The Chinese Unit: Persistence of the Collective Urban Model in Beijing

The Chinese Unit Persistence of the Collective Urban Model in Beijing

Yuwei.Wang

Projective Cities (MPhil in Architecture) 2011/13 Architectural Association School of Architecture Design-and-written Dissertation June 2013

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Abstract:

This dissertation attempts to re-strategize the relationship between the role of architecture and the idea of the city as a social space defined by the state and its citizens in China. It argues that the Chinese government should provide a more advanced welfare system that reflects its economic status and benefits all people. This welfare system is the foundation to promote a new collective idea of the city rather than solely proliferate urbanization.

The urban conflicts I focus on directly relate to the question of the citizen. I propose two ways of defining citizens. One is through the social events that compose one’s lives, whereby typical events can be regarded as the commonalities experienced by all. The other is through the social ties that one either is born into or establishes.

With these definitions, the city can be read as the different scales of space within which the typical lives occur and social networks are established. However, the nature of urbanization has fragmented these spaces and stretched the social networks across the city scale. A series of urban conflicts have therefore emerged. And I argue it is impossible to solve these conflicts within a market-oriented urban context: we have to rely on the power of state.

The thesis proposes that the architectural and urban space is first and foremost a social and political construct, embodied throughout history in the Chinese urban unit. Consequently, any spatial manipulation that creates new social ties can be considered equally as a polemic strategy to form a new society. Architecture then is regarded as either a framework for social events or a framework that embodies social ties. This definition understands people’s commonalities, social ties and urban space therefore as a mechanism to criticize contemporary Chinese urbanization. In the end, a middle-scale model between the private family and the public city will be proposed, within which the typical events will be assembled and rearranged as the commonalities to rebuild an idea of collectivity.

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CONTENTS

Introduction

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The Research Question

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The urban question

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Aim and structure of the thesis

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Chapter1: The Definition of Historical Chinese Unit

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1.1. The Transformation of the Urban Idea and the Dominant Types of

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Beijing 1.1.1. The courtyard house as the city making element

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1.1.2. The courtyard house as a social framework

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1.1.3. The hierarchical spatial order and the idea of sharing in the courtyard house

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1.1.4. The courtyard house as a common framework

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1.1.5. The ‘work unit’ as the city making element

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1.1.6. The Danwei as a social framework

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1.1.7. The hierarchical spatial order and the idea of sharing in the Danwei

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1.1.8. The Danwei type as a common framework

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1.2. The Definition of the Chinese unit---Three Principles

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Chapter2: The Critique on The Contemporary Urban Planning and the Mega-Block

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2.1. The Transition of Developmental Strategy

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2.2. The Transition of Urban Planning

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2.3. The Chinese Housing Market

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2.4. The Composition of Mega-Block

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2.4.1. The Block Scale

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2.4.2. The Typical Chinese Housing Plan VS the Typical Office Plan

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2.4.3. The state capitalism, organizational corruption and welfare system

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2.5. Conclusion: The Urban Conflicts and the Way of Defining People

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Chapter 4: The Proposal of New Chinese Unit and New Collective

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Conclusion: The Culture of Collectivity as the Idea of City

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Chapter 1 Introduction

The Chinese Dream: The new Chinese leader Xi Jinping refered the ‘Chinese dream’ on many occasions.

Chinese people have always had the dream of the Great Harmony of all under heaven, and long for a beautiful society with noble virtue, material plenty, equality and equity, in which all under heaven belongs to everyone.

This is the most central spiritual belief of the Chinese people. The Chinese Dream, in the end, is the dream of the people. It relies on the people, for the sake of the people. Socialism ensures that everyone jointly enjoys the opportunity for a splendid human life, jointly enjoys the opportunity to see dreams become reality, and jointly enjoys the opportunity to grow and progress together with the motherland and the times. The country doing well and the nation doing well, is for the sake of everyone doing well. The Chinese dream is for the common good.

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…… the Americans are just simply waiting for the moment when China finally becomes capitalist. I have a different assessment of the situation. I believe that the government is trying to, in a very intelligent way, introduce some of the advantages of liberalization without entirely giving up a kind of ‘safeguard’ for the entire nation.

That is something you can either be serious or cynical about---Rem Koolhaas

The Research Question: In the latter half of the 20th century the United States surpassed the Soviet Union A photo of the central government of China(Zhong Nanhai). The gate writes: Serve the People.

with its free markets and democracy; but in the new century, the Chinese government has achieved great economic success by allowing a high level of economic freedom with its central political intervention. In the past thirty years, China has transformed from a command economy of industry-driven socialism to a market economy of state capitalism.

The state capitalism has brought China almost 10-percent GDP growth per year over the past 30 years. State-owned enterprises account for about 60 percent of China’s GDP. Fundamentally, the Chinese economy is still under state control.

Through these state-owned enterprises, the government intervenes in the economy to protect critical industries from competition. At the same time this potential for The new leader of China, Xi Jinping

political intervention has made the Chinese government both the wealthiest and the most powerful government in the world.

In the wake of the global financial crisis, some critics have argued that state capitalism is superior to the free market since most liberal capitalist countries have failed to save their economy. But state capitalism is riddled with problems. The problems of state capitalism are mainly a political rather than economic one; especially as political power is always converted into economic dominance. Many companies in state capitalism inevitably degenerate into crony capitalism, as many powerful politicians tend to extend their control for their own gain. Therefore, mainly a small proporChina’s GDP growth since 2000-2012

tion of politicians have benefited from the economic achievements of past decades, largely through corruption. At the same time, the central government of state capitalism hasn’t made social welfare and the fair allocation of resources their priority, but instead, has prioritized its own benefits and powers.

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The dilemma of state capitalism is that its development largely relies on a virtuous and far-sighted government, which would stand for public interest rather than the personal gains of its elite. Since coming into power, the new leadership of China has started an anti-corruption campaign against government officials. President Xi Jinping and his political peers identified widespread corruption as a grave threat to China’s political stability. China’s new Prime Minister Li Keqiang1 laid out a vision for a more equitable society in which government officials put the people’s welfare before their own financial interests. In particular, he asserted that the government’s sprawling work force would be trimmed to increase spending on social welfare.

Therefore, the state today is beginning to question its role and function in both the economy and the social structure. With this in mind, what is the responsibility of the government and what is the developmental strategy in state-capitalism? As a socialist country, I would argue China should have a more advanced welfare system that better reflects its economic status. The government should take the responsibility to realize a ‘people’s republic’ by making state capitalism benefit all its people.

The Urban Question Since China has a special social context and political mechanism, two questions need to be discussed before further consideration: what should be the idea of the Art work by Liu Bolin. This photo Implys that peoples’ lives are defined by the State’s ideology

Chinese city and who should make decisions for the Chinese society? To answer these two questions, I will examine the urban conflicts which emerged during China’s reform and opening. The city of Beijing as a historical Chinese city, which is still under a continuous transformation from a typical industrial city toward a global metropolis, will be used to unfold the conflicts faced by most major cities in China, as well as the driving forces behind these conflicts.

Beijing’s master plan and the elemental urban block have represented the change of Chinese urban ideas and the games between decision makers. Before 1978, the organization of Beijing was not based on the market but on the idea of collectivity.

By comparing maps from before and after 1980s’, we can easily find that a city that used to rely on urban blocks, today now largely relies on an infrastructural system, and the urban plan has transformed from very specific plans of blocks to very general plans of a circulatory system.

Art work by Liu Bolin. This photo Implys that peoples’ lives are defined by the market and commodities.

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Li Keqiang’s first comments as China’s prime minister on March 17, 2013

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The social network and typical events

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The fragmentation of peoples’ lives

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Nevertheless, what has happened in the past 30 years is not merely a transformation of urban morphology and fabric, but also a transition of society and the way in which people live in the city. As a command economy, the central government has intervened and mobilized labor forces by setting rules within the work-unit in which they lived and worked in. Nevertheless, in the context of Chinese urbanization, the urban population, events and social ties have been redistributed and re-organized by the market. Therefore, people previously defined as the labor force before are today redefined as consumers. Although this transformation has considerably advanced Chinese society, it is also fundamentally problematic. I am particularly interested in two questions. One is the increasing traffic congestion despite the government’s increasing expenditure on infrastructure construction year by year. The other is the absence of social cohesion within community and between communities. A citizen could be defined in two ways: one is through the social events which comThe ancient urban planning

pose his or her life, like studying, working and living; the other is through the social ties which they belong to or establish, such as kinship and friendship. From the first definition, we can see that the fragmentation of peoples’ lives in a city with around 21-22 million population would inevitably cause (the) serious traffic congestion.

From the second definition, one’s social ties have been stretched across the urban scale. Related people do not live in the same community or block anymore, while people living in the same space have no reason to communicate with one another, which has caused the regression of social cohesion within the community.

Normally, people would blame this on the fast expansion of the city and heterogeneous land values. However, I would argue that the fundamental reason is that the urban block failed to function as a social device to frame people’s lives and define peoples’ social roles as it did before. Today, urban blocks are nothing but containers of population. Peoples’ lives on the other hand majorly happen outside of the blocks they reside in.

