Hutongs are a traditional form of Chinese neighborhood, comprised of many courtyard houses called siheyuan; Hutongs are normally associated with the city of Beijing as they grew up around the Forbidden city organically. Houses closest to the forbidden city typically were large and housed nobles and administrators, whereas siheyuan on the outskirts of Beijing were home to the poorer classes. Since hutongs are distinct collections of homes , they have been the smallest unit of Chinese administrative government from the early 1400’s. Today, hutongs are regarded as a cultural mainstay of China. They are where you find the best traditional food and examples of genuine Chinese city culture, but many lack basic modern amenities due to their age. Most have running water and electricity but do not have private bathrooms and thus share public bathrooms. They are very cramped and unsanitary, characteristics that lend themselves to disease and other avoidable urban problems.

Hutongs are quickly disappearing in favor of high-rises and highways. In the city of Beijing it is estimated that one Million citizens have been displaced in the rush to modernize, and many of these citizens used to live in the hutongs.

I think that the aforementioned facts lend themselves to a series of questions:

• Why would the Chinese government want to demolish hutongs?
• What right does a govenment have to make its citizens homeless in favor of modernization?

Why would the Chinese government want to demolish hutongs?

There is great benefit to urban density, especially in a City like Beijing. Instead of having unplanned communities like hutongs, the goverment can build neighborhoods that accomodate cars, modern plumbing and also more modern amenities like cable and internet.  Cities can add highways and other modes of transportation, which is especially beneficial in a congested city like Beijing. Modernization is one of the main goals of the Chinese government for the next thiry years so that China can emerge as a world power established in modern cities and economy. Recently, the government has started to acknowledge that detractors of hutong demolition have at least some credence.  Some historical neighborhoods have now been designated protected from demolition, which is a good step.

What right does a govenment have to make its citizens homeless in favor of modernization?

I think this is the largest issue at hand here: human rights. Even if the government offers a small stipend (about $1000) for relocation, it in no way covers the financial and emotional costs of relocation. Certainly the Chinese government has the right to promote modernization in whatever form it has in mind, but not the right to relocate its citizens against their own wishes. Forcing people and families out of their childhood homes crosses a distinct boundary between citizen and state, even in a country like China. Citizens should be given the choice to leave their homes rather than to be forced out. They should have the choice to stay in their homes or to relocate to modern housing.

In my last post I touched on how globalization is producing a homogeneous architectural style worldwide, so now I want to take that idea and focus on the very embodiment of homogeneity: the Suburbs. I’ve rounded up a fair amount of photos from around the internet to illustrate my point: the suburbs are everywhere, and they are the same pretty much everywhere. Now you can have a pretty house with a white picket fence anywhere, even in China (photo evidence of that later).

With the growth of a middle class in developing nations, families move into houses that are nicer, bigger, more modern and so on. The result of this is that suburban neighborhoods pop up on the borders of cities due to a multitude of factors:

1. Building hundreds of houses from a similar template is relatively cheap and is quick to go from blueprint  to move-in: there is a large incentive for developers to build suburb-type neighborhoods.
2. Suburban neighborhoods are removed from the smog, crime and other undesirable qualities of the cities that they are near. They are thus very attractive to newly prosperous families in developing nations where those aforementioned qualities are rampant.
3. They provide instant urban structure for quickly developing regions.

As such, modern suburban neighborhoods are showing up everywhere throughout the world. What started as an iconic American phenomenon has spread to the entire globe. There are gigantic suburbs being built in every major city in China.

Japan:

India (Bangalore):

China (Shenyang):

United Arab Emirates (Dubai):

Florida (for reference):

Indian, Chinese and Arabian (al Jazeera) cities are growing to resemble American urban centers, which I find to be a little disturbing. The rise of the suburbs brings with it many implications, especially for non-American cultures.

First off, there is a loss of cultural history and identity with the loss of traditional neighborhoods. The most prevalent and dramatic example of this is the bulldozing of Chinese hutongs in favor of modern neighborhoods. Hutongs are the traditional form of Chinese community and are comprised of many siheyuan, which are homes built around a central courtyard. Hutongs house very close-knit communities who are identically Chinese. Magical Urbanism has a great post on the disappearing hutongs that really encompasses my feelings on the issue. Modern architecture and estranged communities are replacing hutongs; the loss of traditional Chinese culture is leading to a diminished sense of cultural identity for Chinese citizens.

