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- [00:00]
A
Good evening everyone and welcome. I'm Fran Tonkis from the Cities Program here at the lsc and it's my pleasure to welcome you Tonight to the 2009 James Sterling Memorial Lecture on the City. This is the third biennial prize to be awarded by the LSC Cities Program in partnership with the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal. And our colleague Giovanna Barassi, the Associate Director of the CCA is here with us this evening. The James Sterling Memorial Lecture Prize was established by the two institutions in 2003 to create a forum for the advancement of new critical perspectives on the role of urban design and urban architecture in the development of cities worldwide. It was conceived, as the name suggests, in homage to the architect James Sterling, who believed that urban design is integral to to the advancement of new critical perspectives on the role of urban design and urban architecture in the development of cities across the world and saw it also as a vital topic for public debate. And it's a particular pleasure in that context to welcome Mary Sterling to be here with us tonight. Equally, it's a great pleasure to introduce the 2008 nine winners of of the Sterling Lecture Prize, Robert Mangurian and Mary Ann Ray. They are principals in the architectural practice Studio Works, which was founded in California in 1969. Studio Works is a practice that is committed not only to high quality and inventive architectural design, but also to design education through teaching studios in California and also in Beijing. Their studio base, the Beijing Architecture Studio Enterprise, was established in 2005 and informs some of the work we'll be hearing tonight. This relationship between research, education and practice is one that the city's program is also committed to. So it's a particular pleasure to ask you to join me in welcoming Robert Mangurian and Mary Ann Ray to speak to the on their topic Beijing Inside Out.
- [02:22]
B
Thank you so much, Fran and hello you guys there. Yes, it's such an honor for us to be here and we're so grateful to the Sterling Prize and to LSE and to CCA for letting us for supporting this work that we've been doing in Beijing now for a year or two.
- [02:40]
C
Let me say yes, also thank you for having us here. I wouldn't be here if it wasn't for Jimbo is what James Sterling was known as, at least for his Yale students. I unfortunately was never a Yale student, but was lucky enough to have three partners about a year out of school who were also just a year out of school in New York who had studied at Yale, two in architecture and one in graphic Design and James Sterling had an enormous influence on their lives, and therefore mine. And I must say, architecture as we know it today. And for the sake of this talk, architecture's influence in forming cities would not be what it is at all without James Sterling existing.
- [03:45]
B
Beijing inside Out. And maybe we could start the slides now. They said it would pop up automatically.
- [03:53]
C
There's. So Marianne and I are doing this together. So Marianne reads. Well, I read poorly and I like to improvise and waste time, but that's the way it goes. So anyways, here we are. Beijing inside Out.
- [04:41]
B
Rural Apollitan developments in early 21st century China. The tongue twister that we've invented. Their politicism. So three days before, 35 students from two North American universities were arriving to spend nine weeks with us at our Beijing studio. We found ourselves without a space. The government had taken away our space. We considered throwing in the towel and telling the students to go home, but finally we pulled out all the stops and ended up in a very raw space filled with Gobi Desert sand. No electricity, no phone, no Internet, no not even any doors. We spent the first two days sweeping out that sand. It was across the street from our friend, the artist AI Weiwei, in what was then the backwater of the now famous 798 Arts District, if you know Beijing at all. We found ourselves in a place called Chao Chongdi, a small urban village which was unknown to us at that time. And it was undergoing something of an extreme transformation. So in three days we had all the necessary amenities in place. And once we were there, we experienced a form of human congregation unlike anything we'd ever experienced before.
- [05:51]
C
So I'll back up just a little bit. We got to Beijing in a peculiar way. This is a story that could be a half an hour, but I will shorten it to less than a minute. Scottish bloke Bernard Webb, through his compatriot in the U.S. well, also in England, Drew Hammond gave us a call, this would have been in 2002, and said, could we. You would be perfect to help introduce steel construction to China and therefore be in line to build endless numbers of 80 story office buildings. We informed Bernard and Drew that the tallest building we'd ever done was two or three stories and they should really call up Som or Norman Foster. And they insisted over and over. And then finally we said, okay, but we couldn't go right away. And we. Bernard got through to Drew and said, because we were going to be picking our olives. And in Rome, Drew said, oh, what good fortune, because Bernard will be there as well. Anyways, we ended up therefore in Beijing. And it was true. Bernard had good connections. The Shanghai gang was in power and those were basically his connections. Needless to say, steel construction took care of itself and. And the tall buildings went to other people.
- [07:35]
B
So we found ourselves landing in Beijing, in China, new ecological orders. We found ourselves confronted with a whole series of very extreme conditions of urbanism and of larger things which this addresses here that went beyond simple issues of sustainability or simple distinctions between what was natural and artificial. And actually one of the things we learned, which is just so stunning and hard to believe, is that over 3 billion trees have been planted in Beijing over the last few years. And this is actually, as we'll see later, part of a realization of a plan of 1959 for Beijing that Chairman Mao had proposed for all cities that called for 40% greenery coverage. A little bit ahead of its time and surprising to us, but this afforestation that's going on throughout China is counteracting this massive deforestation that really began with Chairman Mao's agricultural practices clearing land to grow food. And it turns out that now the continuation of that has a lot to do with what you're seeing right here, which are wooden chopsticks. 45 billion pears are produced in China every year and that requires 25 million trees. They're exported to many Asian countries. Luckily now they're being replaced with bamboo chopsticks for a large amount, which is a much more sustainable practice. This is actually a table that our students built at our base studios. Again, we come from a kind of world of practice and architecture, even close to art practice at some time sometimes. So this is 40,000 chopsticks that produce a kind of table or a surface to eat upon. And this is a chopstick steamer stool composed of 3,000 chopsticks. This is a one child family policy family of three. Enough chopsticks for half a year.
- [09:31]
C
To water the trees. In the desert environment of Beijing, engineered rainmaking has been enacted by the Bureau of Weather Management modification by the Bureau of weather modification. 70 rockets of silver iodide produces two days of rain, providing a good dose of quote top down irrigation.
- [09:52]
B
And we're going to hand out just a few things through the lecture. Again, being architects, we like to touch things and have material things and not just abstractions. So we're going to hand around, don't actually open this up, but this is. These are some silver iodide pallets.
- [10:06]
C
When he's not tending the cherry orchards outside of Beijing Yu Yonggang can be found between the twin barrels of a retired.37 millimeter Anti aircraft gun, blasting shells into passing clouds. I don't feel like God, he says. I'm just an ordinary worker. Last year's Olympic opening ceremonies and this year's 60th anniversary of the revolution ceremonies benefit from the likes of this ordinary worker. And I have to say I was just there actually by coincidence, with seven students doing some reconnaissance in Chao Chengdi. And Monday, the anniversary was on Thursday, which was a television event. Except for the 1 million people that were in the parade. It was sort of shocking in a way. But Monday was a beautiful day. Tuesday it was overcast badly, Wednesday even worse. And Thursday morning I got up early and at 6:30 it was just socked in overcast. And by 8:30 the sky was crystal clear blue, not a cloud anywhere.
