A Story of Tangjialing
The Wickedness of Nomadic Urbanism in China
In the urbanization process of Chinese cities, a particular phenomenon has caught many attention from the public. In the outskirt area of these fast-developing cities, traditional courtyard housings have transformed into high density low-rise building blocks to accommodate the large inflow of “urban nomads” population, and resulted in a unique urban typology called the “urban village”.
Tangjialing was one of the largest urban villages in Beijing, with 3,000 villagers accommodating 50,000 urban nomads in an area of mere 100 acres. Many types of urban nomads once lived in Tangjialing, which includes a large number of newly graduate students, self-employed people and even white collars. All these people rent housings from the local villagers, and together they created informal communities that are like ghettos. Tangjialing was demolished in 2010 and was replaced by a gated community under administrative order. For some reason the urban nomads did not stay in the gated community, but turned to seek for other villages to stay. This triggered the creation of new urban villages. And this cycle has been repeated over and over in many village sites.
So why are these urban villages emerged? Why the government decided to demolish them? Why the urban nomads chose to leave the gated community? Most importantly, why the cycle?
In C. West Churchman’s editorial “Wicked Problems” in 1967, Horst Rittel’s concept of the Wicked Problem was introduced: a class of social system problems which are ill-formulated, where the information is confusing, where there are many clients and decision makers with conflicting values, and where the ramifications in the whole system are thoroughly confusing.
Is our Tangjialing story a case of the wicked problem? Perhaps yes. Firstly, it is a social problem. Unlike the subject of science, for which properties and behaviors are intrinsic and have their limitation in their influence, social problems do not inherit the answer themselves, and have a great impact on a considerable number of the individuals within a society. The nomadic population in Beijing is 7.58 million, occupying nearly one fourth of the entire city population. The proper accommodation of this group has always been a central focus on government’s to-do list. However, can the problem be simply formulated as a shortage of housing for the nomadic population?
Let’s try to find where the origin of the problem is and locate the problem center. So why the large nomadic population? Someone might say that the city has expanded so much under urbanization, and all farmlands in the rural area are encroached by city. People who lived in rural areas have lost their source of income, therefore are forced to enter the city to make a living. Others might disagree. They think that as city grows into mega cities, innumerable opportunities are presented to people outside of these areas, and have attracted them to come into the city to change their lives. Another view is that, it is not the inflow that is causing the large population, but the problem with stagnate outflow. Many people refuse to leave the city even though their life quality is even worse than before. The reasons can be pressure under family expectations, lost hope, compromises for children, etc. Which one comes first? It’s every hard to know.
If we are not sure about the origin, what about the importance? Can we divide issues into parts and prioritize them so that we would know where and how to intervene? If improving the living standard on site is the goal, will providing large and spatious housing make everyone live happily ever after? Not really. Local villagers have already used their farmlands to build the low-quality housings to accommodate the urban nomads. For many of them, the rent is the sole income they have, and they couldn’t afford tearing down all the houses and turn the lands back to farmlands. So what about subsidizing the villagers to demolish the urban village? I’m afraid that would not solve the problem either. Due to the long-term effect of the construction activities, the land is in fact no longer suitable for growing crops. So if we want to sustain the local villager’s economic chain, we’ll have to find other farmlands for them. Then the question comes to the benefit of the owner of those other farmlands. If we give new housings to the local villagers and let them rent out the units, would that sustain their lives? No, because the rental fee would be too high for the urban nomads, and no one would choose to live there. Maybe providing housing is not a viable path. What if the goal focuses on making people leave the ghetto so that the urban villages could naturally disappear? Then the question falls into increasing employment rate and creating programs for the business minorities, which is another potential wicked problem because it relates to economy, politics, and even education.
It seems almost impossible to know when we have sufficient understanding of all the related variables of the problem and how big the network is. What has happend in Tangjialing and many other urban villages in Beijing are the strongest evidences of how the government is unable to cope with the wicked nomadic urbanism.
It appears that the officials diagnose the urban villages as a single facet problem: it is the scar of the city, and should be eliminated to improve the overall image of the city. They seek for efficient ways to erase those undesirable conditions, and one of the most common method they use is brutal, forced demolition accompanied with new construction. However, such actions are more and more often being challenged by a growing awareness of the society’s pluralism and of the differentiation of values held by various group of individuals. In the case of Tangjialing, the local villagers, the diverse group of urban nomads, the residents in the effected area, the government, are all stakeholders of the problem. The valuations of government proposals are “judged against an array of different and contradicting scales” (Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Horst Rittel/Melvin Webber). Creating a desired condition for one stakeholder might raise objection from another group; providing solutions for certain parts of the problem sets may cause a severer consequence on the other part of the package. If we ask why the urban nomads chose to leave the gated community, and never cease to generate urban villages elsewhere? It is because the values presented in the gated community does not match to their desired condition, and this gap certainly cannot be solved through the repetition of the demolition-construction process.
The government really needs to ask themselves whether such action is the right thing to do. In fact, what part of the urban village is really a problem? Isn’t the urban village itself a manifestation of the consensus or balance reached among many stakeholders?
Now the question is, can wicked problems be solved? What’s the optimal thing the government can do? Interestingly enough, the characteristics of the wicked problem presents many similarities with the problems that are seen and dealt with in the design field. A design problem is a situation that needs to be determined and concretized through certain lens of framing relationships. Design problems don’t have a single fixed solution, but have many solutions that tackle with the commons and particularities of the problems. In another word, design, as an operating tool, has the power to deal with the complexity of the wicked problem and has the potential to encompass differentiate values, adjust to new situations, and even direct to new results. According to Richard Buchanan, this power of design essentially resides in designers’ ability to utilize the concept of placements: innovative re-positioning of problems.
What is regarded as the designer’s style is sometimes more than just a personal preference for certain types of visual forms,materials, or techniques; it is a characteristic way of seeing possibilities through conceptual placements.
—— Richard Buchanan
Through this lens, the intentions of many Utopian community design could be better understood.
The proposal by Riken Yamamoto conveys the idea of re-thinking scales of individual living. The standard modules provide a way for low-cost customization accommodating differentiated values while maintaining overall quality and integrity of the community. The concept implies a sense of indeterminacy: there is no definitive conditions or limits, only operations and growth. Instead of pre-conceiving the final result, the design allows the community to be self-generated and self-adjusted, thus more resilient and robust. Perhaps in the future, the wicked nomadic urbanism problem could be mitigated under design thinking, and urban villages would no longer be ghettos but a lively and beautiful scene in the city.
self notes…
- deconstructionist architecture embodies symbolic meaning/ideological environment/Tschumi
- impact people other than physical environment/experiment will continue
- Ishigami: placements into nature/cloud, forest, rain, horizon…
