China in the face of Change

he New York Times‘ Nicolai Ouroussoff writes:

BEIJING — Historical cycles that took a century to unfold in the West can be compressed into less than a decade in today’s China. And that’s as true of Beijing’s preservation movement as it is of the building boom that has transformed Beijing and turned many of its historical neighborhoods — known for their narrow alleyways, or hutongs — into rubble.

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Lost in the New Beijing: The Old Neighbourhood

HISTORICAL cycles that took a century to unfold in the West can be compressed into less than a decade in today’s China. And that’s as true of Beijing’s preservation movement as it is of the nation’s ferocious building boom.

The explosion of construction activity that has transformed Beijing into a modern metropolis over the past decade also turned many of its historical neighborhoods — known for their narrow alleyways, or hutongs — into rubble. As grass-roots preservationists began sounding the alarm, the aging wood frames and tile roofs of the ancient courtyard houses that give these neighborhoods their identity were being supplanted so quickly by mighty towers that it was hard to pinpoint where they once stood.

Now, as they labor to protect what remains, Chinese preservationists are facing a new, equally insidious threat: gentrification. The few ancient courtyard houses that survived destruction have become coveted status symbols for the country’s growing upper class and for wealthy foreign investors. As more and more money is poured into elaborate renovations, the phenomenon is not only draining these neighborhoods of their character but also threatening to erase an entire way of life.

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Michael Sorkin for Architectural Record:

“Learning from the Hutong of Beijing and the Lilong of Shanghai”:

I had been to China frequently, but somehow, until a few months ago, never to Beijing. Like many cities in China, it’s intimidatingly vast and growing like Topsy. Unlike other cities, though, it is laid out with an orthogonal monumentality, with vast boulevards, widely spaced buildings, and a thick aura of imperium.

The prototype for the city as a whole is the famous Forbidden City, described by Marco Polo as the finest, most complete palace complex on the planet (“… no man on earth could design anything superior to it�)—an astonishing monument to dynastic power. Centralized authority loves recursion, seeing its favored forms deployed at every site and scale; official Beijing is an exemplar of this merger of symbol and control. As Versailles is to Haussman’s Paris, the Forbidden City is to both historic and contemporary Beijing. And the Forbidden City was itself conceived recursively, as the terrestrial expression of celestial geometry.

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