All cities look alike: what’s behind China’s monotonous urban landscape?
This article was originally published in Chinese on LNDC’s WeChat account on May 20, 2019, a collaboration between LNDC and guest author Zhe Cao, an architect working and living in NYC.
People have different tastes for virtually everything. From something as abstract as modern arts to as routine as daily clothing style; it is indeed hard to rank some preferences over the others. Aesthetic judgements are, after all, highly subjective inventions.
Yet for residential buildings in today’s China, the judgement becomes a much easier task — as there is little doubt to the fact that their monotonous design never fails to burn one’s eyes. Had ancient Chinese architects got a chance to visit today’s China, they would probably think they were in a totally different country.
Yet this strikingly boring style is never a Chinese invention. If we trace back to its origin, we can safely attribute this design to Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 who already has a long list of things being attributed to him, including launching a nationwide crusade to grow corns in order to compete with the US, despite his country being at the same climate zone as Canada.
In the late 20th century, the Soviet Union was facing a major crisis: population in Yekaterinburg and Novosibirsk witnessed a tenfold increase from 1917 to 1950, far exceeding the housing capacity at that time. Under this circumstance, Khrushchev suggested a new type of housing that required little budget both to build and to maintain. This new design soon swept the whole country as a major problem-solver for the overgrown population. Therefore, unit housing has another name called Khrushchyovka .
The main problem with this design is the lack of design itself. Khrushchyovka is usually 4 to 5-story high, thus avoiding the cost of elevators. They usually appear in groups as well, with 2 to 6 blocks in a group and each block containing 2 to 6 apartment units, living up to its name. As a stark contrast to earlier styles such as Baroque, Rococo, or Neoclassicism, Khrushchyovka feels more like a minimalist — everything, ranging from design, if any, to facilities, was just about the right size to fit common people’s requirements of daily living.
Architect Philipp Meuser, when asked “how would you describe a Khrushchyovka to someone who doesn’t know the difference between social housing designs?”, described Khrushchyovka “the first prototype of how a residential building could be produced in a very industrialized manner.”
Not far from Moscow were a group of then communist countries in Europe who quickly adopted their big brother’s practice to build and house fellow citizens in this type of housing units. For instance, in Germany they called it die Plattenbauten — “the prefabricated buildings”, a solution-to-go for post-WWII population spikes.
Yet despite its strong color of collectivism, unit houses are not exclusive for communist countries. In fact, we could also find their presence in the US which used to be as just as widespread as in the Soviet Union if not today’s China.
Following the Great Depression, Roosevelt established the subsidized housing program as a part of his New Deal. However, the idea did not attract enough attention until the end of WWII, when limited resources coupled with rocketing population effectively forced the government to put this plan onto agenda. One famous example was the Stuyvesant Town (including the neighboring Peter Cooper Village) in the New York City.
Stuytown was described as “the greatest and most significant mass movement of families in New York’s history” by the New York Times. This Manhattan’s largest building complex consists of 18 blocks with over 11,000 original residents being forced to move out from the planned site. From schools to churches and theaters to shops, almost everything was replaced by pure residential buildings in order to maximize the capacity to house as many people as possible.It was a hard transition indeed, as Stuytown was undoubtedly one of its own kind at that time.
On the other side of the Earth, Japan coincidentally was dealing with the urbanization problem in a very much similar way — human beings after all are the same type of creatures. Giant blocks of buildings called 団地 (danchi) were built in suburban areas for commuters, with overwhelming visual impact. “Sleeping towns” as they were, danchi was but modern shelters for people who probably spent just as much time on trains and subways as in their bedrooms.
Soon this type of high-density, high-rising, and highly monotonous type of communities revealed far more problems than just the boring design. Simply put, concentrating all low-income residents into one condensed neighborhood with minimal educational or entertainment facilities was never a good idea. Not only did it exacerbate issues such as crimes and drugs that often came with poverty, the lack of access to external support and resources further trapped the already disadvantaged populations.
In the 1970s, with the explosive demolition of Pruitt–Igoe in St.Louis — a milestone in modern architecture as many architects so deemed — unit housing met its official end.
In general, the following attributes are frequently associated with unit houses:
1. Originated in 1940–50s;
2. Usually as a response to wars, population crises or rapid urbanization which caused surging demand on affordable houses;
3. Government-led;
4. Fast to build and cheap to maintain;
5. High density;
6. Lack of design and are identical to each other;
7. Officially out in the 1970s.
Unfortunately, as a lot of countries starting to re-evaluate what modern residential buildings and neighborhoods should look and function like, China seems to be enjoying the benefits of this particular style.
Ever since its first Five-Year Plan launched in 1953, top-down approaches have never failed to satisfy the central government especially from the economic perspective. The biggest — if not the only — advantage of this approach is the amazing efficiency. Lack of hassle of going through the democratic process, top-down practice empowers leaders to implement anything they want even including dramatic overnight changes.
