Historic Preservation in Chinese Cities

A City's Image

  • Sites/buildings/images reminding of Hong Kong.

Concrete, Uniform, Faceless Chinese Cities

  • "Faceless" high-rise urbanization.
  • Heavy lift preservation by the government.
  • City living with old architectures.
  • Average lifespan of a building in China is less than ten years, most 25-30, compared to 70 years worldwide.
  • Skyscrapers and imitations of western villas replacing old buildings.

Icons of Success (Building Height)

  • Shanghai Tower: 632 meters.
  • Ping An Finance Centre: 599 meters.
  • Guangzhou CTF Finance Centre: 530 meters.

Western Style New Town

  • Old buildings demolished for concrete and glass skyscrapers and imitations of western villas.
  • Thames Village: more stage prop than town.
  • Architecture relies on car ownership.
  • Rancho Santa Fein Shanghai, defining the Chinese dream.

Ghost Towns

  • Real estate projects developed excessively, exceeding actual demand.
  • High housing vacancy rates.
  • Analysis based on positioning data in China.
  • Some "ghost cities" are tourism sites, only empty seasonally.
  • Chenggong new town, Kunming: designed for 1.5 million, but only 300,000 population after 15 years.
  • Foreign plans/planners not adapted to local conditions, leading to ghost towns.
  • Housing purchased by local government servants in a group buying way.
  • Less than 30% of those who bought housing actually live there.
  • Chinese tax policy incentivizes leasing large tracts of land, even if the market isn't ready.

Weird Architecture

  • Dynamic creations breaking up monotonous urban landscape.
  • Forbidden if not economical, functional, aesthetically pleasing, or environmentally friendly.
  • National Performing Arts Centre ("Big Egg").
  • CCTV Headquarters - Beijing ("Big Pants").
  • Ring of Life – Fushun: sightseeing landmark with 12,000 LED lights, costing $16M USD.

Historic Preservation

  • Preservation of cultural and natural landscape needed to stop building faceless cities.
  • Heritage sites: immovable physical remains with significance.
  • Includes archaeological sites, ruins, tombs, traditional architecture, and cultural landscapes.
  • Government led, top-down procedure.

Reconstruction

  • Mega projects in historic preservation by the government, but not in urban daily life.
  • Preserve the Past, Serve the Present.

Hutong (Alleyway)

  • With traditional courtyards (“四合院”).
  • Social fabric, rich threads of community habit, shared memory.
  • History traced back to the Yuan Dynasty (1271 - 1368).

Case: Xintiandi, Shanghai

  • Shikumen houses turned into a posh entertainment quarter.
  • Increasing favorable local attitude towards historical preservation since 2004.
  • Xintiandi's houses are traditional shikumen (literally “stone gate”).

Ancient City of Ping Yao

  • Well-preserved traditional Han Chinese city, founded in the 14th century.
  • Major center for banking in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
  • Escaped the ravages of the Cultural Revolution due to poverty.

Key Points

  • Focus on building replicable problem-solving models and dissemination of experiences.
  • Supplementary and plug-in approach.
  • Context.
    • Concrete, uniform, faceless high-rise development.
    • Western style new town.
    • Ghost towns.
    • 'Weird’ architecture.
    • Historic preservation.
    • Heavy lift preservation by the government.
    • Old buildings, new chic.
    • Three cases of “living with old architecture”.