MCLC: urban acupuncture

[Denton, Kirk]

MCLC LIST
From: kirk (denton.2 at osu.edu)
Subject: urban acupuncture
***********************************************************

Source: The Guardian (10/2/13):
http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/oct/0
2/beijing-design-week-china-hutongs-preservation

Designers use 'urban acupuncture' to revive Beijing's historic hutongs
Beijing Design Week sees architects launch 'micro-interventions' in one of
the capital's oldest neighbourhoods. But are their good intentions having
the right effect?
By Oliver Wainwright

A plastic fan whirrs above a mountain of tripe, keeping hungry flies away,
while pancakes sizzle on a hotplate across the street. A tricycle cart
laden with coal careers around a corner, narrowly missing an elderly
resident taking his caged songbird out for a stroll, while a construction
worker sits on the corner, slurping noodles from a bag. It could be any
other day in the hutongs of Beijing's Dashilar neighbourhood, but this
week something is different.

Down the lane, a cloud of golden discs erupts from the rooftop of one
courtyard house, spilling out to form a canopy above the street. Coloured
concrete stools dot the roadside, while giant cushions shaped like roast
duck and fresh sushi fill a shop window. A taxi trike trundles down the
road, providing not transport but a mobile logo-design service. Beijing
Design Week <http://www.bjdw.org/?lang=en> (BJDW) has arrived, and it's
brought the “pop-up” concept to one of the Chinese capital's oldest
communities.

“We see these projects as a kind of urban acupuncture,” says Beatrice
Leanza, the Italian director of this year's festival, who has worked in
Beijing's contemporary art world for the last 10 years. “We are proposing
micro-interventions in the area's empty buildings as tests for what could
happen here.”

As part of the Dashilar programme – one of BJDW's three hubs across the
city – two derelict courtyard houses have been taken over by Zhang Ke of
Standard Architecture
<http://www.standardarchitecture.cn/oldflash/index.html>, who has built a
clustered treehouse structure of glass-fronted rooms in the open courts,
accessed by a series of ladders and ledges, that poke up above the
rooftops. With crisp planes of plywood limboing between century-old beams,
it is a prototype for how the site could be developed. Zhang describes it
as “ultra-small scale social housing within the limitations of super-tight
traditional hutong spaces,” which would be part of a mixed-use scheme with
restaurants, bookstores and bars.

A few doors down, the golden fabric discs signal a proposal by the young
Beijing studio, People's Architecture Office
<http://www.peoples-architecture.com/pao/>, for a “courtyard plug-in” – a
plan to insert prefabricated living units into existing houses, leaving
the original structures intact. With plumbing, heating, insulation and
wiring built-in, the modules would require minimal excavation to bring the
leaky, draughty buildings up to habitable standards. The trial project on
this site will see these pods bring a library for the local community and
a startup business incubator.

In any other context, such installations might not be remarkable, part of
the current trend for “meanwhile” uses on vacant sites. But what comes as
a surprise is to learn that these projects have been initiated and
endorsed by the municipal government – which only a few years ago had the
entire district in the sights of its bulldozers.

“There has been a radical shift in the perception of how this
neighbourhood should be developed,” says Neill Gaddes, a New Zealand
architect who for the last three years has worked for Beijing Dashilar
Investment Limited (BDI), a subsidiary of the state-owned Guang An
Holding, tasked with upgrading the area. “There is a real push towards
improvements and adaptive reuse, rather than wholesale demolition and
rebuild.”

The shift has been spurred in part by the disaster that is all too visible
just a few blocks east. In the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games, a vast
swathe of Qianmen, a thriving commercial district for the last 500 years,
was razed and replaced by an inflated Disneyfied version of itself, a
process that saw local businesses forcibly displaced by big-name brands
dressed in pastiche facades.

Extending outside the old city walls, south of Qianmen gate, in a knotted
delta of diagonal lanes, the area had been a lively centre of trade and
illicit pleasures for centuries. From the 1500s, brothels clustered
between restaurants and theatres, opium parlours lurked beneath lodging
houses – a thrilling underworld that lured even incognito emperors here.