On the other hand, among the disadvantages of top-down approaches is the lack of diversity, which has further compromised China’s already lack of flexibility in many social aspects, constrained by its huge population base. As a result, although policies have opened up the door for different kinds of reforms, the actual content of that reform is often surprisingly — or unsurprisingly — boring.
Commercialization of residential buildings was approved in the 1980s, but as the commercialized new buildings were built for sale (before that apartments were obtained not through buying but central distribution), they were also extremely alike and almost identical to each other, as if whoever designed it merely copied and pasted from one single sketch. Indeed, it was nothing like a real commercialization, since the biggest selling point that can usually be found in any commercialized product — the design — is nonexistent here.
So who, exactly, designed them and are keeping designing them? Why did China fail to design interesting buildings just as ancient architects once did on the same land?
Interestingly, it was not any individuals that we should blame on, instead it was the old state-owned designing units. Right after the Communist Party established its regime in 1949, the state took over not just physical properties but also human capital, including, of course, the architects.
Everyone back then worked in a danwei (单位, “work unit”) that is categorized by professions: designing units, production units, infrastructure units, engineering units etc. Some of the units are still running today, although they have been allowed to take on private contract-based projects. The designing unit, as straightforward as its name has implied, was a house for all the architects.
In the 1950s, the central government in its Decision on Strengthening Designing Tasks (《国务院关于加强设计工作的决定》) determined the principle of “practicality comes first, appearance second at most (实用为主、美观为辅)” in residential building design.
Just as every top-down approach, architecture curriculum was amended to follow this guidance. Although designing units gradually dissolved in the 80s just as the majority of other state-owned enterprises, the style acquired from a constrained curriculum has long-lasting impact on more than just one or two generations(Kvan et.al., 2008).
However, this is not yet the whole story of why buildings are so ugly in today’s China. After all, real estate developers and investors control the money and resources which architects rely on to implement any creativity.
At the initial stage of investors’ experiments with commercialization, they basically copied the Hong Kong model — purchasing a vast piece of land, moving out the original residents if needed, and then squeezing in as many buildings as possible with the amount of sunshine barely reaching the legal minimum. This high efficiency ensured maximized profits and since people, who were obviously excited over their ability to own and trade real estate properties, reacted overwhelmingly positive, this model has been established and continued to today.
As land is still a state property, individuals are not allowed to directly buy any piece of land except for farmers in rural areas. They can only buy apartments from developers, who obtained the land — or, technically, obtained the right to sell apartments on a land — from the government through bidding processes. This has made developers the modern landlords, to whom the main purpose of land is never for living but profit-making. Especially in the age of growing prosperity in the real estate market, high demand creates a seller market, further spoiling the developers and eliminating any monetary incentives to spend any extra effort on making the buildings more attractive.
Thus we see that, the right to own properties is fundamentally shaping the way people think and live and even trade with each other. If individuals were able to own their land or at least able to rent it from the government, residential units would probably look quite differently in today’s China. After all, no one would benchmark his/her own house to unit houses if they use the land primarily to live not to trade.
Yet even if people were allowed to own their land in China, variation as we are hoping it could still be unreachable in the short term. Basing upon Marx’s famous quote of “economic base determines the superstructure”, aesthetic considerations have to yield their way to lack of money.
In the US, based on one of the largest single family housing constructor D.R.Horton (NYSE:DHI)’s financial statements, the average order value was $350,000 in 2018. If we exaggerate the cost of labor a little bit and deduct 80% from that value, we still need $70,000 in pure materials to build a house. Assuming that housing materials have generally the same prices around the globe, this is still about 50 times of the average annual disposable income in China for a household. When the budget hits in, this is when the game becomes simple: you just pick whichever is the cheapest option. The money to hire a designer is probably the first thing to avoid, as you can pretty much copy your neighbor’s design, who probably got it online for 2 Yuan (less than 30cents).
Of course, the rural has its own story as well: people are not only choosing the cheapest option with minimal design, they are also copying the urban style which in their eyes represent something modern and better. When the city is filled with boring-looking unit houses, so will the countryside.
Breaking a cycle like this requires generations of efforts. First we need economic development to empower people with the financial ability over housing designs, which will then provide enough monetary incentives for developers to diversify building’s appearances as well. These two forces together could potentially change the principles outlined in the current architecture curriculum so that students would learn to express aesthetic concerns that could get them better jobs in the market. Or, with a traditional top-down approach, we could potentially expect one day some leaders could no longer bear every city looking exactly the same and would then start imposing some new set of rules for the educators to follow.
At the end of the discussion, taking a step back, maybe China is simply walking on the same road where the developed countries have already gone through; or, maybe as time goes by and population grows, we would eventually have to face a world with highly standardized housing units. No matter where the future leads us to, we all should hope that prosperity lasts as long as possible and poverty being eradicated as much as possible. After all, poverty is oftentimes the sole answer to a lot of the questions we have in mind.