- [11:17]
B
Chao Chongdi farmers, floaters, taxi drivers, artists and the international art mob challenge and remake the city.
- [11:23]
C
This first story is close to us. We are literally living in the story of Chao Chengdu, participating in its growth and change and existing very much as illegal residents. Yes, the police station registers us when we are there, but only as temporary residents. Our constructions are illegal. And the legal, quote, legal setup for base Beijing is for the most part illegal. In a pocket defined by the intersection of the massive state planned 5th Ring Road, which was at the edge of Beijing when it was finished in 2002 and of course not now, and the airport expressway that took visitors to the city of Beijing and to the One world, One Dream Olympic venues, sits the urban village of Chao Chengdi.
- [12:14]
B
And the village is in the Chaoyang district. The Chaoyang district, which is by far the largest revenue producing district of all of China. It actually accounts for two and a half percent of the entire GDP of the whole country. One district alone. So it's where the CBD is, it's where the embassies are incredibly wealthy and productive district. But yet tucked away within this context, Chao Chengdu is a thriving early 21st century urban space of mostly illegal structures. Structures being built by a combination of entrepreneurial farmers, contemporary art dealers and artists and others. It's very much unlike the very visible large scale plan developments that characterize much of Beijing and other cities in China and worldwide, in cities that are in the process of forming. But what is unique in Chao Chengdu? While it's unique, it's actually quite indicative of another kind of urbanism going on invisibly. And between the cracks in many Chinese cities and world cities, Chaochon details a story specific to itself and its 4 to 7,000 mostly illegal residents. But it also has embedded within it the problems and possibilities of urban space as they occur in this very unique and pivotal point in human history that we find ourselves in as rural to urban migrations. For the first time ever now, 50% of us are living in cities, 50% of us are living in rural areas or countrysides.
- [13:45]
C
China Rupture Urbanism A Chronology of Change in Cha Chengde.
- [13:51]
B
So at Peking University, a thesis student there in the architecture program, He Huishan developed an idea about Beijing. She called it Rupture Urbanism. And it deals primarily with 20th century Beijing. And she describes really amazingly well the fairly major political and spatial ruptures that have had an impact on the formation of the city in the 20th century. And in fact, this is not something new for Beijing. And in fact, if you look at the city, from dynasty to dynasty, the location of the city, the name of the city, and the shape of the city change quite distinctly.
- [14:29]
C
And I think you could make an argument we're not going to do this here. But although just through this example, in a sense, all cities today that are in the sort of developing mode go through the same process of ruptures that produce a jump forward, another rupture, a jump forward, another rupture, a jump forward. This happened in our place in the US in the late 1800s for places like Manhattan and Chicago, earlier than that.
- [15:07]
B
St Louis, even like Los Angeles, going from a desert to a city or.
- [15:10]
C
An urban area two times in the 20s, and then once again after World War II. And so Beijing and all the other Chinese cities, and we're probably waiting for this to happen, although it's beginning in India, go through these ruptures. One of China's extreme conditions is that Cha Chengde has given us a direct look into is an urbanism of change, of the unfinished, and of the city forever in the process of becoming. Change has become a phenomenon in the village since its origin as a grass wildland. Cha Chungdi translates from Mandarin as grassland. It has undergone radical change as a Qing Dynasty imperial burial site. Then it was completely stripped away during the Cultural Revolution to make room for an agricultural people's commune and agriculture. And then these are the fields in.
- [16:14]
B
Cha Chengdi in that era, and the commune, the workers and farmers in the commune.
- [16:18]
C
And then after 1978, as a semi privatized industrial landscape during Deng Xiaoping's reform period.
- [16:25]
B
This is just a mosaic of some of the buildings in the village that are from that era, the kind of.
- [16:29]
C
Factory, productive landscape, buildings and recently Vanity Fair and Conde Nast Traveler described Cha Chengdu as one of the world's cool, coolest art destinations. Finally, the most recent change alongside the new high art twist, is that the former farmers are transforming themselves into landlords by demolishing their single story houses and building new illegal multi story constructions on the land that they do not own, but for which they have a legal land lease from the government. Heterotopia extraordinaire Simultaneity is without the collapse of difference. Chain migrations and Martha Stewart pays a visit to the village.
- [17:17]
B
So Chao Chengdi now is home to this funny mix of farmers, of taxi drivers and their companies, foreign art patrons and gallery dealers, a lot of art students who migrate there and other odd industry people, people also to high tension repair people. We turned a corner one day around from Chao Chongdi and looked up in the sky and had to just blink because those we found that those were not birds on the wire, but human beings at work. And Robert's passing around the typical issue workers bag. Almost every one of the floating population in Chinese cities that have come from rural areas to act in the construction trade would have one of these bags and it has a kind of electrical symbol and then the slogan produced safely. So and the village is also home to rural and urban, rural to urban chain migrants like the ones mapped here. These migrations don't happen in a kind of willy nilly way. This actually maps one group of people that we happen to know quite well and shows the kind of familial and village and friendly ties and how they all ended up in Chao Chengdu as opposed to different villages. And then even more recently, the national and international contemporary art mob has moved in and they've been following a chain migration really started and provoked by AI Weiwei, one of the premier artists and now architects in China. If you know, he was one of the collaborators on the Bird's Nest stadium with Herzogen de Meuron. And then the villagers have produced a kind of canine migration by importing dogs that are as internationally diverse as the art crowd now in the village. So there are dog breeds from Siberia, France, Portugal, Croatia, et cetera and so on. And this really has to do with the fact that the farmers, now that they've built their buildings, they're not out farming the land for long hours. They now can sit back, their landlords collect collecting rents and there's a kind of time and a space of new leisure in China. And the dog situation, having pets is part of that.
- [19:30]
C
The China art hood village is just part of a wild mix that forms a physical, spatial and architectural heterotopia extraordinaire. The traditional village fabric sits in the midst of a landscape of ring roads, expressways, rail tracks, mid rise housing, suburban villas, factories, high tech, high end international galleries and art studios, agriculture and more. You can see this mix in this photograph as we dissect it. Original village structures, new multi story buildings, active construction sites, impromptu markets, new studios and galleries. Here is an urban shepherd and his flock roaming the streets of the capital city of China, coexisting with the new studios and galleries.
- [20:21]
B
And while 50 yards away, migrant sewer workers took a nap in their temporary tent housing. Martha Stewart strolled into the village and paid a visit to AI Weiwei. She was curious about his new lifestyle and architecture as it had spread up in the village. Illegal, illegitimate urbanism, fake or interior real estate architecture produces a new Chinese middle class, a spontaneous ad hocratic mongrel architecture or the natural village.