The command economy urban planning

I also would argue that it is the very definition of people that is problematic and has caused all of the urban issues I mentioned. Human behavior in the city is purely profit-driven and only for the purpose of fulfilling one’s own desire. The city, as well as the so-called community, have overlooked their potential to be a device of social organization and reduced themselves to a living container. All the issues of city and society could only be discussed in the family and city scales.

Given this situation, the answers to the questions I referred to at the very beginning, should clearly arise from the critique of urbanization and the way it has defined citizens.

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Aim and structure of the thesis

This dissertation attempts to re-strategize the relationship between the role of architecture and the idea of the city as a social space defined by the state and its citizens in China. The above critiques of current urban context have converted two urban problems into two spatial and scale issues through a definition of people. The thesis explores a middle scale model between both the private family and the public city.

This will begin with a study of the urban model before Chinese marketization, and result in the assembling and re-arranging of typical events and social relationships by inserting this middle scale into the contemporary city. The aim of the proposal is to rethink the architecture and urban space as first and foremost a social and political construct, embodied throughout history in the Chinese urban unit rather than overall master plans. The population framed by this middle scale model transcends the concept of the private family, and is defined as a component of a collective group. Thus their behaviors are not entirely motivated by individual gain and loss.

As a group, their expansion and contraction are due to a collective demand. Architecture then is regarded as either a framework for social events or a framework that embodies social ties. The idea of transforming the utilitarian block into a collective social model has to be formulated upon the support of the state, as it is that sate which has violated the rules of marketization.

As a social framework produced by the state, the new urban model needs to find a spatial strategy to organize and bind people rather than simply provide them with a place to live. In Chapter 2, the thesis will work on the idea and the deep structures of historical Chinese urban models, in order to grasp the principles of the urban strategy before Chinese urbanization. In Chapter 3, the thesis will further discuss the unique social and political context of Chinese society, especially the function of the government in state-capitalism. Then the thesis will put forward a critique of the current urban condition and the dominant type of Beijing. The game between local government, developer and consumer will be unfolded to interpret the particular type of Chinese housing block. Finally, the thesis will conceptualize the principle of the Chinese unit and propose to insert this very idea into the current urban model, and convert it into a social framework.

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The courtyard house

The work unit (Danwei)

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Chapter 1 The Definition of Historical Chinese Unit

The Chinese Unit: Before the economic reform in 1980s, the urban idea of Beijing was embodied in two historical Chinese units, rather than its master plans. One is the courtyard house(Si He Yuan) and the other the ‘work unit’ (Danwei). Both of them have successfully defined a group of people as one entity through the establishment of the sense of collectivity. Then the people, defined as a middle scale society, established their own rules within their realm. They neither purely aspired to the public good of society as a whole, nor purely strove for personal benefit, which means they neither lost their competitiveness nor their governance. The study of the courtyard house and work unit attempt to draw a perspective of the relationships between urban strategies, spatial orders of Chinese units and the social ties build inside of them. Through the Chinese unit, the city of Beijing could be understood, designed and reconstructed.

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Chapter 1: The Definition of the Historical Chinese Unit

1.1. The transformation of the urban idea and the dominant types of Beijing

I will study the city of Beijing before urbanization to find how to build the idea of collectivity. In particular I focus on two collective urban blocks before the 1978 economy reform, which I have named the ‘Chinese unit’. The term ‘Chinese unit’ here does not indicate any cultural or artistic meaning, but instead refers to the historical city-making elements of Beijing which could also be regarded as the basic unit of the administrative system, the economic system and the social system, from the feudal era to the industrial era.

Before the economic reform in 1980s, the urban idea of Beijing was embodied in two historical Chinese units. One is the courtyard house (Si He Yuan) and the other the ‘work unit’ (Danwei). The courtyard house was the most common residential unit based on kinship in the feudal era, while the Danwei was the ‘work unit’ that included important working and living space, and it was directly instituted and controlled by the central government during the early socialistic era. Interestingly, though with different compositions and purposes, both of them have successfully defined a group of people as one entity through the establishment of a sense of collectivity. Then the people, defined as a middle scale society, established their own rules within their realm. They neither purely aspired to the public good of society as a whole, nor purely strove for personal benefit, which means they neither lost their competitiveness nor their governance.

The study of the courtyard house and work unit attempts to draw into perspective the relationships between urban strategies, spatial orders of Chinese units and the social ties built inside of them. The premise of this study is that these three aspects persistently influenced and redefined the principles of historical Chinese units. The government always assembled and limited the population within the Chinese unit through its spatial and programmatic organization. The grid and block system has persistently set up rules for the city since ancient times until today, and it allows urban strategies in different periods to be discussed and compared. In particular I want to investigate three questions: firstly; how did the spatial order and social ties make the Chinese unit a common framework within which collective life occurred?

Secondly, how did the political strategies of the Chinese government impact on Chinese Units

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the everyday lives of the urban population, through the ways in which they create

and structure particular forms of spatial order in each example of the Chinese unit?

Thirdly, how did social relationships, political and economic strategies confront and interact within the Chinese unit, which can be read as either a fragment of the urban norm, or an independent exception?

By using ‘Chinese unit’ rather than ‘urban unit’ I aim to set up a particular condition and political background. The unique social context and the political mechanism of Chinese society have the potential to enable the urban block to deviate from market control and the stream of urbanization, to instead stand for a public interest.

Here I adopt the approach to analyze the ‘Chinese Unit’ model by separating it into both an idea and a model. The idea of typology is embodied in the object and ‘serve as a rule for the model’ as Quatremere de Quincy argued in ‘The Dictionnaire d’architecture’ (1825). The study of the ‘idea’ in my thesis mainly focuses on the purposes and strategies behind it, while the study of the model is concerned with the spatial syntax and rules that different Chinese units have adopted as their deep structure, to represent the meaning of that idea.

A fragment of ‘Qian Long’ map of Beijing (1750)

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‘Qian Long’ map of Beijing (1750)

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1.1.1.The Courtyard House as the City Making Element

The city Beijing in ancient times was framed by countless walls. These walls not only protected its people, but also divided them into groups. Therefore the walls were actually built for limitation and social control, and they established a structure for the implementation of top-down governance. Social events and activities were separated and limited by these walls, and the peoples’ lives were supposed to happen inside of the frames as well. Due to this reason, each space framed by walls had assembled multiple urban programs, and people defined by these walls and programs lived a collective life.

The nested urban strucure Drawing from this understanding, in the traditional Chinese city the walls made an ordered space and generated a society of collectivity. The concepts of ‘collectivity’ and ‘family’ had always been regarded as much more important than individualism under Confucian, which promoted the establishment of social hierarchy and was appreciated by authorities.

The walls then melted away as a concrete urban form. The road system became the new tool of planning, but the idea of the city as a place of political and social regulation remained. The road planning of Chinese cities was proposed according to the classical layout outlined in Zhou Li, ‘The rites of Zhou Dynasty’1 . The Li was a code that sought to regulate behavior at all levels of society.

“A 7,500 meter-long axis, running from north to south through the city, is the strongThe grid and governmental rules

est organizing element of the whole plan. An east-west axis intersects this main axis, defining the centre of Beijing. This centre is further defined locally by a rigidly symmetrical layout of palaces and, at a larger scale, by a concentric layout of orthogonal ‘cities’ of Beijing.” 2

In the book Kao Gong Ji (Recording of construction), which the Zhou Li referred to, the earliest urban planning method can be found:

“The capital city shall be a square with each side nine li long and containing three gates. In the city, there shall be nine north-south and nine east-west streets. The north-south streets shall accommodate nine chariot-ways. Together they form a 1

The urban fabric

The Rites of Zhou (Chinese: t 周禮, s 周礼, p Zhōulǐ) is – along with the Book of Rites and the Etiquette & Rites – one of three ancient ritual texts (the “Three Rites”) listed among the classics of Confucianism..

2 Jianfei Zhu, ‘The Chinese Spatial Strategies: Imperial Beijing 1420—1011.’ (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), P. 29

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The courtyard house as a social framework

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chessboard street pattern. On the left (east) of the city there shall be a Temple of Ancestors and on the right (west) an Altar of Land and Grain. In the front (south) there shall stand the emperor’s audience halls and government ministries, in the rear (north) markets shall be located.” 3

Beijing’s planning basically follows the description of Kao Gong Ji. The city was the central government of China and of many dynasties. The planning had a 7.9 kilometers central axis. With regard to the central axis, the nested walls, planned from top to down, articulated the ground.

“The residential area within the city walls was divided into blocks defined by the The courtyard house was the most prevailing type in Beijing which was arranged according to the Confucian moral order. The Confucian moral order in my argument is a political strategy rather than a cultural one. It promoted social hierarchy in order to implement a traditional governance.

interlocking grid of avenues. In turn, each block—known variously as li, or later, fang—was enclosed by its own walls.”4

Then the organization of population is achieved through the articulation of urban space. The rules were called ‘Xiangli’, which is similar to the concept of ‘nomos’ of the Greek polis. Both of them could be interpreted as law, custom or conventions.

The ‘nomos’ limited and regulated peoples’ actions. The rights and obligations of citizens were the major concerns of the Greek polis’s planning. Similarly, the laws of old Beijing planning were to mirror the distribution of power and to divide society into small units according to a hierarchical system of population registration, tax collection, military and political control. Here, urban forms are used as an instrument of regulation.

