Beijing catching-up
Notes for an article published in “B-Nieuws”, magazine of the Faculty of Architecture of TU Delft, issue 9, 26/03/07
CITY
Size is one of the first things that impresses in Beijing. The size of this city is a historical fact. It had been achieved for reasons and conditions very different from the reality of today. So Beijing’s size is a condition to start with. There seems to be an affinity of the Chinese to separate and seclude, “Divide and rule” as the Romans used to say. This strategy of walling and defining boundaries has been practiced by the Chinese for many centuries and has been applied from a universal level (the definition of their country), to countryside, city and dwelling level. It has been a way of coping with size and managing multiplicity (of people, land, commerce, culture). What was defined by a wall was ordered, humanly controlled and comprehensible.
As in many other cultures the Chinese used art as a way to present an ideal. Two examples, the Yuanyan garden in Shanghai and a wallpaper from a hotel in Beijing show such idealised and romanticised understanding of space. So the continuous creation of boundaries into boundaries was also a way to provide variety. It allowed establishing different worlds inside a certain controllable limit.
Using these strategies the Chinese created and maintained Beijing a functioning city for long time, despite its immense size. The scale of the city makes multifunctionality necessary. Beijing is huge and monotonous in its diversity, you can find anything anywhere. It is built according to a more community based, village-like approach and seems to lack the principles of modernity. That used to be the Chinese way of dealing with scale.
But there is the modern, Western understanding and way of managing size. In the West people have been presented with size only recently (last 100 years) and it had coincided with their technological achievements. In the West society copes with size using technology. Western cities tend to be quite heterogeneous and to provide substantial differences from one place in the city to another. Using methods of transport and thinking of the city in terms of a network with certain hubs provides the constant flux of people, goods and info. Such a strategy is continuous struggle to cope with traffic, movement, imbalances, and polarities, good and bad neighbourhoods. But precisely because of that Western cities appear very dynamic, Beijing inside the 2nd ring road appears very village-like.
At present Beijing is somewhere between the old way of dealing with size (most things can be found anywhere in the city and people need to move only inside a limited radius for work, living, pleasure, shopping) and the western way of highways, traffic, metro, trains, commuters, centralities. The city is struggling to modernise. There are two areas where the battle Chinese-Western is taking place: inside the 2nd Ring Road and all that is outside of it. Each has its own methods of modernisation.
The creation of urbanity inside the 2nd Ring Road means the congestion of the historic centre of Beijing. This part of the city looks and works more like a village at the moment. It is characterised by community life, horizontality and high density. The problem lies in the fact that land is precious and market forces push Old city residents away. In their place even more dense living conditions are created, such that convey a stronger sense of urbanity (high rise, wide streets, shopping malls). Is it possible to create such an urbanity and density keeping in mind the situation of village/community life?
The modernisation of the city outside the 2nd Ring Road means the expansion of the city, creation of urbanity on the edge of the city. It is about pushing away or incorporating existing villages. The autonomy of any part of Beijing is a result of the size of the city. For the same reason every new zone should be enough self sufficient. Problems and poor results arise also, but not only, because of economical reasons. Land on the edge of the city is cheapest and that is why it is being used for cheaper homes, very often for relocation. The residents of these zones do not posses enough economical power to attract detailed and varied development. Many of the suburbs are quite heterogeneous for the sake of economic efficiency.
COMMUNITY
The question of what the size of a community is comes with this train of thoughts. What creates a community, where does the threshold, in spatial terms, between community and strangers lie? One can take the traditional Beijing urban structure as a reference: the hutongs. There is a certain social pressure in hutong areas. That is due to them being secluded and village-like communities. The density and availability of services is on one hand a way of exercising control between residents. That is made possible by the stable population and by the people, who even though many, still know each other. An effect of that way of cooperation is for example that there are no beggars inside hutongs, but it is full of them in other parts of the city. The easiness in which these neighbourhoods are inhabited could be observed when one sees people walking in their pyjamas in the morning/evening to go to the toilet, take a shower, and brush their teeth.
Still the Chinese are very individualistic people, they would give up individuality only to the family. The reason they group is not so much a social one, but more a practical one: commerce, security, organisation of the population.
HOUSE
As mentioned, the Chinese of today would give up individuality only to their family. People live to make a family, raise a kid and try to provide the best for their child. They live through their children. So the house loses its aesthetical importance and becomes a utilitarian space for surviving. That is caused by purely economic restrictions, which have produced a certain culture of inhabiting. Residents do not seem to care so much about their houses. Their life is more about food, career, education and very much about the family.
The house is an instrument for survival: shelter and food preparation. Because the house has to be kept constantly at good service, inhabitants keep on upgrading it and adding/closing/expanding space. Maybe what Chineseness means nowadays is to give lower importance of the dwelling as an aesthetical object and one for individual expression. Instead homes are looked at from a more utilitarian point of view. Constant adaptation to keep space practical is thus more important than embellishment, tidiness and decoration as personal expression. Decoration instead appears for religious purposes or due to some other superstition.
There is a distinction between private space, which is kept mostly clean and ordered and public space, which is dusty and messy. That is a result of the lack of feeling of social responsibility for the common space. As I said the Chinese are very individualistic.
THE CHALLENGE
So the dilemma of Beijing is how to catch up with modernity, both in the Old centre as in the rest of the city. A Beijing prototype, in my view, should consider this as a major topic. I see the edge of the city as a place where modernity is being created for the low classes. Having in mind all the above observations on community and dwelling patterns I intend to design a prototype that could be applied to the poorer suburban areas. It should introduce a different approach than the one of the standardised, homogenising and quite simplistic examples of today. It would count on the flexibility and movability of the Chinese, their ability to create functioning communities and their desire for adaptable housing.
Fotos of the Yuanyan garden and a Chinese wallpaper