- [20:55]
C
All of the new building in the village is illegal, I must say, or at least not legal. Whether built by entrepreneurial farmers or by AI Weiwei, who when speaking about the buildings that he has designed and built in the village with fake design, says, all of my buildings in the village are illegal. When he first came back, as many artists did in the late 1980s, there was something called the. And they smelled, they sensed something in the air which was of course turned into Tiananmen. And it had to do with government corruption and the economy going sort of very strange directions. And they left because art at that time was severely censored. They left and went to other countries. So AI Weiwei went to New York a lot with some other people. And he came back around the late 1990s, probably 1999, was living at home with his mother and father. His father had been or was one of the premier poets in China. And his mother finally got sick of him around and said, you know, why don't you go out and earn a living? And so he, I guess he asked one of his friends and they said, why don't you? I don't know how the contact was made with Cha Chengde, but they said it's sort of a place and not too far from the famous Kapha Central Academy of Art in China. And so he went over and saw some empty land and talked to the village leader. And the village leader said, yeah, you can use it. I'm sure they made a financial arrangement to use the piece of land, but the village leader said, it's at your risk if the government wants the land or wants to tear it down, they have a perfect right to do it.
- [22:58]
B
And what he built, actually this is his house and studio, is a kind of hybrid of a New York loft. Because one of the depressing things for him when he went back from being in New York, there was no space like he had seen in New York for artists to do their work in, but a kind of hybrid between that and a Chinese cross.
- [23:16]
C
This map shows the legal structures in gray and illegal in the predominantly black. And then also a note here. This does not include, does not account for the recent villager activity. And when we say recent villager activity, we're talking about the last five months.
- [23:38]
B
Which we'll talk about in a, in a bit. Zuron soon is a Chinese term which means natural village. And in China there are two kinds of villages, whether we're looking at an urban or a rural village. And a natural village is one that sprung up of its own accord, in a sense, from the bottom up to fill some need of labor or something else. Whereas an administrative village, the other kind of village, is administered and put in place from the top down in a more planned fashion. Chao Chongdi is historically a natural village, having sprung up to serve the imperial burial grounds that were there. And that natural growth really continues today with the architecture that is both high, pure and minimal in the case of AI Weiwei and some of the other artists, designers there, but at other times is low, idiocratic, spontaneous and mongrel, and that these two coexist together. AI Weiwei, again.
- [24:35]
C
This is one of the oddities. It's right on the edge. It's part of Cha Chengde, but at the edge this is. We saw this sign at the entrance to the village and it said Iowa, one of our states in the US and we didn't pay much attention for the first year, first months that we were there. And then finally one of our students family came over, I guess, and was visiting and they somehow were taken to this place. Well, it turns out Iowa was established by a person whose father had more or less been one of the mayors of Beijing until 1949. Then the family decided, decided to leave and run off to Taiwan. He was this person was sent then not sent. He went off to the Kent State University in the US and got his degree, I think before the shooting, and then ended up at the University of Iowa for most of his life as.
- [25:46]
B
A professor of theoretical mathematics there.
- [25:50]
C
But somehow, because it was Iowa, he got interested in beef and aged beef.
- [25:56]
B
And corn fed beef, which he taught Mongolian farmers How to replicate.
- [26:01]
C
So he, I guess retired earlier to something, but he brought his family back and somehow they had rights to a piece of land or they. I think they had rights.
- [26:13]
B
He raised his family, he was able to reclaim the land from pre1949 in this kind of edge of the city.
- [26:19]
C
But it was illegal to build anything but farm structures. He was not interested at all in farming. And so he established these sort of Quonset hut buildings which are basically greenhouses.
- [26:32]
B
So they look like agricultural buildings.
- [26:34]
C
So he's a farm. And then he set up a restaurant and trained some farmers in Mongolia to have their beef fed up on corn, which is not particularly healthy, but it certainly makes the beef taste better.
- [26:49]
B
And a suburban style house that reminded me of things where I grew up in suburban Seattle.
- [26:53]
C
One of these, one of them is dedicated to either Lincoln or Cadillac.
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B
Cadillac with Iowa plates that reverse migrated with him back to Beijing.
- [27:03]
C
And the ping pong table, which is Chinese. And then his miniature golf course, which, which we've never seen anyone use, which.
- [27:09]
B
Is sort of nice that it sort of has Chinese characteristics to it. Not quite the pure version. And then this slide illustrates something that for us is quite.
- [27:20]
C
Iowa is. Yes, Iowa is the curved roof.
- [27:25]
B
And this is the National Film Museum at the end. After this became an arts district, the government decided to set up the National Film Museum industry as sort of a kind of leech on the creative cultural zone that had finally made the magazines due to the artists having really developed it. And because of that and a kind of recognition of this having developed as a cultural scene, what for us was pretty interesting is that even though this was an illegal zone, the government has not clamped down on it. In fact, the government seems to be allowing the urban villages, certain of the urban villages, to exist and develop and also in a way, stealthily supporting them. This is new infrastructure being put into our village, separated sanitary and storm sewers, new water and gas pipes. And this happened about two, three years ago. Before that, you know, the smell, the insects, et cetera, were crazy. This has really solved a lot of the problems of that in the village. So. So in a way, the government is actually supporting, in a quiet way, the growth occurring from the ground up by these entrepreneurial villagers and artists.
- [28:32]
C
And as part of the. A part of this effort, you know. And again in the morning, small gear in Beijing, the National Film Museum, you can barely see it, but the only way you can get to it. Well, not the only way, but the easiest way to get to it is off the fifth ring road. But you can only go in one direction on the fifth ring road and there's an off ramp that takes you down the street where we have sort of where we are and various other things I wei way and so on. And then they widened the road next to us and widened this road so you could get to the thing. But they realized and I guess we've saw the plans for the thing to to do the on ramp to the 5th Ring Road you would have to tear up most of Chajangdi. So they've held off on that. I'll say the villagers, but we've done it one or two times. To get onto the 5th Ring Road you actually have to turn your car around and go backwards, face oncoming freeway traffic, highway traffic, the off ramp and get until you get onto the 5th Ring Road and then you're cool, you're.
- [29:41]
B
Or some people back into it and then move forward. So in a way the government is accommodating this life and small scale development going on in the village. They don't have to invest in large scale consuming planning and the kind of money and development that's required to support it. So it's sort of being done in a sense for them. So this kind of incremental urbanism produced by the invested city dwellers themselves forms the kind of city that Jane Jacobs describ describes as one that learns from cumulative wisdom that's fast on its feet and it adapts at a moment's notice. Workaholic 247 city scenes and routines, lanterns and cinemas to the passerby.
- [30:23]
C
No question, Chao Chengdi is a kind of workaholics dream city. It operates 24 7. And to just put this into context, Cha Chengde is not unique and most people in actually a fair amount of the world do work six or seven days a week. Certainly six days a week, 12 hours a day as the standard work week.
- [30:47]
B
So for instance this is a shopkeeper and his son taking a nap behind the counter. I'm coming in at about 6:30 in the morning to buy some juice from the mother and wife of these two people. And they're taking naps after their 4am pickups and deliveries and will then go on to the school day and the shopkeeping day. I was dated.