If party officials come today, it would be to stock up on Rolex and Zara,
or maybe guzzle a Happy Meal. Extending south in a monumental ceremonial
axis, just below Tiananmen Square, now stretches a polished open-air mall,
where outlets of Nike and Starbucks, Costa and McDonalds, stand behind
pantomime costumes of swooping roofs encrusted with gilded signs and lurid
mouldings.

Billboards declare the project is “respecting the city texture and
recasting the historical view,” as well as “restoring history's cultural
pulse”. But walking the street today, it feels a vapid gauntlet through
which replica trams now ferry tourists back and forth from H&M to
Häagen-Dazs.

It is the most visible example of what has happened in numerous pockets of
the old city over the last 10 years, as neighbourhoods have been
demolished and rebuilt in the name of heritage preservation. From the
shopping street of Nanluoguxiang near the Drum and Bell Tower in the
north, to the alleys around the Sichahai lakes, the areas designated for
historic conservation have been transformed into zombie recreations of
themselves. Elsewhere, crumbling courtyard houses have been wrapped in
neat jackets but their squalid innards left unchanged, adding a flimsy
tourist-friendly veneer to give a picturesque backdrop for lucrative
hutong tours.

But in Dashilar, things seem to be going in a different direction. Home to
around 55,000 people over a square kilometre, it is one of the most
densely populated parts of Beijing – six times the average density. It is
also one of the most convoluted in terms of property ownership, with only
around 10% of buildings in the possession of the state-owned developer,
with the rest split between work units and private owners – a situation
further confused by multiple sub-letting and the proliferation of
illegally built structures within and on top of courtyard houses. This has
seen the built fabric of the area rapidly decline, with little maintenance
and upkeep of the properties due to both unclear ownership and ongoing
uncertainty about demolition.

“I'm longing to move out,” one elderly resident who has lived here since
the 1950s tells me. “But the amount of compensation they are offering is
far too little for me to find anywhere else to go.” It sounds a familiar
story, one that in the past would have ended with forced eviction. But
changes to property laws since 2008 have made it harder for developers to
expel residents, putting more power in the individual owners' hands to
demand higher prices. As a result, residents now compete with their
neighbours to be bought out at higher rates, which is making Dashilar an
increasingly divided place. But the deadlock has a unexpected upside.

“This stalemate is providing an opportunity for the area to develop in a
slower, more beneficial way,” says Gaddes. The initial failure of the
Qianmen redevelopment – which was plagued with vacant units due to
inflated rents – gave the government cold feet about rolling the same plan
out across Dashilar. This hiatus gave BDI time to commission the “nodal”
Dashilar pilot strategy, developed by local architect Liang Jingyu
<http://www.aarchstudio.com/index.php> from 2011, which would facilitate
several model projects in strategic locations across the area – and show
existing owners how investing in their properties and businesses could
help turn a profit and improve the area. “We're trying to change the
conversation from people holding out for compensation, to wanting to
invest and stay in their own community,” says Gaddes. As the leader of the
local Xicheng municipality puts it, these pilot projects should be “like
twinkling stars that grow by themselves”.

Beijing Design Week introduces the Dashilar neighbourhoodOne such
twinkling star comes in the form of Lin Lin, the director of Jellymon
<http://jellymon.com/>, a creative agency based in the neighbourhood, who
recently sold her flat in London to buy a 10-year lease on an art deco
factory across the street from her studio in Dashilar.

“I'm planning a holistic up-cycling experience,” she beams as she leads me
through her building site and up a ladder, in sequin-studded platform
heels, to the first floor, which she wants to transform into a cocktail
bar. Down below will be an organic supermarket and restaurant themed
around re-use. She is presenting the concept at BJDW by hosting a
performance banquet, in which every piece of a pig is used in what she
calls a “fusion of fine dining, taxidermy and product design."

Many locals turn up to watch the surreal occasion, happily stuffing chunks
of the pig into bags to take back home. It is hard, however, to imagine
how many of them will frequent Lin Lin's organic food shop when there is a
heaving farmer's market around the corner selling food for a fraction of
the price.

A project that looks a little more sensitively calibrated to the needs of
locals is proposed by French designer Matali Crasset
<http://www.matalicrasset.com/> a few streets away. Dressed in a red
harlequin outfit and sharp bowl haircut that gives her the look of a
children's entertainer, she has taken over a factory building for the week
to run workshops with local schoolchildren to imagine what the space might
become.