The layout of Beijing displays a centrality and symmetry, which highlights the power of authority in the center and the dominant role of rules and laws. The private houses were defined as part of a block by surrounding walls, wells and markets they shared. The central government was not only the engineer of society, but also

The kinship is the foundation of the collectivity within the courtyard house, and this collectivity was established based on social hierarchy. The composition of rooms was encoded to represent and reproduce the hierarchy of family members and the governance system, reflected both in its organizational layout and scale. With its specific articulation of space, individuals were placed according to their identity and should behave according to moral orders.

shaped the urban form as an urban planner. Through this technique, the power was separated and delivered from top down, and the power system covered every aspect of people’s lives. No one living in the city could escape from it.

This system took the household as the minimum element of urban organization rather than the individual, which meant that the family was the smallest social element. However, it is necessary to clarify the concept of family, which at that time, was nothing like its meaning today. The concept was significantly broader than direct relatives. The ancient family could accumulate from several members to 3

Jianfei Zhu, ‘The Chinese Spatial Strategies: Imperial Beijing 1420—1011.’ (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), P. 32 4 David Bray, ‘Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform’, (Standford University, 2005), p.23

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The typical events in the courtyard house type

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The spatial syntax of the courtyard house

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The courtyard house types varied according to climates and situations

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The events and social ties framed by courtyard houses

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hundreds of members. The masters of the family as the agent and mediator stood for the honor and had the obligation for other members, and all other members rose and fell as one group. Family to some extend was a form of sub-society.

1.1.2, The courtyard house as social framework

The courtyard house was the most prevalent type during this period. This was mainly because the spatial order of courtyard house was encoded to represent and reproduce the clearly defined social relationships that underpinned the Confucian moral order. The typical courtyard house was a traditional rectangular housing type with multiple rooms surrounding a void in the center. In different areas of China, the courtyard house type has slightly changed to respond to climate and cultural conventions. The layout of a typical courtyard house in Beijing was designed to be simple but rigid, which would translate social hierarchy into a spatial syntax.

In a typical one-yard courtyard house, the rooms surrounding the courtyard were normally sited along the north-south and east-west axes. The room on the north and facing the south was the main room for the senior couple, so that the seniors as the masters could dominate the internal courtyard and other rooms. The buildings that adjoined the main room and faced east and west are the side building where the other family members lived. The northern, eastern and western buildings are sometimes connected by pathways. The building facing north is known as the opposite building. The entrance gate is usually at the south-eastern corner. All of the rooms around the courtyard have large windows or doors facing onto the yard, and small windows high up on the back wall facing out onto the street. The distribution of spaces made each member visible within the hierarchical order of the social group, and the individual’s behavior was policed through the transparency of the open courtyard formation.5

The number of courtyards was a mark of prosperity and wealth in ancient times.

The size and quantity of courtyards would vary according to the status of the family, number of family members and social structure; some large compounds had two or more such courtyards to house extended families. The biggest courtyard houses, like the Forbidden City, were as large as small towns. They occupied many urban infrastructures and programs. Some of them had their own park, lake, hills, schools, 5 Chen Li, ‘Reinterpretation of Traditional Chinese Courtyard House’ (University of TennesseeKnoxville, 2009), pp. 2-3

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clinics and so on. For their members, the courtyard house was more like their own world. Nevertheless, no matter how it grew, the basic principles of spatial arrangement and distribution remained the same. In a multi-yard courtyard house, each courtyard opened to the next one. One could not enter other yards freely without permission, and members took different circulation routes according to their status. Each individual was supposed to behave according to the rite of propriety and remain in his or her rightful position defined by a social hierarchy. The traditional Chinese unit was therefore designed to reproduce the differentiated social relationships demanded by the authorities.

1.1.3. The hierarchical spatial order and the idea of sharing in the courtyard house

The hierarchical system of the courtyard house separated people according to their identity into miniature societies. It produced a collective social order through the very idea of sharing, and on a different spatial scale, people were defined according to what they shared.

In each courtyard unit, the void space and the walls define its residents as a group.

The void space, the yard, is a common space where people belonging to same group could come together, and the wall articulated the sharing hierarchy. Peoples’ daily lives majorly happened and overlapped within their own courtyards, which acted as a social space. At the next level, a larger courtyard framed two or more courtyard houses. The people who belonged to separate courtyards were defined at this scale as one group.

The typical situations and programs at different scales also play an important role in defining people. Space of different levels in the hierarchical system contained different events, from private to collective. For instance, in the main courtyard, a domestic entertainment party would be held on festival days or special occasions, and all of family members were supposed to participate and mind their manner and speech.

Yet in each individual courtyard house, people would be more casual and relaxed.

Because of this existence of sharing, governance was ubiquitous. There were many shared rooms like guest halls, reading rooms, tea rooms, private classrooms, eating rooms, toilets, etc. Family members were all allowed to use these rooms and facilities. This governance made the lives within the courtyard house more political than today’s family lives. People in ancient era had to carefully deal with their relationship

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The typical courtyard house type 1( single courtyard type)

The typical courtyard house type 2( multi-courtyards type)

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The growth of spatial order

The growth of courtyards

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The The Grand View Garden or Prospect Garden (Da GuanYuan 大观园), a large landscaped interior garden in the classic Chinese novel Dream of the Red Chamber, built within the compounds of the Rongguo Mansion. It is the setting for much of the story.

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The courtyard house as a common framework can capture different urban programs

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with other family members. If one was ejected from the family, it meant he or she was out of the social system and lost all of living resources, since these resources were distributed and controlled by each family master. Through this understanding, we can understand how collectivity was established in ancient society.

This nested system could be enlarged from the smallest courtyard house to the whole city. In the case of the Forbidden City, countless small courtyard houses were embodied and defined by the walls and sharing voids at multiple scales.

1.1.4. The courtyard house as a common framework

In the Forbidden City, besides being a housing unit, the courtyard house type could be used as a government work place. In fact, by slightly changing its deep structure, the courtyard house type could occupy multiple functions, such as commercial facilities like restaurants and stores, and religious facilities such as temples and altar halls. As a common framework used in different climate conditions and occupying different programs, the rules and the political strategy behind the type could be implemented in every territory of China. Through this common framework, the central government intervened in and regulated each individual’s daily lives, and people who entered it would quickly realize the laws and orders it represented. The common framework embodying this convention translated the hierarchical system to a common knowledge.

To conclude, the courtyard house as a cellular city-making element was directly produced by Chinese political philosophy. It defined people into groups through reducing individuality and encouraging collective living. Finally, it was a common framework that could lend itself to different programs.

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The Danwei compounds

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1.1.5. The ‘work unit’ as the city making element

After 1949, when China’s communist party founded The People’s Republic of China, the population of Beijing suddenly underwent dramatic growth. The urban population in Beijing was 2.6 million in 1949, and it grew up to 5.9 million by 1986.6 In the new socialist regime, as the political center of the nation, Beijing was set up as an exemplary industrial and productive center for all other Chinese cities.

The planning of the early socialist Beijing learned from the Soviet urban planning The urban plan of 1954

model, which projected the economic plan to the spatial master plan. The purpose of urban planning was mainly to design a physical space to accommodate and arrange both production activities and employees to achieve the goals set by economic planning. The Communist Party tried to convert the city, even the whole country, into a big factory. The planning firstly was under the leadership of Mao Zedong. In Mao’s urban strategy, “only when production in the cities is restored and developed, when consumer-cities are transformed into producer-cities, can the people’s political power be consolidated.”7 Therefore, the first round of the master plan focused on:

(1) The urban plan of 1955

Medium and large industrial construction projects in reasonable locations in

the city (2)

Urban functional areas

(3)

Urban transport and infrastructure.8

The main aim of the city was to increase the efficiency of the labor force and of production. The master plan made in 1958, decentralized planning via an emphasis on the close relationship between work and home, in a critique of the principle of segregated land use.9 Most new construction in the 50s’ and 60s’ were productive structures. These factories and institutions built apartment buildings for their workers. The new dominant type, the work unit, emerged and was largely developed.

The work unit, named as Danwei in Chinese, included important working and livThe urban plan of 1957

ing parts, and was directly instituted and controlled by the central government during the early socialistic era. It framed most of parts of urban life. By 1978, around 6 Data from The social statistics department of national statistical bureau of China 7 David Bray, ‘Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform’, (Standford University 2005), p.96 8 Chaolin Gu, Xiaohui Yuan and Jing Guo, ‘China’s master planning system in transition--Case study on Beijing’, 46th ISOCARP Congress 2010, p.2 9 Chaolin Gu, Xiaohui Yuan and Jing Guo, ‘China’s master planning system in transition--Case study on Beijing’, 46th ISOCARP Congress 2010, p.12

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95 percent of urban labour belonged to the Danwei system.10 The work unit quickly became the social, economic, and organizational unit of the Chinese society. In the book Social Space and Governance in Urban China, David Bray wrote: ‘……It was the foundation of urban management and the basis for a distinctly socialist strategy of governance. At the same time, it played a crucial part in mobilizing labor to transform consumer cities into producer cities and in the process create a large new working class……’ 11

1.1.6. The Danwei as a social framework

The Danwei (work unit) defines who you are and where you belong. Membership in The workplace

a Danwei was an important sign of social status and an important vehicle to attain status and social mobility.12

Danweis were organized in a hierarchical system by industry. It served as the mediator between the power of central government and the general population. For the government, a society organized with collectives in enclosed territories, instead of individuals, was easier to control and govern. Rather than simply being a workplace and residential place, the Danwei was in fact a political regulation device, as the courtyard house was.