- [31:12]
C
And I used to. This is a scene I used to walk by when I would in the early days make a trip back and forth from Los Angeles to Beijing and we were doing some construction work and Jason who was helping us and obviously speaking Mandarin with Shao Liu and his workers, he So I would go back and forth and so I would get up early in the morning, probably because of jet lag, and go get some baozhu up in the center of Chao Chengdu. And that's when I really first got to know the place and whoops and sorry and I'd walk by the scene, but the scene had people around it and they were eating dinner. This was at 6:30 in the morning. And after a while we'd wave to each other and then unfortunately, well, I guess it could have been fortunately, but they said why don't you come and join us, we're having dinner. It's like at 6:30 in the morning it didn't seem like. And so I had to beg off it. And after a while they stopped waving at me. I think it was rude to them for not having dinner. But this the crowd, it became clear after a while the crowd was were taxicab drivers and they were just finishing their shift, turning the car over to somebody that they were sharing a room with in Cha Chengde and that other person was off.
- [32:44]
B
So some of the housing stock in Chao Chongdi is taxi driver housing. This is the courtyard of that housing in the village. And this is a little sequence that takes you through this shift change as a lot fills up with the day drivers. Then at dusk the day drivers come back, switch with the night drivers and then the beds are exchanged as well in the rooms. And this is a project by one of our thesis students, Chris Ward, who filmed down at the main intersection in the village for one hour in the morning. But then at night, 12 hours later, he went back and re projected that morning scene onto the night scene and it became a kind of slipped overlap of time and space reflecting this non stop or 12 hour night and day shifts of taxi drivers and construction workers in the village. Inside Out Urbanism or Lih Wai Bufen There's a saying in China, Liwei Bufan. And this is a way of describing a kind of lack of clarity about what's inside and what's outside. And it can refer to your clothes being turned inside out like this. To not knowing a friend from an enemy, or to not being able to discern the difference between your home affairs or private affairs and external or public affairs. And quoting from a lecture that Pili did for us at base. He's an art curator, one of the top art curators in Beijing. He talked about how before 1992 in China we did not have a notion of private space, or at least not such a definition between private and Public space. Every space was public. You go to 798, the Arts District in the former Military Dawn Way now, and you can still see that kind of format of collective buildings. It's more like a hostel. You don't have a toilet, you don't have a kitchen. Everybody had one bedroom and we shared the kitchen, we shared the bathroom. And that had something to do with the fact that all the land in China was owned collectively by the people or the government. So this new kind of real estate thing, where people actually own their own houses, has really changed lives. People started to have their own private spaces. That's the main thing. In the 1990s, it was a fantastic dream for a Chinese family to have their own apartment and with their own kitchen, toilet and two bedrooms for Westerners. Pili said, it's very hard to understand how this change can inform and transform daily life for Chinese people. But people at that time then started to have public space versus and separate from private space, their own space to act within. On any given sunny day in Chao Chongdi village, the rare break from the overcast gray Beijing sky is taken to advantage and the bed covers and quilts come out of the houses for a sun bleach. The village transforms for a few hours while the temporary soft facades clad the brick houses. This low tech laundry method is especially useful in a place like Chao Chungi, where running water and drainage infrastructure were not present in most of the dwellings. That's changed somewhat.
- [35:47]
C
And one of the things, you know, for us, maybe it's just our eyes or the way they work or head, but, you know, they have a fair amount of at this point. Galleries in Chao Chengdi, most of the really serious galleries move from 798, which is where the art scene really established itself in China, up to Cha Chengde, where it was less of kind of a circus and knickknack chops and so on and so the blankets, you know, so they have great. They have very good shows in the galleries and it's amazing that it coexists with the rest of the village. But then outside you'll see this, which is quite frankly as good as a fair number of the shows. But it's just happening in a kind of natural way.
- [36:42]
B
Architectural production and reproduction cycles of fake, fake and double fake, control C, control V and the culture of copy.
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C
In this entrepreneurial, illegal environment, the culture of the copy and the copy thieves.
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B
Thrives.
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C
Thrives.
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B
Okay, and we're going to hand you around one of the fake luxury goods that are produced in China.
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C
And the issue, we won't go into this in sort of a long way, but the culture of the copy is the copy has a totally different meaning from a kind of Western interpretation where you're always maybe since the Renaissance, inventing new things and believing that the new is always going to sort of upstage the older thing. And then we have progress and so on. In the Confucius system, that's not the.
- [37:51]
B
Case in Daoist philosophy, things gain value in their repetition or their remaking the kind of restatement of something anew. So it's a kind of reversal of our Western view, perhaps on this idea.
- [38:04]
C
And AI Weiwei's design studio, called Fake, is in Cha Chengdi and led by AI Weiwei and has designed and built some projects there. The farmer, and that's this one on the left. The farmers who are constructing the new multi story buildings. And at this time, not very many definitely took notice of AI Weiwei's architecture. And mainly the wealthy foreigners who were paying high rents for them, the small farmers started to make fakes of the fakes.
- [38:39]
B
So this is a whole series of images. On the left you'll see a real fake design by AI Weiwei and his team, international team. And on the right, a farmer making an artificial or fake coffee. Fake, fake, fake. And they're sometimes right across the street from each other. It's like, okay, this is happening, all right, we can do it here.
- [39:06]
C
And there's another sort of take on this. For those of you that have read the book Gamora covering the Italian mafia, Camorra, the same thing comes up, but in a with the Pradas and the Armanis and so on, of the world, completely complicit in it and not unhappy at all that their goods are being reproduced at a much lower cost and disseminated throughout the world. It kind of is like a pat on the back to them and future customers. One year later.
- [39:49]
B
So last fall, the lecture basically ended where we just stopped and we curtailed it a bit more this year, running through a kind of catalog, an inventory of the conditions and things that were producing the urbanism in that funny urban village. So at CCA in Montreal, the project really involved that one very specific village that was indicative of other places in China. But one year later, it's really expanded, expanded through our work with our students there, to include a dynamic network of cities, of towns and urban and rural villages within the greater municipal region of Beijing, which is shown here. It covers 16,800 square kilometers of land. And we're now in the process of exploring a kind of new space that exists between urban and rural China. And we really think that this new space has been produced by an amalgam of contrast conditions and entities that will attempt to delaminate or attempting to delaminate tonight. And they really include global and local economies and specific conditions of a communist and socialist system of politicians and government, of new communication technologies. This is a flat screen TV with satellite dish in a rural village three hours out of Beijing, where we were the first foreigners that some of them had seen. But so there's this new access to these technologies by rural and that these conditions of the space between rural and urban have also been produced by the rural and urban inhabitants and their migrations by entrepreneurs and the effects again of these migrations. And this space is really being formed without and or in spite of official planning methods. And yet the space has produced new urban rural environments that offer creative and intelligent alternatives to the current standard large scale planning methods. And we're calling this space, at least for now, rural, a politan space, because we've really found that the boundaries between rural and urban are much less clear than we'd once imagined. And we think that this new space requires a way of looking at the urban and the rural, not as distinct in different environments, but but rather as part of a larger network or interconnected or interdependent field. So DGU Dispersal Group Unit Urbanism Checkerboard Urbanism Forest of smokestacks Chairman Mao was a radical urban designer. So to find the origins of this kind of rural politican form as seen in the urban village, we hit upon this plan for Beijing. And it's one of the ones that seem to to get left out as planners look at these kind of famous plans that were made for Beijing. This was produced in 1959 and Liang Sicheng, if you know anything about the Chinese urban planning, was one of the great planners of the 20th century, was involved with the design along with a team of Chinese and Soviet planners. But on this plan, what is said is that Chairman Mao was the primary influence or maker of ideas for this plan.