Second, suburbs inherently lead to a geographic division of socioeconomic classes. Since the suburbs are essentially large developments of similarly priced homes, suburban neighborhoods house people of very similar economic status. Due to the great distance between new suburban developments and the cities they surround, the poor are being left in the slums far away from new developments, forgotten. A new generation of children is being raised far from poverty and other urban problems like racial division and crime. Although that in itself is not inherently immoral or in any way wrong, the likelihood that such problems will be present in suburban children’0s consciousness is small. How can such a society function? I found a great video on this very topic that discusses the implications of suburban development in Cairo:

There is a very powerful part of the video where one of the interviewees talks about how children in the Cairo suburbs say that they have never even been downtown. I just don’t understand how a city can have a sense of common identity if its middle class citizens have no contact with its downtown. How can you ever hope to make a dent in cyclical problems like poverty in crime when your classes are isolated by the structure of your city?

Hong Kong is one of the most developed urban centers  and one of the most essential economic nodes in the world. If it were a country unto itself (it is administered by mainland China), it would be the third most densely populated nation in the world with 6,200 people per square kilometer. It is known as ‘the world’s most vertical city’, as it has the largest number of people living or working above the 14th floor of any city on the globe. Hong Kong has the most skyscrapers of any other city as well, with 6,439. Michael Wolf has an excellent photo series (I actually used one of his images for the background of this site) on the skyscraper landscape of Hong Kong that I think really captures the overwhelming sense of metropolis that the city produces:

And here’s a video that shows the overwhelming size of Hong Kong from a helicopter:

One of the things that impresses me the most about Hong Kong is the fact that its architecture could go anywhere within the first world, most of those buildings would look perfectly natural in Houston or Hamburg if transplanted from Hong Kong. I think this is a result of globalization: architectural firms are designing buildings all over the world now, and that has produced a surprisingly homogeneous global architecture style of glass facades and concrete cliffs.

Another impression that Hong Kong leaves me is that it, along with other Asian megacities like Tokyo, are indicators of where Eastern Asia is headed. Hong Kong had its building boom in the 1960’s, wheras there are many Asian cities that are in a similar building boom right now. Mumbai, Shanghai, Beijing, Delhi and other such cities are building rapidly for their exploding populations. As urban density increases, I think that those cities will begin to look built up in a similar way compared to Hong Kong. They won’t be nearly as dense, as Hong Kong is heavily restricted by its own geography, but due to the overwhelming amount of people  moving to Asian cities at the moment, they will need to build up and out with haste. In fact, more than half of the world’s skyscrapers that are currently under construction are located in Asian cities. Almost all of the rest of that figure belong to cities in the Middle East, notably Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. The urbanization of Asia is leading to the construction of first-world cities outside of North America and Europe, and the balance of world power is shifting similarly.

I find it very interesting to look at ambitious developing countries and all of the facets of their modernization: the cultural cost of building new infrastructure, the influence of Western culture on developing countries (ie globalization) and the world’s perception of urbanization. Obviously urbanization/modernization goes hand-in-hand with globalization, and as such I plan on comparing suburban cultures in India and China versus that of the US and exploring the culture of materialism that accompanies modernization. I think that the questions that I am trying to get at are: what is lost with modernization/urbanization and what is its cost? What is to be gained through urbanization/modernization? Where is all of this headed? Where will the children play?

A clarification of terms:

Urbanization, modernization and globalization are all topics that overlap heavily, due to the development of our global economy (globalization), third-world countries now have access to the resources that allow them to develop modern infrastructure for their citizens (modernization), who are moving from their villages into the cities (urbanization). I won’t bother to really get my hands dirty with talking about globalization here, as it is ancillary to the other two topics and I have a limited amount of time, so here is a link to what it is.

Modernization and urbanization really go hand-in-hand here, as many many citizens of developing nations are moving to cities in search of jobs and a generally better living situation. As a result of their swelling populations, cities have to develop infrastructure to handle increased traffic, water use and so on. Such is the process of growing a modern city in a third-world country.