Abstract
After 25 years of intensive urban and housing development from the housing reform of 1998, China’s urban form, in terms of housing styles/types, has witnessed a sea-change. Poor Chinese cities with low-rise family houses and middle-rise, Soviet-style, 4 to 6-story danwei apartments have been replaced by middle-income and even high-income cities with mostly middle-rise and high-rise apartments. Why does China keep constructing high-rise housing apartments? Existing urban China studies rarely pay attention to this aesthetic, urban housing form/style issue. Based on 14 months of ethnographic work in Beijing and numerous short-term visits to multiple Chinese cities, this study argues that China’s high-rise mania is a poster child of China’s state-led urbanization process, with the help of contemporary Chinese urbanites’ manic belief in homeownership and multiple homeownership. Furthermore, there is a cognitive gap between the experts’ (architects and urban planners) conception of high-rise and the non-experts’ (homeowners) understanding of high-rise. While the experts openly admit their lack of freedom to design alternative housing styles/types, the non-experts mostly consider high-rise housing as the only feasible reality in China. In the end, a manipulated reality of high-rise China has been firmly established, both from the supply side and from the demand side.
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Urbanization, Housing-style, High-rise, Discourse, Manic homeownership, Manipulated reality