- [42:51]
C
It was called dispersal group unit urbanism. And it turned out to be a fairly radical proposal for a city, and one that may certainly be relevant by implication today in some way. It is a proposal for a producer city.
- [43:14]
B
I won't pronounce it.
- [43:17]
C
As opposed to a consumer city or a Shaofei Chengxi. This is an urbanism of dozens of tripartite collections of agriculture, factory and village. Between these units. The plan calls for forests or more agriculture, an additional mandate of the 1959 plan, Mao specifically raised the issue of having 40% green coverage in urban areas.
- [43:42]
B
And so this was not just a model for Beijing, it was really a model for all Chinese cities. Going into his new era of China.
- [43:50]
C
Is an urbanism that puts the countryside in the city, predating, but anticipating, as we will see later, the new socialist urban and rural village mandate in China. This 1958 plan was never officially adopted, but as one writer mentioned, it was used in practice and in later years it has vastly affected the way Beijing looks today, which we will now see. And it is there. If you look between the cracks and find that There are nearly 500 Cha Chengdes in Beijing, these are all the urban villages. So therefore, if there are 500 in Beijing and these were all all been easily seen on Google, there are maybe 50,000 in the urban cities of China.
- [44:42]
B
And like Robert says, they're easily seen from Google Earth, which is how we first sat down with our students to map them and discover them. They are not visible. When you drive through the city as a normative city dweller or visitor, you don't see them. But when you actually then look up close to them, and we first looked at them through from the air, we've now been on the ground and have actually entered a lot of these, but from the air you can see that they actually follow this tripartite programming. So you've got village, which is the people's commune or the housing. You've got agriculture and factory, another version of that. The blue roofs are always the factories, the agriculture and the village. And then they're amazingly adaptable to strange anomalies. So for instance, this one has mid rise housing blocks slammed right down into the middle of the commune housing area. This one has a freeway interchange running right through it. And this one has an airport Runway. The phenomena of the urban village, or more directly in Chinese, the chungzhong. Soon it would be the village in the city. So that might be a better translation, an urban village. And then the role that that plays.
- [46:00]
C
In the city, as we just saw and said, it turns out that Chao Chengdi is just one of nearly 500 urban villages that we've identified and cataloged. The villages are nearly invisible from the normative city, either screened by layers of trees or by whitewashed walls. Behind the scenes, these villages are raising unique city making voices of their own. An estimated 1.5 million people, or one in every 10 Beijingers live in these villages. In urban atmospheres like Cha Chengde, it is a Beijing not seen during the Olympics or even by normal city dwellers. But it is a prevalent urbanism.
- [46:42]
B
And so you could see here, you know that some of these villages, yes, are on the edge of Beijing. But there for instance, is an urban village right around the corner from cctv, right here now being demolished. Actually the site of the new American Embassy is right here and there are several villages. We're going to zoom in on that on the next slide, I believe, or that Nestle's headquarters is surrounded by them as well. So that was the whole CBD area. It's packed with urban village villages that are never seen. And you can see this crazy mix here. So the site of the new American Embassy is at sea right here. The Lufthansa center is here. And the Kempinski five Star Hotel, one of the favorite hotels for international meetings. If you've been to Beijing, you've probably been there. A suburban style housing area, probably for expats working in the embassies. Factories are right here in the backyard of that. And then the A's are urban villages. Again, you don't see them when you're visiting the Kempinski or the embassies. But there are three urban villages here, a ring road and agriculture here. Actually mostly tree farms to support that afforestation that we looked at earlier. And then a golf course down here. So incredibly odd mix that you don't always sense from the ground. So we can ask the question, what role do these urban villages actually play in the city, in Chinese cities and what do they provide? So for one thing, they provide low cost centralized housing for service sector workers in these new multi storied farmer buildings. So even while illegal and unofficial, the quality is actually not so bad. And it really is the only option, it's really the only low cost housing, urban housing being built in the cities right now. So certainly filling quite a large gap in the official planning. They also provide for local agriculture, for fresh food in close proximity to urban populations. I know something probably on all our minds these days, they also provide a kind of alternative to a landscape of object buildings, an alternative to the city of master planning and market economy, where fars and daylight distance setbacks, which really have their origins in western planning, thought Gropius and others, where these formulas really produce these kind of shadowlands like this, this Google aerial caught it right at the moment where the legal term is illustrated, we're not going to shade our neighbor at the most extreme sun position. But these shadowlands really produce scenes like this of vastness of Emptiness, a completely non vital urbanism devoid of people, except for the occasional security guards looking after the place.
- [49:27]
C
So we feel these urban villages provide around the clock urbanism. Since day and night, the urban village street life is thriving. The urban village also provides urban democracy at the local level. Since all the village leaders are voted into office. And this is something that is not very well known in the West. I think both the urban villages and the rural villages, which we'll get to in a second, the leaders of the villages are elected through voting and they have the same in terms of that it's a kind of democracy. They have the same kind of influencing and sometimes you could call corruption. Of course, the urban villages supply specialized services and labor that fill the gaps and account for the ebbs and flows of the urban economy. Some example of these specialized services are recycling. The urban villages are where most of the sorting of recycling takes place. Western style entertainment for expat housing. In this case, Bu Luyin village is situated between two wealthy, mostly expat, gated suburban style housing developments in northeast Beijing. Close to the airport for escape. It has been established. It has established itself as a service spot for foreigners who go there for pharmaceuticals. But both legal and illegal, antique shops, massage parlors, pubs and Internet cafes. It serves as a kind of antidote to the sterile, private, suburban like communities that surround it, which are devoid of shops and street lights. And in fact, the village provides the only. The villages provide only highly public and active social space and nightlife for miles around.
- [51:23]
B
Yeah, we have a friend that lives in one of those adjacent expat communities. And he says, you know the kids. But also he and his wife find themselves sneaking over there because it's kind of the only place where anything's happening.
- [51:35]
C
Also arts districts, the urban villages are where the arts districts usually take hold because there's a kind of ease because of the illegality of the whole situation that you could just go in there, set up shop and.
- [51:52]
B
And the economical ability to live quite economically as well.
- [51:56]
C
Taxicab companies and their drivers, small scale urban manufacturing such as furniture making. The urban villagers also provide.
- [52:10]
B
So those are some of the kind of roles that the thing the urban villages play in their programs, the programmatic supplements that they make to the city.