The fundamental importance of the Danwei lay in its unique combination of economic, political and social functions. A typical Danwei integrated the workplace, the housing area and communal facilities in a big compound, but sometimes the Danwei The public canteen

would be divided into several secondary compounds to mark different functions and power groups. The key architectural elements were located along a central axis, with subsidiary elements arranged in groups on either side of it. The communal facilities, like public clubs and canteens, were located in the centres. From the typical Danwei layout we can easily see that buildings and walls were used to demarcate compounds. These compounds then enclosed the central area, which was filled by monuments like stadiums, education centers and other communal facilities. ‘The largest-scale Danwei tended to have separate residential compounds adjacent to the compound containing the industrial plants and administrative offices. Indeed, the sheer size of some of these Danwei gave them the appearance of small cities or industrial towns.’13

The living compound

10 The social statistics department of national statistical bureau of China, 1994 11 David Bray, 2005, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform, Standford University, p95 12 Yu Xie, Qing Lai and Xiaogang Wu, Danwei and Social inequality in Contemporary Urban China, Work and Organizations in China After Thirty Years of Transition, p286 13 David Bray, ‘Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform (Standford University, 2005) p146

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The typical composition of Danwei

36

1.1.7. The hierarchical spatial order and the idea of sharing in the Danwei

The Danwei had partly inherited the basic spatial principles of the courtyard house.

The elemental social units were transformed from traditional forms of family, to institutions. To adopt the traditional cellular urban unit and regulate the urban population in separated groups, one of the key issues was to handle the relationships between different individual preferences. Since in each cellular work unit members were no longer tied by kinship, the new government attempted to find a way to encourage the collective living style and suppress private interests.

The government therefore developed a welfare distribution system. The work unit offered its employees lifetime employment and welfare including free housing, medical care, child care, food supply, water and electricity supply and so on. These resources that people depended on, were totally controlled and allocated according to an employees’ performance by each Danwei executive department. The executive department was the Communist Party branch. Thus, the whole state was under the control of the Party. In this way, not unlike the feudal age, the individual had to rely on the group and the miniature society they belonged to. Each individual laborer in the Danwei was supposed to contribute to the public interests and the socialistic ideal rather than pursue personal interests. The so-called welfare was actually defined in a governmental and political manner.

Within this welfare system, every three to five families shared toilets and kitchens on the same floor. At the next level, each two to three buildings shared facilities like laundries and gardens and, at the Danwei level, all residents shared hospitals, schools and so on. These shared facilities assembled people and limited the expansion of their social circles and lives in a middle scale block. 14

1.1.8. The Danwei type as a common framework

The administration, institution, university, big hospital, military, factories, and almost all the urban institutions are Danweis. Danwei took the fabric of the city and society, and included every individual into the administration and economic system. It formulated a very generic idea of spatial organization. Though each Danwei model appeared quite different from others, they were following the same rules.

14 David Bray, ‘Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform’, (Standford University 2005),p.151

37

University

38

Government or institution

Factory

39

Different scale compounds defined by housing slabs. Through this definition, a hierarchical spatial order will be established, and the Danwei become a social framework.

40

The tyical events and social ties framed by Danwei

41

The housing slabs in the Danwei

TYPES

VOID

BORDER

CIRCULATION

The deep structures of compounds in the Danwei

42

The typical compound in the Danwei

43

The tyical housing slab type in the Danwei

44

The corridor as a common space

45

1.2. The definition of the Chinese unit In addition, though it was the norm and a device of the central government at that These two types, the courtyard block and the Danwei, were the most typical and

moment, the Chinese unit was socially and spatially defined as an enclosed au-

elemental units of Beijing during their consecutive political periods. In both cases

tonomy. The separation between the inside and outside and the independence of

the void provided a common ground in which collective life would occur. Both also

the parts of the system enabled the Chinese to deviate from the norm of the city,

adopted a symbolic axis and hierarchical spatial layout. The difference between

and form a political and economic exception. This is of critical importance later in

them was, however, evident. In the courtyard house, people lived in different

my argument, because this allows us to understand the Chinese unit as an ‘intel-

rooms where their location indicated their social status within the family. By con-

ligent urban model’, which can actively agree or disagree with the urban norm.

trast, the Danwei, promoted a principle of social equality, with each family seen as

Differing from other homogenous urban models, the Chinese unit has the poten-

the same. The void in the courtyard house was a place where the master could

tial to criticize, challenge and generate new urban rules.

survey people’s behaviors, while in the Danwei the void was the place where people would ascertain their social ties. The growth of the courtyard house can be

Therefore the historical Chinese Unit can be understood as a kind of flexible

considered as an extension of the existing social hierarchy, while the expansion

urban element that proposes and transforms the cellular urban structure. In other

of the Danwei merely meant an increase in scale and a higher number of inhab-

words, through the Chinese unit, the city of Beijing can be understood, designed

itants. The symbolism of the Danwei also substantially differed from that of the

and reconstructed. Most importantly, we can also learn that the meaning of this

traditional courtyard house, which was arranged by a central axis and had a clear

cellular unit is far more than simply an urban block or a housing community. It em-

progression of elements from lesser to greater importance. The Danwei reversed

bodies the idea of regulation, and the government used it as the minimum admin-

this order by placing the principal architectural elements at the forefront of the

istrative department. This implies that the Chinese unit is the foundation of urban

axis, opposite the entrance to the compound.

management, and the basis for a distinctly socialist strategy of governance.

The arrangements of space and programs in both cases were not merely for political purposes, they also promoted social cohesion by providing communal facilities and common spaces. Social ties between family members, partners and neighbors established a collective lifestyle within these enclosed units. People living in the same Chinese unit would always have something in common, and this commonality consolidated social ties and formed circles of similar minded individuals.

In summary, the three principles of the Chinese unit are firstly that the Chinese unit is the city-making element. Secondly, in the Chinese unit the spatial hierarchy defines a single spatial element as part of the entity, and also, an individual person is defined as a part of the group by the events and situations that occur at different scales. The spatial order and the form of buildings in the Chinese unit are set up by a political purpose, are not just utilitarian. More importantly, they are productive. They produced a collective social system by the very idea of sharing.

Finally, the Chinese unit is a common framework that could be occupied by different programs. In doing so, the Chinese unit could be defined firstly, as a cellular city-making element embodying a political will, and secondly, as a common urban framework within which a collective life could occur.

46

47

The Mega Block

48

Chapter 2 The Critique on The Contemporary Urban Planning and the Mega-Block

The urban problems that China is facing today could never be solved by building more infrastructures. It is time to turn to urban block once again. Architecture need to be recast as a frame of space, social ties and typical events. Unless the building and space arrangement stops formulating for a commercial purpose, it would not regain its urban role and power as an instrument of social framework. When the architecture plays a role as an instrument of adjustment, it would concrete the dialectical relationships between state and market.

49

2.1. The transition of developmental strategy Following the study of the Chinese unit, I will now focus on the urban problems of contemporary Beijing. This chapter analyzes the current economy system, urban strategy and the problematic deep structure of the residential block.

In a pure market economy, labor forces are controlled by private interests, and enterprises maximize profits by reducing labor cost. Business and consumers decide Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun at the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee in December of 1978.

The emphasis of the government has shifted from class struggle and massive production to economic development.

what they want to produce and purchase. The government in a pure market-driven society plays a limited role in the urban construction. In a planned economy, the government is characterized by the collective ownership of goods and resources to produce what people need, instrumented by the dominance of state-owned enterprises. To lead and organize economic construction is one of the functions of the socialist state. The state institutions exercise the necessary control, through economic, administrative and legal means, over the state owned and collectively-owned enterprises and other economic sectors, in accordance with the needs of developing the national economy in a planned and proportionate way. As an economic system in which economic activity is undertaken by the state, with management and organization of the means of production in a capitalist manner; state capitalism combines the best of both the market economy and the command economy: the private sector and market competition with the stability that comes from government backing.

Deng’s economic reform has largely promoted the dramatic transition of Chinese cities during 1980s’ and 90s’.

China has undergone a comprehensive socio-economic reconstruction from a command economy to a socialist market economy. Since the 1980s, the emphasis of the government has shifted from class struggle and massive production to economic development. To achieve this shift, new incentives and competitions were required at the micro-level rather than at a macro-level, so that the efficiency of production would be stimulated. The state had to relinquish its governance over all aspects of city. In the Danwei period, once a worker was employed he got all the basic living guarantees though with very little salary. He could enjoy the materials and social benefits provided by the Danwei. However, the planned economy had also dampened the initiative and creativity of workers. Deng Xiaoping, the leader of Chiese economic reform, considered material incentives to be more effective than ideological incentives in the promotion of labor productivity. More autonomy had been given to the Cadres of Danwei in regard to decisions on investment, resource allocation and labor force management. The labor market was created and workers could be hired and fired according to enterprises needs and their performance. In 1986 the government issued provisional regulation on the contract labor system in

50

state-owned enterprise. The old employment system had been put to an end. The ‘iron rice bowl’1 became history, and China entered a new era. Both employees and enterprises had the freedom to choose each other. The welfare system provided by Danwei had been replaced by the pricing mechanism.

