Haussmann and Le Corbusier in China: Land Control and the Design of Streets in Urban Redevelopment

Abstract

This paper discusses China's current phase of large-scale urban redevelopment, using contrasting cases of morphological change and street design to examine the political-economic basis of urban design. The typical, superblock-centred approach is an outgrowth of local land use practices that were shaped by widespread collectivist expropriation of property from the 1950s into the 1970s, and drastic resident relocation policies since the early 1990s. A contrasting case, from a city where such levels of expropriation did not occur, reveals a very different, more street-centred approach to urban design that correlates with a more favourable compensation policy for residents.

Notes

1. For a discussion in Chinese of the legacy of Haussmann especially as it relates to debates about current demolition and redevelopment in Beijing, see Wang (2003, pp. 22–27) and Abramson (2007).

2. In France, even the word boulevard has enjoyed a revival in street naming at the expense of avenue as part of the reaction against ‘modernistic town planning’ (Darin, 2004, p. 147). Avenue literally means ‘a way by which one arrives’, i.e. a space of movement, while boulevard originally meant a city wall and had become a place for strolling, socializing and exercise, i.e. a space for being as much as for moving.

3. Some of the Corbusian urban design legacy has even been physically undone, as in the replacement of elevated expressways with at-grade boulevards in Manhattan and San Francisco; the ‘re-weaving’ of isolated superblock housing projects' site layouts into the older grids of streets that surround them; and in current plans to make Moses's Lincoln Center more accessible from its surrounding streets (Goldberger, 2003). The ‘re-weaving’ of a Corbusian housing layout has occurred even where such a surrounding grid is absent, as at Boston's redeveloped Columbia Point housing project, where the new site plan reorganized the original loop system of streets and reoriented the apartment buildings to address a new, tight grid of streets designed as if there were a surrounding fabric to which they could connect (Goody, 1993).

4. Here ‘housing’ is defined as residential floor area, not household units. In addition, some of these statistics are from the late 1970s rather than the early 1990s, but changes that occurred in the intervening years was due mainly to the increase in new commodity housing or new units built in the 1980s to compensate owners whose housing was expropriated in earlier decades. If anything, the proportion of pre-1949 housing in city centres that remained privately owned was even lower than these statistics.

5. Municipal traffic planners in 1995 rejected a proposal by the author and other planners working on the West City District's Development Control Plan (kongzhixing xiangxi guihua) to create a special category for arterials that would favour pedestrian and bicycle traffic over automobiles, and reduce setbacks to encourage street-oriented businesses and preserve a number of historic sites along the right-of-way.

6. Yang Dongping noted that as each of these danwei had its own public amenities, along the 5-kilometre stretch from Bai Shi Qiao to Zhong Guan Cun there was not one public cinema until 1980 (Yang, 1995, p. 253).

7. Quanzhou is a prefectural municipality whose administrative urban centre has a population approaching 800 000, which is approximately one-tenth the population of Beijing's or Shanghai's contiguously built-up urban centre.

8. A survey of the Bei Men area, conducted in 1993 by the author and fellow students under the guidance of Professor Lü Junhua at Tsinghua University, revealed that most families occupied 70–120 square meters of built area, but some households had as much as 150–200 square meters. By contrast, typical households in the old neighbourhoods of Beijing at this time occupied between 20 and 50 square metres.