- [52:19]
C
And let me interrupt, you know, a big percentage of the population of the cities in China, but it goes farther than that, which I guess we'll get to, are made up of what's called in China, the floating population. They in a sense are illegal residents of Beijing. In Los Angeles we have them probably easily a quarter of the population of Los Angeles is made up of illegal residents. And they, in China they do most of the construction, which is the biggest industry in China. They fill most of the factories and do enormous amounts of other work in Beijing, probably of the, let's say 25% or 20% of the population, about, about a quarter or 20% of this population basically live in middle class housing, except that they are the caretakers of the kids or the kid while the parents are both away working.
- [53:27]
B
So the urban villages also provide another model for density or the way to kind of configure buildings on land to house people. And so we've compared in the next diagram the typical farmer constructions in Chao Chengdi, which are now three, four, five stories. So we're comparing this fabric in here to a tower kind of mid rise tower housing that's right down here called Silver Maple, where some of our students were living both here and here. So we got to know both of these places next to each other. So we're going to look at this piece of land and if we look at it, we can see that the same piece of land, well, that if Silver Maple Tower houses 840 people at a rental cost per person per month of 1,000 yuan or about US$155. If we put over that the fabric of Chao Chongdi's new farmer Constructions, that the same piece of land would house 3,200 people at a rental cost of 70 yuan or about US$10 for per person. And this is on real estate that's precisely adjacent to each other. So these urban villages are breeding grounds for entrepreneurs and are in some ways social and economic ladders for the villagers who are now becoming wealthy landlords through this architecture, as well as for the rural urban migrants who are living in those structures, the floating population. So clearly Robert Neuwer's book Shadow Cities, A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World points out that this phenomena of self built environments is a very massive but silent force in cities forming and reforming themselves today. And he and others have stated that by 2050 there will be 3 billion city dwellers, more than one third of the edge of the world's population, living at the edge, often illegal. Living in and occupying illegal structures in unplanned parts of the cities, under the radar, but clearly part of the city and perhaps in some cases containing the DNA for creative and unexpected alternatives to city growth and change. Now some of these villages are disappearing. They're going through dismantling processes overseen by orders given from above. The Chai Chien or Demolish and Relocation Bureau. But this is being done without plans for replacing what all of those things that we just talked about that they're urban villages provide in the city, maybe especially where do all of these rural to urban migrants now live in the city. Beihu Chu is a village formerly associated with a liquor factory. So again we're seeing our pattern of factory, village and agriculture. The liquor factory has now turned into an art ghetto. But unlike Cha Chungdi, it's been walled off from that village. So it isn't able to sort of innovate, interact, or have a kind of mutual vitality. It exists as one of these recycling centers, like the photograph we saw before. But it also sits within a landscape of encroaching golf courses. So the first PGA golf course in China was built right next to this. And the village is suspended within this demolition and relocation process. About 30% of the families here are dingzihu, which means a nail household. And what this means, these are sty stubborn families who resist leaving their traditional homes despite the insistence of developers seeking to make enormous profits. They're hanging out for more money, for a better deal. And the Ding zihu relates to the fact that it's hard to pull out of a piece of wood, a rusty nail, as to get them out of here. So amidst the rubble here, village life goes on. The rubble has actually been overtaken by jungle and growth because it's been there so long. And the old foundations of things are being reoccupied as gaming, hangout, market and laundry workspaces.
- [57:15]
C
In this, when it reaches this state, you could use the term which Robert Neuwirth uses sometimes as slums. And in some cities, say Mumbai or Bombay, it essentially is slums in the way things are made, slum like. But for the most part, the urban villages in Beijing and in China, and Chao Chengdi being a typical example, you would never call it a slum. The buildings are well constructed, brick and concrete, and they're straightforward. Things are relatively clean.
- [58:01]
B
The new socialist village Micro urban experiments in the new socialist countryside in the city re peasantization, giving more, taking less and being more flexible.
- [58:14]
C
We've in the last two years, we've also extended our sort of work out into an even larger question. The rural villages of China. The shift from the rural situation to the city situation has been the greatest factor in city making and city revision in the past hundred years worldwide, and in fact the past 25 years, the force of migration to the city has been in an extreme condition. And successfully in successfully developing countries. Clearly cities are seen as the place to be economically, but are they the place to be socially, spatially and environmentally? China has perhaps 2 to 4 million not people, but rural villages, each with populations of 2 to 500 inhabitants, with an average annual income of about US$400. The new socialist countryside section of the most recent function, Five Year Plan 2006-2011 for China, specifically addresses the vast rural population of China, the 700 million people who are mostly farmers. That five year plan put this at the top of their situations that needed to be addressed along with another one, which was that the Chinese education system system and the patterns of really Chinese thinking had sort of prevented the country from doing the inventing. Yes, they were producing and are producing much of the goods of the world, but they weren't inventing these things. So helping and finding a way to, to make the rural villages and the life there much better was one thing, and the other was to try to reform the schools. In most of the world, Western world, the farmers are subsidized, certainly in Europe and in the US In China, they had the opposite condition. The rural villagers, because the government owned the land, had to rent the land, land from the government. And so they are actually paying money.
- [60:31]
B
In order to farm, paying taxes on the production. So Chinese President Hu Jintao in this most recent Five Year Plan, a direct quote of something that he's really said to the countryside is that we will stick to the guideline of giving more, taking less and being more flexible with that rural population. So these are slogan banners. They're hung throughout Chao Chongdi. They're publicizing the new socialist countryside mandate. Even though we're in the middle of the city. Chao Chengdu has been mandated as an official new socialist village. And that's related to the slogan banner here. But this line between rural and urban and between agriculture and industry again is not so clearly demarked at the beginning of the 21st century. From an official Chinese report, Chen Shiwen in 2006 says that huge gains in agricultural efficiency have emancipated huge numbers of rural laborers from the land, thus laying the basis for the development of farmer run township enterprises whose competitively priced goods and services sell well across China. So it's starting to move into operating a little bit more like urban productive areas. And these township enterprises are involved in many sectors in industry, agricultural products, products processing, transportation, communications, construction, commerce and catering. That's from an official report. This is from a rural village that we visited. This is an ongoing experiment by one Rural man that we met and he's working on developing a prototype for a small scale incinerator that could be used at the rural village level that would get rid of all the non recyclable waste that they could send to the city. So everything that's left over, you can see he's stored things into old shoes and plastics, but there's something that's left and he's working on trying to get rid of that without polluting the environment. He's able to do it now, but by adding things to the air that he doesn't. We don't want to. So by 2004, 22 million township enterprises existed with 138 million employees and they had generated 4.1 billion yuan in added value. And that was a 13.9 increase over the year 2003. So now the driving force between the increase in farmers income and rural economic development, these township enterprises have created about 30%, have created job opportunities for about 30% of rural laborers to date. So it's one thing that's sort of causing perhaps a shift from these rural to urban migrations that no longer do you need to perhaps leave the rural area to have work opportunities or a productive life in some other form than farming. This is a rural bee farm, and the farmer who farms it, another person that we met and this rural entrepreneur has figured out how to. We couldn't figure out how yet, but has figured out how to export enough honey to the Philippines to earn US$7,000 per year while most of his neighbors were making, as we said before, about $400 per year.
