolic setting regardless of whether projects are centrally located within a city, on its periphery, or somewhere in between. Partially because of the sheer size and scale of developments, communities and neighborhoods are regularly imbued with this asset that is becoming something of a hallmark of Chinese community development.

One conspicuous aspect of China’s housing and community development that warrants particular comment and attention is the megaplot character of physical organization. Almost invariably this seems to occur at increments between 10 and 16, or so, hectares. From the vantage point of urban-architectural design this rather immediately introduces a number of issues that need to be addressed regardless of other circumstances. First, there is the matter of edge porosity and the number and distribution of entrances into developments.

In many of the examples described here, these entrances were relatively few and far between. Moreover, this is in keeping with time-honored practices and ideas about community, as described in the preceding chapter. Second, there is the extent and type of connectedness that is rendered within megaplots, with outcomes undoubtedly affecting gradients of community and privacy, as well as convenience and levels of service delivery. Contrast, for example, the central location of public and community services in Caixiang Xincun with those at Langrun Gardens on the periphery. Third, there is the landscape component in between spaces of the megaplot discussed earlier. Moreover, it often seems to be as important as the buildings themselves. Fourth, there is the figurative appearance of developments built almost entirely and almost all at once. In the case of Tongfangxiang, for instance, this seems to

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have been handled well with a largely uniform palette of materials engaging with an architecture that was both traditional and modern in various respects. Fifth, and finally, there is the opportunity within these large scales of development for the addition of further programmatic enrichment as time and circumstances move on and allow.

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Moving forward, there are also other precedents for dealing creatively with megaplot arrangements. First, there are the integrative strategies conspicuous in residential projects like the Linked Hybrid and, in particular, Jian Wai SOHO , located in the central business district area of the Chaoyang District of Beijing.49 Developed by SOHO, a successful and innovative private enterprise, the latter project was designed by Riken Yamamoto and responds to a new trend in otherwise commercial areas of live-work environments. Spanning across a megaplot on the order of 350 by 200-plus meters, were—in the early phases—some nine slender towers displaced 25 degrees from the street alignment of the area for superior insolation and views along an adjacent river, and rising to a height of 100 meters. Housing approximately 10,500 inhabitants, the project has a density of around 62,000 people per square kilometer. Of particular interest here though is the three- to five- storey-thick ground plane area, punctuated by open courts, crisscrossed by bridges and serving on the order of 200 shops, restaurants, and cafés, alongside car parking, tennis courts, and other recreational facilities. Allowing entry to the complex directly from surrounding streets, it is this ‘field operation’, for want of a better descriptor, which transforms the megaplot into a vital urban pedestrian domain.

Second, there are what can be termed scalar approaches to megaplots, whereby the sheer size of housing projects, like for instance the Pinnacle@Duxton and Skyville@Dawson in Singapore, both commissioned by the Housing and Development Board of Singapore, simply fits megaplots in a manner similar to normal buildings in more ordinary smaller urban blocks.

Both rise as much as 50 storeys and are comprised of multiple towers, with linking sky decks and community spaces at several levels of the tall towers. No doubt other strategies can also be harnessed, particularly those on display in chapter five of this volume dealing with new pathways forward and redevelopment opportunities.

Plan of Jian Wai SOHO in Beijing

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ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Peter G. Rowe is the Raymond Garbe Professor of Architecture and Urban Design at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and a Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor. He served for twelve years as Dean of the Faculty of Design at Harvard and prior to that as the Chairman of the Department of Urban Planning and Design as well as Director of the Urban Design Program. He is also the Chairman of the Studio for Urban Analysis (SURBA). The author and co-author of numerous books, several concerning China and East Asia, he recently authored Emergent Architectural Territories in East Asia and co-authored Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories.

In large part, this book is one of the outputs of the Health and Places Initiative (HAPI). The CP Group provided funding for the overall HAPI project and we thank the CP Chairman Dhanin Chearavanont for this funding and program manager Naree Phinyawatana for her extremely helpful feedback. David Mah, Leire Ascensio Villoria, Laura Smead, and Emily Salomon were working on companion outputs from the initiative and provided useful input. Yifan Yu was a thoughtful advisor to the wider project. During final production, Yun Fu, in particular, was instrumental in pulling the illustrative component together and both Chenghe Guan and Yingying Lü were fundamental to the earlier interview process.

Ann Forsyth is a professor of urban planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Trained in both planning and architecture, her research and practice focuses on the social aspects of physical planning and urban development and particularly on how to make sustainable and healthy cities. Widely published in monograph and article form, she serves as the Program Director of Urban Planning at Harvard.

In addition, our interview and recent site visits in China would not have been possible without the generous assistance and time of the following local contacts.

For the cases in Beijing we would like to thank Mr. Jianyin Li, Mr. Hong Shang, and Ms. Chen Chen. In Shanghai we are grateful to Professor Zhonggu Wang, Professor Yifan Yu, Mr. Zhiqiang Fu from the Vanke Group, Mr. Chengliang Huang from the Calxon Group, and Mr. Donglei Shi. In Suzhou, we would like to acknowledge the efforts of Mr. Wenbo Qiu, Mr. Jianhua Shi, Mr. Paul Tao, and Ms. Shirley Wang.

Finally, for the projects in Shenzhen, we would like to extend our appreciation to Ms. Dandan Hu and Mr. Jianyin Li.

Har Ye Kan is a lecturer in geography at Dartmouth College and a research associate at the Studio for Urban Analysis (SURBA). Prior to her current engagement she was a research associate and post-doctoral fellow at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design, where she received her doctoral degree. She has authored extensively on housing and issues of Chinese urbanism, including recent co-authorship of Urban Intensities: Contemporary Housing Types and Territories.

The air quality data, wind and environmental comfort maps, and Walk Score modeling results at the neighborhood level were produced single-handedly by Yingying Lü. Other illustrations, drawings, and graphs that accompany the text were done by an exceptional team from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design led by Yun Fu and including Kevin Fu, Wenting Guo, Mengdan Liu, Haibei Peng, and Long Zuo. With the exception of those credited in the publication, all photographs were taken by Ann Forsyth, Yingying Lü, and Peter Rowe. Finally, we would also like to express our appreciation to our editor for Birkhäuser, Andreas Müller and to our graphic designer, Reinhard Steger for their encouragement and creativity along the way.

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