Since 1978, two of the most significant changes to Chinese policy have been the urban planning system reform and the establishment of the housing market. After a series of huge transformations, the control of city was gradually delivered from the government to the market. The market became the most powerful factor in adjusting the society and urban form. Since the government lost their control over individual Danwei, each Danwei began to find their own way for further developments. One significant change was the separation of the workplace and the living place. The commodification of urban land reduced the interests of Danweis’ Cadres to provide their employees with housing. Since the 1990s, more and more Danweis would rather pay housing subsidy and rent the land and rooms to commercial use for additional income. At the same time, the housing market had been established. The urban strategy began to place emphasis on the construction of infrastructure rather than the specific plan of each block, since the reform caused a large flow of labor force and the pricing mechanism redistributed the functions of urban land. Populations were redistributed according to people’s wealth rather than social ties.

2.2. The Transition of Urban Planning “In a market-driven society the necessity of urban planning stems from the existence of externalities and the need to provide public goods. In a planned economy, urban planning is perceived as a tool to realize the socialist ideology of planned development and to ‘translate’ the goal of economic planning into urban space.” 2

The advantage of socialism over capitalism was its potential to establish a scientifically planned economic system capable of fulfilling the genuine needs of society.

In contrast, capitalism was largely unplanned and driven by the desire to maximize profits.3 Spatial planning reflected economic planning. In a pure market economy, on the other hand, private property rights would be protected, and could not be taken for public use without compensation. The government since has limited powBeijing in the early stage of economic reform

1 The popular expression of a permanent job on fixed income, regardless of workers performance.

2 Fulong Wu, 2007, Urban development in post-reform China, Routledge, p 158 3 David Bray, 2005, Social Space and Governance in Urban China: The Danwei System from Origins to Reform, Standford University, p80

51

ers and could not direct private sectors to produce certain goods and services.

To clarify this for my project, it is necessary to unfold the relation between the market economy and urbanization. Urbanization was imported to China after the economic reform. Before the Chinese economic reform, urban lives majorly happened within each urban block. The focus on infrastructure construction after 1978 meant the city had been redefined as a place composed by roads and private families.

The term urbanization was firstly introduced by the Spaniard Ildefons Cerda. His The grid system of the Eixample. Barcelona

General Theory of Urbanization (1867) and its application in the proposal for The Reform and Extension of Barcelona embodied his comprehensive approach for industrial cities. The task of urbanization was to expand infrastructure as much as possible in order to develop human habitats. Rather than impose a specific urban form, he offered a set of parameters to articulate the urban fabric. “Cerda’s paradigm was the condition of limitlessness and the complete integration of movement and communication brought about by capitalism.”4 In his proposal for the Exiample of Barcelona, he also used the grid and block system, but in his case they were used as devices to maximize efficiency and redistribute social wealth in a homogeneous way. In his 133-by-133 meters blocks for Barcelona, each family had a private garden, while the public space, which he named as the ‘inter-way’, was completely open to the city and pedestrians. Therefore the compound was not only a

The urban blocks of the Eixample. Barcelona

shared space for residents, but also an extension of the city road. The block model clearly announced the city as a large ground composed by individual families. In other words, the essence of urbanization put private interests first, and the city was supposed to provide a homogeneous condition and healthy environment for the reproduction of the labour force. Therefore, by the original definition of urbanization, people were defined either as private families, or as the population of the city.

Before 1978, the city’s master plan aimed to control people’s daily life within the Danwei. The driving force of society and urban planning were the administrative commands of state. However, since late 1980s, China’s urban planning system were rebuilt when the planners and government realized that traditional master planning was no longer capable of meeting the demands by a rapid development of the economic system. The master plan was no longer directly connected with politics.

The ‘Interway’ model

Therefore, the new market economy required an effective control over land speculation. The government in response allocated power rather than resources to the

4 Cerda, The Five Bases of the General Theory of Urbanization ed. by Arturo Soria y Puig and trans. by Bernard Miller (Milan: Electa, 1999) ,p 9

52

Street Scene

Scene within urban unit

Before1949

1957

1992

2004

53

The wide roads and housing communities

54

The industry distribution planning

Green area planning

The program structure planning

State-owned enterprises and institutions planning

Land use planning

Multi-centers planning

Road network planning

Public parking planning

Flyovers in Beijing

55

The ‘Xi Zhi Men’ tube station. Beijing

The ‘Xi Zhi Men’ street. Beijing

56

lower level government. Retreating from the direct control of the Danwei, the state’s control over land use was weakened. Therefore, the need to control land uses through land-use planning became acute. To be effective, land-use planning had to be able to regulate land use regardless of the status of work-units.

The master plan of Beijing encouraged people to move out of the closed society of the Danwei. The 1989 City Planning Act set up a comprehensive urban planning The urban construction since 1990 to 2000

system that replaced an economic planning strategy with urban land-use planning.

The government only indicated the basic land use of each district, and the specific planning was released to each developer or enterprise. Infrastructural systems were used to manipulate regional spatial development, such as city size, environmental quality, and urban settlements. After 2000, the master plan intended to promote Beijing to the level of global city, especially when Beijing was appointed to host the Olympics. From the inception of economic reform, the infrastructural system became increasingly important, since the influx and exchange of commodity had defeated politics to become the instrument of the city. As a consequence, today the city of Beijing is greatly defined by vehicular transportation. City planning, which transformed from an administrative diagram in ancient Beijing to the economic plan of socialist Beijing, has become an infrastructural plan in modern Beijing. By the mid-2000s, urbanism largely took over industrialism as the basis of its development

The urban underground lines planning .2012

strategy. On the other hand, the system of governance became less and less important in spatial organization.

The urban master plan since 1980s’ played a significant role in economic growth.

The master plans focused on large-scale infrastructure, economic networks and tertiary industry. Urbanization was promoted. In Beijing, large housing districts, subway extension and a second and third ring road were completed in the late 1980s. Most of new residential buildings are now in the suburbs, while most of important industries and offices are in the center. Urban life has been fragmented. People have to travel a long distance to work, shop, study and so on. By 2012, the number of motor vehicles in Beijing has exceeded 5 million. Today the city has 6 ring roads, 16 subThe Housing boom has largely changed the urban structure of Beijing. The ground lost its social function.

way lines, and 882 bus lines. People are encouraged to travel by public transport rather than private cars. However, traffic congestion is still increasing day by day.

To combat traffic congestion, the local government has built a subway system, adding more lines and working towards doubling the size of the system by 2015.5 However, the annual average population growth in Beijing is about 3.8 percent over 5

Transport in Beijing, Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transport_in_Beijing

57

the past 10 years. Migrants who have resettled from other provinces to Beijing are the main contributors to Beijing’s population growth. Building a more comprehensive infrastructure is not the solution to meet the rapid growth, as I would argue that traffic congestion is caused by current land policy and the market mechanism. In other words, I believe the issue will not be solved until we adopt a different developmental strategy that uses architecture and urban design to organize urban lives and social networks. Then urban space would be shifted from a commodity to a tool of governance.

2.3. The Chinese Housing Market By 1989, 90% of public housing was owned by the Danweis. At the beginning of 1990s’, since the central government no longer provided financial support, more and more Danweis found their land could bring more profits than their productions. Thus the cadres of Danweis tried in various ways to convert industrial and residential land to commercial use. The land use and the nature of Danwei were separated. The cadres became partners in businesses that were totally unrelated to their original industries. The real estate developers came into the game from the 1990s’, and much urban land has been transferred to them since. The Danweis and real estate enterprises became partners. Much agricultural, industrial or residential land has been converted to commercial use through their collaboration.

The state required an effective way to push society and the economy forward, and changed the methods of developing and managing urban land through the ‘privatization of housing’. The book Work and Organizations in China after Thirty Years of Transition states:

“As early as 1978, ideas about privatizing housing were firstly proposed by Chinese leaders. In 1980, the National Urban Housing and Residence Meeting formalized its housing commercialization plans: “Workers are permitted to build privately owned housing units, purchase publicly owned housing units, and own property. The state would make plans to construct housing units and sell them to the public.” In 1988, the National Housing Reform Meeting held by the State Council approved a scheme encouraging workers to buy the existing public housing stock. Finally, a 1998 directive of the State Council declared that the state and the work units stop constructing publicly owned housing units but channel this source of funds toward subsidizing

58

workers in purchasing their own housing units. This last measure effectively brought the welfare-oriented housing allocation regime to an end and promoted rapid growth of the real-estate industry in the ensuing years.”6

The new housing policy of 1998 aimed to boost domestic demand and thus stimulate economic growth by promoting housing investment. The housing market quickly grew and started to provide urban dwellers with alternative living opportunities outside of the Danweis. The commodity housing became the dominant means of new housing supply. Since the 1992 commodification of housing reform, the real estate industry has become one of the greatest driver of the Chinese economy and produced massive housing developments, especially in suburban areas. Developers and property management companies have taken over the main responsibility for providing basic facilities, infrastructure and services, which were previously under the charge of each Danwei and given as a form of social welfare. Both local authorities and private entrepreneurs benefitted from this game. The city became a super-scale company. It is evident that this urbanization was seen as a win-win deal.