- [63:34]
C
Jane Jacobs surprised herself and others in the first chapter of the Economy of Cities, first chapter entitled Cities First Rural Development. Later she says, one of the many surprises I found in the course of this work was that was especially unsettling and seemed to run counter to the common sense that work that we usually considered rural has originated not from the countryside, but in cities. Current theory in many fields, economics, history, anthropology, assumes that cities are built upon a rural economic base. The reverse, in her eyes, seems true. Rural economies are the outgrowth, including agricultural work and directly built upon city economies and, and city work. Whether we agree or not with Jacobs that the city economics had to develop in advance of establishing agriculture, her arguments do make it clear that strong interdependencies between the two are necessary and even natural. The desire for and perhaps the need for agriculture in proximity or even simultaneously coexistence with cities is a growing trend in the desert developed world. For China, the need for using Any arable land for agriculture, including land in the urban areas, is clear. With only 7% of the world's cultivated land, China has to feed one fifth of the world's population. In an era that is fundamentally urban, the rural must surely undergo change to remain relevant and engaging. And this change may not need to be radical, may need to be, excuse me, radical, ruptured and as fast as the change that is occurring in the Chinese city now. And perhaps this change will alter radically our conceptions of the city. The normal way it had gone in, not counting Europe, but in newer countries like the US and so on, is that the farming had been industrialized and therefore the foreign population had less to do and they moved into the cities. The great migrations in the US from Europe to the US happened in the 1890s and on. But then there was this huge migration that took place after World War II from the rural areas of the US into the cities. In fact, it happened during World War II to man the factories. And in China, this can't happen in other countries. In India, it can't happen. Otherwise, the cities explode, and the cities grow so fast that all sorts of things can't be taken care of for this kind of population. And we had a hint that the rural population is not so interested in coming to the city. It's almost like they were saying, we had a little boy in one of these rural villages tell us, you know, what are you going to do when you graduate from high school or go to college and so on. And he said, I'd like to come back to my rural village because he.
- [66:39]
B
Goes to school in the larger satellite city because the education is sort of centralized there.
- [66:45]
C
And I'd like to set up, make sure we have Internet for everybody in the village and so on and so forth. In other words, he was saying that we want to be with it. We want to be the. Of. Part. Part of the world. We want to be part of, in a sense, the life of the city. But we certainly like the fresh air that we have. We like our neighbors, and we like the land we're living in.
- [67:05]
B
So there have been a lot of reverse migrations, and actually a lot of contemporary Chinese film deals with this, the kind of reverse migrations from the city back to the countryside. One funny story we had. We met a village leader in a village near this larger market town, and we asked him, what's your most radical idea for your village? Because he felt the village was sort of shrinking, being emptied of its vital age group. And he said, actually, I had the idea to tear down the entire village and build a skyscraper in the village. So the Central Party is actually beginning to realize that hybrid forms of rural and urban, and specifically not suburban space may need to be invented during the 1990s Asian financial crisis. Our friend Bernard Webb that Robert mentioned earlier, who wrote the housing policy for China during Jiang Zemin's era, told us that China weathered that economic difficulty by selling for the first time ever the houses and apartments in urban areas to the Chinese people, thereby producing what he called the largest real estate transaction in the history of, of humankind. And yet so under the radar that the New York Times didn't even report upon it. During the past year or two, China is now making a parallel maneuver, this time selling land rights to rural property, meaning that now the rural farmers can actually sell their rights to someone else. And so that trades and new forms of exchange can start to happen because.
- [68:36]
C
Before this time a farmer that had the rights to the land was not allowed to transfer those rights to anybody else legally.
- [68:45]
B
Right. And so this really what we're starting to see, just hints of that it's beginning to produce a flood of self investment and again a kind of creative and intelligent alternative to in these self made entrepreneurial environments, just like we saw in Chao Chandi and some of the urban villages. So in an era when distinct notions of urban and rural have broken down and come into question question, perhaps these new conditions should be considered as new sites of potential.
- [69:18]
C
We returned to Beijing and Chao Chengdu in late April this year for what we call base 4.0 and found the village in a frenzy of construction. And if we gave the impression that Chao Chengdi was a frenzy of construction before this, that was, that's incorrect. The only frenzy of construction that existed in Chao Chengdu was that first wave of the sort of mandate new socialist village, new socialist countryside, where they put in the infrastructure coming into Cha Chengde. But this last April we found the village in this frenzy of construction. We were quite frankly shocked after the infrastructure improvement two years ago that toured the cities for about six months. Cha Chingdi it settled down to minor constructions, some new galleries and some renovations in other art spaces. Things were relatively quiet, albeit with the usual urban village vitality. Now in the core of the village, it seemed in, and this is since April, March and April, it seemed that about 25% of all of Chao Chengdu's traditional village, like one story houses had been torn down and construction was well underway to construct three story brick and concrete replacements.
- [70:40]
B
And what we're passing around now, the green coat is actually a kind of something that we made at base with our students. It's a replica of the Mao Zedong coat, which now these days is really only worn by farmers, if you find it at all. So it's a kind of farmer's coat, but made out of the fabric that you see here that's used in the urban areas to screen off the construction sites of active building. And behind. So behind that the building's filled with the floating population at work building the city. So you're already into this section.
- [71:13]
C
Oh, sorry.
- [71:14]
B
So the past 120, 20 days is what Robert had started to talk about here.
- [71:22]
C
Oh, and this could have been. We're now standing on the roof of Madame Yang, who comes in and cleans our studio in the morning and the evening. And Madame Yang we first met our first year in Cha Chengdi and she would come into the studio, a beautiful woman and she would just go into the waste baskets and pick out plastic bottles and cardboard. And this went on for two months. And we of course got to know her and would wave and then this will sound funny because it was funny to us, peculiar. She felt guilty for doing this and. And then would actually empty the waste baskets. So we thought all this was really ridiculous. And we said, we turned to each other and said, you know, we just really have to pay her to do this work. And so for the last four years she's. Three years she's been coming in and cleaning the floors and cleaning some other things twice a day while riding there. Beijing is incredibly dusty from the desert coming in, so you have to dust everything daily. Coming back in May of this year, late April, Madame Yong and her husband had torn down their one story set of buildings and were building a three story complex of about 80 units. And this is when it's. And it was started then and now it's more now it's finished. And we said, you know, how does that work? How does she, how did they come up with the money to do that? So that's maybe explained in a minute.
- [73:16]
B
And then bumping into AI Weiwei, he said something to us, he said, yeah, these days Chao Chengdi must be the fastest growing city in the world. And really it seemed to appear that way. So basically this landscape of a few years ago has now turned into this landscape. So what was causing the seeming agreement of some of the stakeholders in Chao Chengdi to convert their one story structures into three story affairs made up of a kind of typical deal of 3 by 5 meter sized rental rooms.
- [73:50]
C
And this is just a sidebar here. These are some of the people that are doing the construction in Cha Chengde. They're not the villagers, but they're the migrant or the floating population. And they built their houses out of brick but at zero cost because since they're not using mortar, they just pile the bricks on top of each other, put the roof on and live in it.
