Jenna Quirk
Architect
Minneapolis, U.S.
Submission: "Progressive Techniques for Everyday Practices: Hutong"
The city of Beijing is in a state of spatial and cultural transition that relates directly to its people, economy, and architecture. The city is advancing at inconsistent rates throughout the city that can be characterized by simultaneously seeing someone ride by with bricks on the back of a three wheel cart and watching a thirty story building go up in a month. Amongst the rapid building up, and building out of Beijing, thousands of communities are being bulldozed to the ground to make space for tall building construction. The result is that thousands of people are being displaced from their homes and forced to relocate further from the city center and further from the many resources they depend onto survive, without sufficient compensation for their losses. At the same time, the often underestimated cost of construction with unrealistic timetables for design cause the construction to be delayed. The displaced communities return to the piles of rubble that once was their homes to rebuild temporary structures. Numerous spontaneous businesses, small restaurants, and services repopulate the area temporarily allowing for the revival of a network of necessary entrepreneurial adjacencies that they once depended on to function day to day. For instance, one woman runs a small restaurant out of the front of her home, she buys produce from the neighbor who grows it, and that neighbor eats at her restaurant.
The main site of study, although thousands of these sites exist, is located outside the 4th ring road on the northeast edge of Beijing. This community is significant because it provides a dynamic network of low-rise structures which foster connections, through adjacencies, between people and businesses which couldn’t function without that connection. The residents of these communities act as builder, architect, occupier and business owner, thus creating a somewhat haphazard, but efficient, built environment. These communities currently represent over half of the population of the city and are being threatened by a higher power that doesn’t recognize the cultural significance, and necessity of these communities for the people who live there. These peripheral neighborhoods are an extension of the more historically recognized neighborhoods in the city center called Hutong. If you’ve ever spent time in Hutong you know there isn’t anything else like it in the world. Hutong is not simply a neighborhood of buildings; it is embedded with history, culture, and invisible networks that underpin the functioning of the entire city. The main concern here isn’t necessarily the cultural significance of the peripheral communities but the embedded networks of day to day life that allow even the very poor to maintain a certain quality of life. As the edge communities are leveled for high-rise housing, people are quickly displaced and forgotten, leaving them further from the city and further form each other.
It is necessary for us as designers, architects, and planners to be aware of this circular phenomenon that occurs at the fringes of Beijing. There’s more to the story of today’s China than impressive high-rise buildings. As China builds up, we must bring out attention to the ground in order to grasp the larger scope of their modernization and to realize that the majority of the population is going through his major cultural and spatial transition. Alive in the modest haphazard constructions at the edge of Beijing is a way of life that needs to regain authority in the city.
Bio:
Jenna Quirk recently graduated with a Master's Degree in Architecture from
the University of Michigan. Her thesis, titled "Progressive Techniques for Everyday
Practices," developed from a two-month investigation situated in the hutong
neighborhoods of Beijing, China. She also studied analytical drawing in
Oaxaca, Mexico and participated in the development of a portable light
prototype for the Huichol Mexican community. Jenna is currently practicing
with James Dayton Design in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
"120 million rural workers live in cities throughout China"
See Xie Chuanjiao, “Study raises questions about hukou,” China Daily, http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-04/10/content_846718.htm, April 10, 2007.