The development of Chinese housing markets was accompanied by rapid economic growth in China during the period from 1999 to 2007. In 1999, Chinese developers purchased about 120 million square meters of land, but by 2007 this figure had The housing market statistics during 2008-2009

reached 402 million square meters, an increase of nearly 235 percent.

The privatization of housing has led to a new type of residence: commodity housing community. This so called community provides its services with a price, and does not encourage a good quality of neighborhood relationships. Contrasted with a socialist residential model characterized by uniform public housing and homogeneous neighborhoods with public and community services, such as street cleaning, gardening, and security, which was previously provided by the government or work units, they are now provided by private developers or Property Management Companies. Thus, both housing and community services previously provided by a welfare state have been taken over by an emerging economic sector. The government cannot and does not any longer want to control people’s daily lives.

These super scale gated communities are named as ‘Mega-blocks’. The title ‘MegaBlock’ is ironic: it satirizes these so called communities as merely super-scale residential containers. As a typical product of Housing Marketization, the Mega Block was criticized from different perspectives. However, the Mega-Block is also the 6 Yu Xie, Qing Lai and Xiaogang Wu, Danwei and Social inequality in Contemporary Urban China, in Lisa Keister, Work and Organizations in China After Thirty Years of Transition(Emerald Group Publishing Limited 2009), p.289

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Residential Slabs Framed a Park

60

Residential Towers Sited on a Park

61

Residential slabs framed a park

62

Residential towers sited on a park

result of the very specific setting of the government by controlling parameters. Their fast sprawl and prevalence are taking over the urban fabric and shaping the social organization. Rather than creating an archipelago in the city fabric, they are the basic components of the city, which are developed one next to the other in subur?

?

?

ban areas. These monsters were criticized for occupying too much urban land and

?

?

having no social obligation to the city. A typical Mega-block is constructed as a super

?

? ? ? ? ?

scale gated community with guarded gates, strong fences and private facilities. The

?

urban plot today is sub-divided by secondary roads into 2 to 6 Mega Blocks. De? ? ? ?

tailed land-use policies are given to define the boundaries of each construction project within its plot, through control indexes such as building density, building height, general layout plan, utility engineering plan and three dimensional site plans.7 One can easily see that the construction of residences does not consider social ties and communication at either scale, and is instead based solely on profit. Privatization is

The size of Mega block

the new driving force of society.

The housing block had a very subtle role in the Chinese city making process. Yet, today their development is often controlled by private property developers, and these developers may be in charge of one or several urban blocks. The government only controls basic parameters such as height and FAR. Developers transform the urban blocks into commercial products, but in the meantime, any development of the urban block is not a simple architectural project. It has an impact on urbanity, social rules and thousands of peoples’ daily lives. I would argue the formulation of blocks needs more political intervention to set up spatial rules. The government has the obligation to intervene in this process. Given this situation, the blocks face two options: either reduce themselves to a commodity, or function as a political device.

2.4. The Composition of the Mega-Block

The master plan of a Mega block

In a further analysis of the Mega-Block, I continue the method of separating its idea from its spatial model. With regard to the model, I divided my study into three scales, the block scale, the building scale and the floor plan scale to reveal its deep structure.

There is a clear system to define residential communities in China. “According to the Code of Urban Residential Areas Planning and Design in China, which was first proposed in 1993 based on the earlier experience of Small District

7 Anthony G.O.Yeh, Jiang Xu, and Kaizhi Liu, China’s post-reform urbanization: retrospect, policies and trends, (Intl Inst for Environment, 2011) P. 23

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TYPE

64

INTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

CIRCULATION

planning and design, there are three levels of residential developments which were defined based on facility-catchment population. The first level is called ’residential district’, which accommodates a population between 30,000 and 50,000 which is similar to the population of a Howard’s garden city; the second level is called ’small district’, which accommodates a school catchment-population between 7000 and 15,000 which is similar to the population of a neighbourhood unit suggested by Perry; the third level is called ‘ cluster’ which accommodates a population between 1000 and 3000 corresponding to the population-catchment of a residential committee.’ 8

2.4.1. The Block Scale

With respect to the planning settings and also to fulfill the landscape requirements, although the standard varies in terms of housing price and quality of services, the Housing slab

Mega-Block can be grouped into two main categories. The Mega Block as residential slabs framing a park, or residential towers sited on a park. Within these two types, major facilities such as community centers, commercial facilities, neighborhood shops, kindergartens and primary schools are provided. However, the parks are dissociated from buildings as separate islands defined by pedestrian routes.

The facilities and landscapes shared by dwellers are supposed to be the inhabitant’s common spaces that will bring people together, but in fact they are provided as commodities and used to promote an image of high-quality life.9 With the housing boom of the 1990s, the purchase of a house is not so much concerned with acquiring basic accommodation but rather its associated life style, and real-estate developers project what kind of new lifestyle customers require. Living environment has become the main selling point, because under market-oriented urban development, housing is no longer driven by political strategy or basic accommodation as in the socialist era.

The urban population has become fragmented according to their ability to pay. Wu in From Work Unit to Commodity Housing Enclaves has criticized this as having caused social segregation: ‘moving into these estates is based on housing affordOffice slab

ability, the residents create the ‘enclave’ of similar socioeconomic statuses. At the neighbourhood level, the social space is being homogenized, while at the city level 8 Dou Qiang, Change and Continuity: A Morphological Investigation of The Creation of Gated Communities in Post-reform Beijing, (Bartlett School of Graduate Studies, 2008). p.4 9 Fulong Wu, Rediscovring the ’Gate’ Under Market Transition: From Work Unit to Commodity Housing Enclaves, (University of Southampton, 2005). p.9

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different qualities of residence are built, causing residential segregation.’ This has also caused the absence of social cohesion within the gated community. Though dwellers become identified by similar incomes, it cannot define these people as a social group. By social group I mean a group of people who have commonalities in many aspects of their lives. The problems of the Mega Block’s deep structure are not simply its wall and gate, which prevent a communication with city, but the space articulation and social organization within it.

In a Danwei compound and courtyard house, the foundation of social ties is the overlap of working and living. As I argue in the last chapter, this overlapping is achieved by the spatial hierarchical system that defines individuals as components of a group. The existence of a transparent spatial syntax has blurred the border of separated space. For instance, when two separated residential compounds share a school, their children connect individual families. Education then becomes a commonality amongst otherwise unrelated families. In the same way, by inserting a market in a compound, neighbors can socialize and shop together. Therefore, when more and more commonalities overlap, the kinship, friendship and other social ties will overlap and eventually build a collectivity.

A collective compound in Shanghai

The figure shown here depicts a collective compound in Shanghai, where people living in this community have established their own rules. The public space like corridor and yard has been converted into a social space. An evident feature is that people extend their family space to these public spaces. There is a very subtle atmosphere in these spaces, they can be read as a family space but shared by different families: an urban and collective living room. In contrast, in a typical Mega Block, the purpose of the floor plan and master plan is not to construct intense interactions between neighbors. Rather they are designed to reduce the all-inclusive relationships found in work-unit compounds into that of a anonymous and purified residence.10 According to Wu’s view, in these new gated communities, residents are busy and the motivation of the spatial design is to reduce ‘unnecessary’ social interactions. To some extent, the concept of community is dead, since the foundation of community is participation and social ties.

2.4.2. The Typical Chinese Housing Plan VS the Typical Office Plan

I see urbanization today happening in two dimensions. Architecture is not only designed to articulate the ground condition, but it also needs to construct a vertical 10 Fulong Wu, Rediscovring the ’Gate’ Under Market Transition: From Work Unit to Commodity Housing Enclaves, (University of Southampton, 2005). p.20

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fabric. The nature of the slab is to frame space, while the nature of the tower is to efficiently stack different events and programs. Therefore I use these two types as my prototype to exemplify the driving factors behind the city.

The new slab housing building is different from the Danwei housing slab. They are composed by 2 or 3-room units. These small units repeat and connect to each other to form a slab rather than being organized by a common corridor. Housing towers were mainly developed during 1980s’ to 1990s’. In this period, the urban population underwent dramatic growth; to promote the efficiency of land-use, the towers became the dominant housing type. Since the late 90s’, Chinese urban residents were no longer satisfied with a basic living environment. Until 2000, the average living area per person in Beijing has increased from 7.06m2 in early 1980s’ to 16.75m2.

The housing shortage is no longer the motivation of urban development. Housing development switched from the pursuit of quantity to quality.

The ‘V’ plan and ‘butterfly’ plan emerged in this period. The south-north surface was enlarged to increase the number of rooms receiving sunlight; the ‘groove’ became a popular architectural solution to maintain good ventilation for rooms like bathrooms and kitchens. After 2001, the housing plan became more and more extreme. The tower plans always had to provide for more than 8 families.11 To achieve the maximum FAR, developers would often reduce the width and increase the depth of towers. Each room majorly relied on grooves for sunlight. In response to the demand of large scale landscape, the slab buildings and tower buildings were combined as a new form with linear or corner commercial facilities, so each unit of slab contains more than 5 families by transforming the lift core to a short corridor. The floor area per capita increased from 19.4 m2 in 1999 to 31.6 m2 in 2007.

Therefore the layout of the tower plan is primarily effected by ventilation and demand for large internal floor area and circulation spaces. The Wangjing New Town in north Beijing was one of the original Mega Block projects; each core of the towers served 8 or more families, and each household area was increased to 150-200m2.