- [74:15]
B
And this is a kind of sequence of a project that we did with the migrants where we said can we have the house actually migrate? We have an exhibition in Tianjin and can we borrow the house? Borrow the house and pay you for it and pay you to basically dismantle it, remantle it, dismantle it and take it back home again.
- [74:36]
C
And the students at the architecture school were, you know, this was unknown territory for them. This is something they didn't know anything about really. It seemed like it was important for them to know this. Piles of brick lined the streets before we left in late June, presumably ready to form the interior spaces since by this time most of the structures were completed. And then two government edicts appeared throughout Chao Chengdu. One describing that no reimbursement compensation would be made for any construction not completed before July 15. And the other stating that Cha Chengde and 15 other urban villages in the immediate area would be demolished within two years.
- [75:19]
B
So here's a before here's Chao Chengdi and the village to the other side of the expressway, it's the first to go. Chao Chondi is slated to be the last to go. And so there's a whole flood of everyone from all of the other 14 villages now flooding into chaos. This is the after this took place over the course of a few months.
- [75:44]
C
Returning to Chao Chengdi in late September with some graduate and undergraduate students from SCI ARC in Los Angeles to work on projects intended to help prevent the demolition of Cha Chongdi, we made a thorough survey of the residential structures that turned that revealed that the number of tear downs and three story rebuilds was actually closer to 80%. So 80% of all the structures, one story sort of residences in Chao Chengdi are now three story structures. And then we got some numbers from some of the people, including Madam Yong, which helped to explain some things. Construction cost is in Cha chengde is about 100 yuan per square meter. And this part I'm not completely sure of. Thus, for a typical three story building, $15,000 is what's required. I think it's maybe closer to 25,000, but somewhere in there rental for a 3 by 5 meter unit which actually goes back to the rural village. Size of the house or not the size of the house, but the module within the house is anywhere from 300 to 500 yuan per month. The total rental of a typical building with this number in mind ends up being about $37,000 a year per building, 37 to 50,000. So Madam Yong and her husband and their employees immediate family, if they can rent out all 80 of these units, will earn this amount. Okay, that's a good thing. But reimbursement and compensation for the property, if the government were to take it, is at the rate of 10,000 to 15,000 yuan per square meter. So Madame Yong's building in fact now is worth worth $1.4 million. Clearly a win win situation for the farmers and urban villagers.
- [77:51]
B
And so there's a rumor whether they're building them to become land. Well, like you say, win win. Either they're the landlords or they get the compensation.
- [77:58]
C
And in the village next door, Grand Longgin, the demolished village across the expressway, 600 families. From a reliable source, a good friend of ours bought new cars immediately after being compensated, and not small cars. Finally, this powerful phenomena of self built urban environments taking place today in wealthier urban villages illustrates and confirms Robert Neuwirth's statement that these squatters mix more concrete than any developer, they lay more brick than any government. They have created a huge hidden economy and unofficial system system of squatter landlords and squatter tenants. The only difference in the Chinese cities is that the squatters are almost always official land lease holders. Most of these land lease holders in the villages of Beijing are former farmers who have the rights to the farmland and or houses in what used to be agriculture people's communes, but are now urban areas. So these self built urban communities environments have formed from a strange condition of publicly held but lent land acted upon by individual and private entrepreneurship. This has produced a kind of space under the influence of a hybrid experiment that is part capitalism, part communist and part socialist.
- [79:21]
B
And toward rural neopolitanism. So as a wrap up, we're proposing that the new environments that we've looked at to tonight offer alternatives to known planning methods and strategies and models. Even with projects that have high ambitions to produce new alternatives, the restraints of large scale planning seem to carry with them a homogenizing spatial baggage that seem to prevent the existence of things like the 24, 7 city, the inside out city, the legal illegal city, the unfinished city and the heterotopic city. This is an urban experiment in Beijing that intentionally set out to Produce a kind of heterotopic new city. This is soho, or small office home office. You can find it easily on the Internet if you're interested in knowing more about it. The developers are Zhongxin and Pan Shi Yi of the Soho Development Group. And the New Yorker did a really amazing article on these two and sort of their ambitions in architecture and planning.
- [80:17]
C
They're two of the most successful development developers in China, but also certainly the most adventurous.
- [80:24]
B
Yes, right. We have a huge amount of respect for these two and their work in support of good architecture. But there is a critique of this project, and I think they have felt it themselves. Zhang and Pan envisioned a mix of tenants here that would use the spaces in different ways, as houses, home offices, small businesses, or as design and art studios. But it turns out that no one wanted to live there. No one wanted to live next to what might become something like a massage parlor or a Chinese restaurant. At least not in this kind of setting that was up in the air, minimalist, all white surrounding. So nearly all of the spaces now these days have been taken over by a lot of design offices. Actually a lot of really good architecture and design firms are occupying these, or else the spaces are vacant and they're sitting there just really as real estate investment properties. So this attempt to produce a heterotopic city didn't have the kind of street life and nightlife they'd hoped for. Since no one lives there, we're suggesting that we might look to the urban village, the urban village as it exists now, as we saw in Chao Chengdi, and the rural village of the future, where we're seeing the hints of a new entrepreneurial, inventive landscape landscape as well as to the new developing space and networks between those two, between the urban and rural. For means to expand our understanding of planning for human habitation by recognizing the conditions out of which they grew. Could we as architects, planners, economists, and as conscious designers consider accepting that, for instance, the loss of publicness of public space in contemporary urbanism perhaps requires a loosening up of. Of the need to draw such absolute distinctions between the two and an openness to allowing for slippages, simultaneous and overlaps of the two?
- [82:12]
C
Can we imagine living environments that are less spatially fixed but that allow for and accommodate quote floating, that is allow for human migrations at many spatial and temporal scales?
- [82:26]
B
Could we consider hybrid experiments involving combinations of a two official top down support and thinking with bottom up action?
- [82:35]
C
Can we consider the design? That design might produce a dynamic environment that is never finished. When we're finished, we seem to be in the ground. So why would we want our cities to be finished that is ever open and adaptable? With the built in ability to adjust to changing conditions, could we consider an.
- [82:55]
B
Openness to an environment that is neither purely urban or nor rural, and certainly not suburban, but one that we might imagine as rural politan?
- [83:05]
C
The urban villages are like Umberto Eco's open work, in which there are deliberate loose ends that allow the public to step in. For Eco, the open work provides the possibility for elements of multiplicity and plurality. And it produces a more interactive process between the reader and the text. Or in this case, between. Between the urbanite and the city.
- [83:28]
B
Thank you. Thank you.
- [83:36]
A
Robert Manguri and Marianne Ray. Just to announce that the next stage of the evening is a drinks reception which will be served up, as you will know, on the eighth floor of this building. So we need to take the lifts up the top. It is an opportunity for people both to return the Hermes handbag copy, wherever that ended up, and also to continue the discussion with our guests tonight and to see the book that emerges from their work on Cha Chaanji. Thank you all for your attendance.