French designer Matali Crasset plans to transform a disused factory
building into a community play space. Photograph: Matali Crasset“I was
attracted to this building because it has the potential to act as a public
route, linking the two streets either side,” she says as we walk through
the building where she plans to install a “forest crossing playground,” an
undulating ramp dotted with cabins and greenhouse spaces. For now, she has
daubed bright graphic patterns on the walls and built some temporary
furniture, but if the plans go ahead, it could be a useful social space
for parents to bring their children in an area that lacks such community
facilities.

While well-meaning, many of the projects in the area seem to have
mis-fired. Italian designer Luca Nichetto <http://www.lucanichetto.com/>
has installed a number of coloured benches, designed to be moved and
flipped to act as stools or tables, inspired by watching locals move their
stools into shady spots along the streets. Yet their heavy concrete
construction means they can barely be lifted – instead, some clever
residents have taken them apart and are using their cylindrical legs as
plant pots.

Hong Kong-based designer Michael Young <http://www.michael-young.com/> has
been commissioned to design a new public toilet, with a curvaceous
white-tiled shell that will arch over the new loos like a space-age pod.
It looks nice enough, but inside it will house four conventional western
cubicles, negating the fact that the current open squat-toilets serve a
key social role, where people chat between knee-high partitions.

Speaking to residents who have witnessed the Dashilar project evolve over
the last three years, there remains an understandable suspicion about the
developer's motives – with the precedent of Qianmen all too fresh in the
memory. Some question why they would be seeding designers and new
businesses in the area, if not as a form of cultural-led gentrification,
with the ultimate aim of attracting a more upmarket resident. Others are
more hard-nosed: the incremental improvement of the neighbourhood makes
demolition less likely, and thus threatens their chances of being bought
out. Many would happily see the place razed if given the means to move on
to better conditions – and they are not blind to the fact that these
crumbling lanes represent some of the most expensive real-estate in
Beijing.

He Shuzhong, founder of the Beijing Cultural Heritage Protection Centre –
which recently wrote a furious letter to the RIBA
<http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/architecture-design-blog/2013/aug/
02/zaha-hadid-destroying-beijing-heritage> condemning Zaha Hadid's Galaxy
Soho mega-mall for destroying an area of hutongs – has little time for the
Dashilar plans, seeing the nodal strategy as no different to what happens
elsewhere, only disguised in more palatable rhetoric.

"The developers want to be seen as gentlemen who understand the local
history very well," he says. "But at the same time, they are trying to
make Dashilar high-end, with new, bigger, brighter buildings. They despise
local residents and the non-wealthy and want to move them all out."
"It is also difficult to distinguish who is the development businessman
and who the local government officer," he adds. "They are almost a
compound body – they are developers when they need to make money, and they
are government officials when they need the power."

“We wanted to create a social space that the community could share,” says
architect Hai Teng, showing me around a series of wooden house-like frames
he has erected on the rooftop, overlooking a courtyard filled with a
jumble of jerry-built out-buildings, where six families totalling 15
people currently live. “The neighbours here are not so friendly to each
other, so we wanted to make a space that they could use together.”

The architects were originally intended to occupy the empty first floor
level of the building, which extends along the streetfront in a long
glazed gallery, for up to two years. But when the downstairs residents
caught wind of the fact this space was going to be unlocked, they said
they would move in themselves and stop the practice from taking up
residence. As a result, the designers are now on the rooftop in two
temporary tents. “If we stay here and get to know them, we hope they will
change their minds,” says Hai. “Most architecture and design exhibitions
waste so much money, so we wanted to do something useful.”

Bert de Muynck, a Belgian architect who has carried out extensive research
on the Dashilar initiative with Mónica Carriço at the Moving Cities
<http://movingcities.org/> think-tank, has mixed feelings about the
outcome so far. “It is a brave attempt to do something different after the
failures of places like Qianmen,” he says. “People criticise those
developments for creating twee stage-sets for tourists – but we have to be
careful Dashilar is not just creating another kind of 'authentic' stage
set for designers.”