Compared to the slab housing block, the tower has a much greater efficiency. And the shape and layout of households creates a maximum surface area to achieve this.

The typical plan is flexible and about exclusion, evacuation and non-event as Rem Koolhaas argued. In his article the ‘Typical Plan’ he asked the question: ‘could the Typology of housing plans

11 Le Zhao, ‘The Evolution of Residential Tower High Rise—The Case Study of Beijing’, (Beijing university of city engineering and architecture, 2010), pp. 20-36

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Housing floor plan(2 or 3 units)

68

Housing floor plan(4 units)

69

The time line of typical housing plan

70

office building be the most radical typology?’ The typical plan abandoned all characters and identities by stripping away all traces of uniqueness and specificity. It has no quality, no rules and controls. It is a space in which the government has no chance to intervene. It is a space for business.

The housing plan became increasingly specific since the 1990s, because of the parameter control and the focus on profits. The layouts of rooms are fixed. In China the specific plan is the most prevailing type, which means it is the most typical and common type.

Unlike Rem’s argument about the typical office plan, the specific housing plan is generic. From Beijing to Guangzhou, the specific plan is adopted in each city with slight changes according to climatic conditions. Thus I propose that through the specific plan, the government could intervene in the housing market and people’s daily lives.

If we compare the principles of the typical office plan and Chinese housing plan, we can find they fundamentally represent two ideas. The office plan is a capitalist production; it is free, neutral and democratic. The housing plan on the other hand has partly inherited the characteristics of the command economy, or the socialist idea; its structure regulates how things are to happen within it. It is authoritarian but efficient. For Rem, identity is considered as the opposite of what contemporary society produces. However the fact is that the loss of identity has not only weakened the boundaries between the public and private realm, but it has also reduced communication between people. There is no relationship between individuals, different realms and different events. Each room or floor represents a different lifestyle and different ideology, in the end the typical plan will lead to a chaotic society. Archizoom’s No-stop City has elaborated a model of an extreme society and the ultimate sense of urbanization. The typical plan covered everything and everyone; there is no difference between outside and inside, no spatial order to separate social events and public realms or private realms. It is a value-free pluralism and diversity12, and the typical plan is out of control. In comparison, the Danwei buildings were totally under political control by providing a clear spatial hierarchy. My new prposed housing type is in-between these examples, it is a production of the government and the market. Since the typical housing plan is a multi-force decision, architects can state their own positions in the design process and adjust the balance.

12 Pier Vittorio Aureli, Chapter1, Toware the Archipelago, The Possibility of an Absolute Arcitecture, (The MIT Press, 2011), p. 20

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Office buildings

Typical office plans

72

However, after 30 years of development, the housing types are clearly standard-

central government. State-owned enterprises in the industry of energy, telecoms

ized due to the limitation of parameters. Each wall, sizes of different rooms and

and banking are pillar industries, and they are under the protection of the central

public areas, even the circulation are fixed, and very few possibilities have been

government. By the end of 1985, urban collective enterprises employed 33.24

left for further improvement. Therefore, both typical office plan and housing plan

million people, accounting for 26.9 percent of the national total, and playing an

can finally become a generic plan by repeating the same elements and standards.

important role in urban employment and economic life.

The concept of type is challenged by them in different ways; one is due to there being no laws and rules; the other is due to too many limitations.

Managers of these companies serve as intermediates between the state and the workers. They are both entrepreneurs and politicians. The Chinese Communist Party appoints 81 percent of the chief executives of state-owned enterprises and

2.4.3. The state capitalism, organizational corruption and the welfare system

56 percent of all senior corporate executives. 5.3 million party officials—about 8 percent of its total membership and 16 percent of its urban members—held ex-

State capitalism can play an active role in leading marketization, and also it could

ecutive positions in state enterprises in 2003, the last year for which figures were

play a role of limiting marketization by providing welfare.

available.13 The government bureaus literally act as entrepreneurs in the marketplace, with their monopolistic power vested in the state organ. Therefore the

The spatial orders of historical Chinese units were real productions of political ide-

state and its bureaucrats are major players in the reform-era economy, but a lack

als and social relationships. Thus, the Chinese unit could transcend being a pure

of regulation and supervision has meant these roles are not clearly demarcated.

container of people’s lives and become a unit of governance and regulation. Ac-

The assumption was that the government would eventually close or privatize

cording to this understanding, the premise of the Chinese unit is governance. The

these state owned Danweis as marketization matures. However, there no sign of

governance system in the Danwei was based on a welfare system. In a Danwei,

this and the opposite seems true. For instance, the China Mobile, which is state

the Cadres controlled the resources and allocated them to workers to establish a

backed, has 600 million customers, because it only has one competitor, the China

governance system. Even in the courtyard houses, the masters of the family had

Unicom, which is also state owned. In 2009 China Mobile and another state giant,

the power to decide the distribution of resources. Yet since the political mecha-

China National Petroleum Corporation, made profits of $33 billion—more than

nism was fundamentally reshaped by economic reform, the Danwei was no longer

China’s 500 most profitable private companies combined.14 On the one hand they

supported by the state, and people had to get anything they needed from the

implement the central policies to control and rule the local market and society, on

market. After the 1980s, without the security provided by the Danwei, many em-

the other they co-operate with private enterprises to develop their own cities. Both

ployees chose to join the market. No longer dependent on their Danwei to distrib-

market forces and government decisions determine which goods and services are

ute goods or provide services, peoples’ lives began to turn outward. Citizen’s lives

produced and how they are distributed.

which use to happen within private realms moved into the public realm of the city.

Due to this, the idea of the Chinese unit will not survive in the post-reform urban

Under this mechanism, corruptions is rampant in China. Corruption can be divid-

context. The block on the other hand was reduced to a utilitarian container.

ed into two types; one is individual behavior, which refers to bureaucrats illegally using their political power for their own benefits. The other one is organizational

During the past 30 years, free market economies spurred the competition among

corruption. Organizational corruption refers to the actions of a public agency that,

private enterprises. However the great success of the economy cannot simply be

by exploiting its power in regulating the market or its monopoly over vital resourc-

attributed to the market. The Danwei has not completely disappeared, though it

es, is aimed at monetary or material gains for the organization.15

has been weakened. The local governments continue to be closely allied with local firms. The game between central government, local government and the market has created a Chinese advantage in the global context, as many key decisions such as energy prices, interest rates and exchange rates are still controlled by the

13 Minxin Pei, 2006, The Dark Side of China’s Rise, The Foreignpolicy. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2006/02/17/the_dark_side_of_chinas_rise 14 The Economist Jan 2012, The Rise of State Capitalism: The Spread of a New Sort of Business in the Emerging World Will Cause Increasing Problems, http://www.economist.com/ node/21543160 15 Xiaobo Lu, ‘Booty Socialism, Bureau-Preneurs, and the State in Transition: Organizational Corruption in China, Comparative politics’, (The City University of New York, 2000), p. 275

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The corruption is often deemed to benefit a collective body of people rather than a few individuals. The boundary between organizational corruption and welfare is very difficult to define. When money is regularly used to improve collective living environment or productivity, it is welfare. What is to be regarded as corruption is the irregular usage of budget.16 But the line dividing what is regular or irregular is a very arbitrary decision. Some organizational corruption seems reasonable and appreciated by society. For instance the China Central Television’s building resembles a giant monster marching across Beijing’s skyline. The iconic form for CCTV is accepted as necessary since it is a monument to a new Chinese society. It reveals the state as the biggest enterprise, since the buildings surrounding it belong to different private Top ten Chinese enterprises in 2011: All of them are stateowned. Image from the article: China unveils 2011 list of top 500 companies.

big companies. However, it neither improves the urban situation nor the quality of urban lives. So I would call it a kind of organizational corruption.

Individual corruption can be defined by laws. However, organizational corruption is a result of the political mechanism. Rather than trying to define them as the enemy, maybe we can turn it into welfare to solve the urban problems and build a welfare community model.

2.5. Conclusion: The Urban Conflicts and the way of defining people.

The urban problems that China is facing today can never be solved by building more infrastructures. It is time to turn to the urban block once again. Either the generic plan or the specific plan will finally lead our society to its failure. They need to be combined in a more intelligent model. Architecture needs to be recast as a frame of space, social ties and typical events. Everyday life takes place within the cluster of rooms that we inhabit. The typical office plan and housing plan frames different meanings of the city, and tells us different stories. The design of these frames should both show the interests of people and the interests of the state and private corporations. These three powers will restrict each other and finally reach a balance, and the production can be rational and reasonable.

Actions are structured and shaped by walls, doors and windows. Unless the building and space arrangement stop being formulated for a commercial purpose, it will not regain its urban role and power as an instrument of social cohesion. When architecture plays a role as an instrument, it can concreteize the dialectical relationship between state and market. Then within each urban artifact, the two powers can cooperate with and confront each other.

Diagrams from the article: State-owned enterprises in China: How big are they?

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16 Xiaobo Lu, ‘Booty Socialism, Bureau-Preneurs, and the State in Transition: Organizational Corruption in China, Comparative politics’, (The City University of New York, 2000), p. 278

Rather than building iconic building, we should consider to use the state power to provide more welfare. The welfare community would restructure the city.

