Art & Architecture
Room for a Billion
Before talking about China’s real estate market and the current state of its architecture and urban renewal, consider these statistics from the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco about China’s progress and its challenges in housing its population:
- From 1998 through 2002, China constructed 1,068 square miles of new residential floor space, which is close to the entire existing housing stock of the American West.
- There are 28 billion square feet of floor space under construction in China, compared with 5 billion in the U.S.
- The net average living space per capita in 2002 was 253 square feet compared to 793 square feet in the U.S.
- Housing and health care are the two most important needs for China’s growing middle class, expected to reach 520 million people by 2025.1
Own to Lease
Nobody owns property in China; they lease it from the government. In reality, however, China has been trying to unburden itself as the world’s largest landlord since the late 1980s. Once housing was treated as a social entitlement, provided by the government or state-subsidized companies to their employees. Now that China has embraced the free market, state-owned housing stocks have been sold to tenants and private developers are building new residential projects. In very little time the Chinese have developed a vibrant real estate market. Today China has about 37,000 real estate development enterprises. 2
To get an idea of these forces on China, see the movie “Seventeen
Years.” After the main character, Tao Lan, goes to prison for
17 years for killing her rival stepsister, she is granted a weekend furlough
to visit her family for the Chinese New Year. In a memorable scene,
she becomes hopelessly lost while searching for her former address. Her
old neighborhood, with its narrow lanes, crowded courtyards and subdivided
houses, has fallen to the wrecking ball to make way for modern high-rise
apartments. Tao looks on the new landscape as if she were seeing Mars
for the first time.
Fixer-Upper
Nearly
14 million people live in Beijing,
which is China’s capital and cultural and political center, and on
the same latitude as Washington, D.C. The present layout of the ancient
city was formed in 1368 A.D. during the Ming dynasty. Preservation and
development are at war here. Urban renewal comes at a high cost. Living
conditions in older neighborhoods are deteriorating rapidly. Meanwhile,
housing is in great demand. The millions of migrant workers who flood into
the city from rural areas need places to live. Fortunately, the recent
boom in real estate is helping to renovate parts of Beijing. Even before
that the city government in 1990 designated 37 projects in the old city
for renewal.3
At risk of disappearing entirely are Beijing’s maze-like hutongs [click here for photo], ancient narrow lanes wide enough only for walking and cycling along. Hutongs are like little villages separated from the city at large. Professor Lu Junhua from Tsinghua University recalls an era when many more hutongs dotted the Beijing landscape: “A bird’s eye view of the sprawling districts of courtyard houses as they were until mid-century would reveal only a sea of greenery — a canopy of trees concealing a metropolis of hundreds of thousands of people — only occasionally broken by graceful, sloping roofs.”
Traditional Chinese Architecture
Thanks to the popularity of Asian design in the U.S., many of us are familiar with Feng Shui with its emphasis on living in harmony with nature. For 5,000 years of history, Chinese architecture has stayed relatively true to this idea. Older buildings uniformly adhere to the rule of balance and symmetry and interior space is dictated by social conventions. This is not to say that traditional Chinese architecture is boring, far from it. [click here for photo]
With their crested tiled roofs and mythical dragons and lions standing guard at the front gates, traditional Chinese residences, temples and palaces evoke an imperial past. The best example of this style is the Forbidden City, the grand palace in Beijing.
Traditional Chinese houses consist of living spaces flanking all four sides of a main courtyard, which is called a Siheyuan. Whole families lived in these compounds, with the elder generation in the main house and the younger generations in the side houses. Multi-generational homes are the norm in China, where the custom is for the bride to live with the groom’s family. Hierarchy dictates the distribution of interior space. After the Revolution, however, these charming houses were subdivided to accommodate more and more families until every available space was used and the courtyards disappeared. [click here for photo]
Today these traditional neighborhoods stand in the shadows of high-rise
buildings. Contemporary Chinese architecture is an example of what happens
when East meets West — the West wins.
[click
here for photo]
Chinese architects tend to imitate the worst in modern
architectural design. Think 1960s high-rise apartment buildings. Corbusier-like
structures dominate the urban skyline. While the West has abandoned these
soulless buildings, China is building more of them, especially outside
the main city core.