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Chapter 3 The Proposal of New Chinese Unit and the New collective

The new Chinese unit provides a prototype for a new state capitalism and modern work unit, and is the political power behind allows it to function beyond the rules of the market. It would be a new manifesto for the new society, befitting a contemporary ‘people’s republic’.

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3.1. Commonalities

The State owned newspaper The People’s Daily is chosen as the agent and the client for my polemic proposal. The newspaper has been an organ of the central committee of the Communist Party of China, as CCTV, over the past 60 years. It is directly controlled by the Party and provides direct information on the policies of central government.

The new office high rise of People’s Daily is under construction. The 150m-tall tower is always compared to its neighbor CCTV by OMA. Although the designer said there are many cultural meanings and ecological reasons behind the shape, everyone can easily see its intention of creating an iconic high rise. I would take my project as a polemic proposal to question the next round of development in the CBD, and provide a prototype for a new state capitalism and modern work unit, since the newspaper has become very wealthy under state protection and is powerful enough today to function beyond the rules of the market. It would be a new manifesto for the new society, befitting a contemporary ‘people’s republic’.

To rebuild the rules but consider what they mean for the contemporary city, the welfare provided to bind people can no longer be basic resources like water and electricity. Therefore I propose modern commonalities among citizens relevant to a The paper is an organ of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC), published worldwide with a circulation of 3 to 4 million.

contemporary lifestyle. The scales of the space that urban programs occupy also reveal their level of collectivity. For instance, a swimming pool can be shared by dwellers in a block but also used as the commonality at a block scale. Through a primary school, families living in different blocks can build close social ties. A primary school can thus be used as a larger scale commonality than a swimming pool. I propose to insert these different programs into the hierarchical spatial model according to their collective meaning. Although it is difficult, if not impossible, to make an accurate formula of building collectivity, the case studies of the Chinese unit have shown that the collaboration of spatial order and programs have this possibility.

At the same time, I studied the migration village in Beijing, which was still a collective society until it was demolished in the early years of the new century. By comparing it to the courtyard house and the Danwei model, I found the overlapping of social ties is another means to form collectivity. In a Courtyard house, the kinship overlapped with neighborhood relationships. In a Danwei, kinship not only overlapped with neighborhood relationships, it also overlapped with work relationships.

In a migration village, these social ties further overlapped with other relationships

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The new office building of the People’s Daily

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The Site 80

POPULATION: 10,000

CBD

The Site 81

20 -- 40 M²

Plant Room

50 -- 100 M²

Gym

100 -- 200 M²

200-400 M²

Beauty Parlor & BarberShop

Swimming Pool

Kids Room

Pets Room

Billiard Ball & Ping Pang Ball room

Photograph &Video Studio

Skating Room

Internet Bar

Tea & Chess Rooms

Workshop

Senior Clubs

Cafe & Reading Rooms

Day Care Room/ Class Room

KTV

Fishing area

KIDS YOUNG PEOPLE MIDDLE-AGED PEOPLE ELDER PEOPLE

Peoples’ commonalities 82

such as friendship and partnership to build an even more complex network. These mixed relationship established ‘gangs’. Within a gang, there is only membership that defines all other social ties. People are thus defined as a part of entity.

I am not proposing to build gangs but instead use this overlapping idea to support the establishment of collectivity. By assembling commonalities and overlapping social ties, the collectivity will be re-introduced.

The spatial strategies occur at 3 scales. The floor plan scale, the building scale, and the whole site scale. The foundation of collectivity for me is to build strong ties between neighbors, which means to transform the neighborhood into a much stronger social relationship. This has to be done within buildings. Once this foundation has been built, the next level of collectivity can be constructed.

At the floor plan level, my strategy is to enlarge the core and make it function as a public living room for neighbors to come together and share their private lives. It can be seen as an extension of each household. The utilitarian traffic core is converted into a communal space like the communal corridors in the Danwei slab housings.

At this level I propose to build a closer neighborhood relationship by weakening the border between public and private, and promoting common activities and shared spaces. Residents may put their fridges, storage boxes, TVs or dining tables in this public living room.

At the building level, the composition types are mainly slabs, towers and podiums.

These three types represent different strategies. The slab building accommodates 2 to 4 households per floor, and extends horizontally. The tower plan accommodates 5-12 households and extend vertically. So the slab building has the ability to articulate the space and set up rules, while the tower type is more efficient. The podium is a free space within which different programs coexist. The National Library was taken as a precedent. In a limited plot, the library was composed mainly by these three types. The slab which articulate the boundaries also clearly define the realm it occupied. the tower on the other hand is purely utilitarian. The podium is a is a common urban room. which is not used for commercial function but as a political and social framework.

I hybridize these two types and insert the flexible typical plan between the specific housing plans. Through this, the workplace and residential plan, which are the main spaces in which peoples’ lives occur, are combined. At the same time, since people

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The utilitarian core has been transformed to a public living room 84

The matrix of housing slab type

85

The housing slab type 86

The housing tower type 87

The composing elements of Chinese National Library (1987) 88

Communal core

Workplace

Open space

Communal podium

89

Residential space

Work place Open place Work place

Residential space

Communal facility

Section

90

Communal core---The public living room

Work space---The boundary and distance between workplace and living place have been demolished

Open space---The space combinds working and living

Open space---The space stimulate creativity and productivity

The communal podium--within which people are defined by what they are sharing. The welfare system is established as a political strategy to recast social network.

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both live and work in the same building, the neighborhood relationship is overlapped with work relationship. This strong tie is the foundation of a larger scale collectivity.

Between office floor plans an open space as a common area freely accessible to employees and residents living in different buildings is inserted. And the podium provides different programs provided as welfare by the company.

The typological change of the building is to transform the housing container to a framework of social activities. At the next level are the boundaries of compounds. I use three ways to define them. Firstly when the whole site is read as a large block, the road around it spatially defines it. More importantly, it is also defined by the collective sharing facilities such as education centers, medical centers, sports centers and so on. Secondly, when the site is defined by residential buildings, it is divided into 4 main compounds; people living in same one share public studies, swimming pools, bars and other communal facilities, provided in the podium. Thirdly, when the office space functions as the frame, the site can be read as a composition of 9 smaller compounds. In each working compound, a continuous open space is inserted to enforce the connection of different buildings. This is also a common area accessible to employees and residents. Finally, when the block is defined by the landscape, they can be read as a series of courtyards, each of which has its own characteristic and function, some are gardens, some are playgrounds for schools and so on.

Therefore, defined by the spatial syntax, typical events and facilities they share. , individuals at any level in this system are always aware of the fact that they are parts of certain group.This hierarchical system of sharing is what I learned from the historical Chinese unit. But I would also highlight that in a Danwei model, which is the production of a planned economy, people lost their productivity and creativity since they got a lifelong career and welfare, thus the state-owned enterprise in my proposal is a public company. The difference in the Danwei is that no matter how hard you work, your living quality is decided by the economic plan. In a state owned enterprise, employees who are also residents work for a better living environment.

The community and living environment is dir==ectly linked with its productivity.

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COLLECTIVE CANTEEN

MEDICAL CENTER

SPORTS CENTER

MEDICAL CENTER

LIBRARY

COMMERCIAL CENTER

CLUBS

ENTERTAINMENT CENTER

ENTERTAINMENT CENTER

MUSEUM

CLUBS

EDUCATION AND TRANNING CENTER

CLUBS

Social space defined by podium and courtyards

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XSIZE YSIZE

XSIZE YSIZE

0

10

20

50

100

ground floor plan

95

Social space defined by workplace

96

0

10

20

50

100

3th floor plan

97

Social space defined by residential buildings

98

6th floor plan

99

100

101

102

Conclusion This dissertation started with questioning the meaning of state capitalism and the role of the government, then analyzed the courtyard housing type and the Danwei type to grasp the principles of the Chinese unit, and the method of building collectivity. Then the research on Chinese society and political strategy after the economic reform led to a discussion of the problematic urban planning and the housing market. After the understanding of these changes, I focused on a specific study of the Mega Block and the typical housing plan. Finally the research went back to investigate the relationship between state, corruption and the welfare system. Until this point, several observations were made and posited:

1) The historical Chinese units as political productions, which successfully assembled people’s lives and framed their social networks through a hierarchical system.

This hierarchical system could be separated into a spatial system and a system of sharing. What was shared by people could be seen as commonalities that bind individuals together. In other words, this system of sharing is a system of typical and collective events.

2) The current urban conflicts could be understood through the typical events that compose people’s lives and the social networks they belong to. The Mega block rather than urban planning is the opportunity to change the difficult urban situation. I argue that the state needs to reintroduce the culture of collectivity through combining workplace and housing, and providing enough communal facilities to the community. These measures could be considered as a kind of welfare rather than organizational corruption, because they benefit all workers and improve their urban situations and living qualities. The typological change of the Mega Block is not simply an adoption of the deep structures of the courtyard house or Danwei, but use their ideas and the different urban types to re-establish a new spatial hierarchy. The new spatial order creates the possibility for collectivity to occur.

The proposal is a polemic, but also an urban prototype that questions the role of the state. It proposes that the state should take part in urban construction more efficiently through the specific planning of urban units rather than building large scale infrastructures. As a socialist government, it has the responsibility to provide a better way of living, working and communicating by using its power invested into by its people.

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104

The working space

105

106

The open space

107

108

The communal podium

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