Some People Always Want to Live "Elsewhere," but What They Are Up Against May Be Modernization Itself

Niu Jian and his shipping-container story are no longer news. What we wanted to know was the state of mind people bring to talking about this way of life, and we have tried to show it as fairly as we can.

Niu Jian and his family lived in six shipping containers for a year. The containers stood in a factory compound in Shunyi, Beijing, a compound that was mostly empty.

From last October, people began to turn up at the compound. They had heard that this cluster of containers was called the "Lettuce House." All summer the roofs were planted with lettuce and celery, the outer walls were hung with potted plants, and in front lay a second small garden.

Visitors felt they were witnessing "a great experiment in a new way of life." In the containers' bathroom they found four large plastic barrels in which human waste was turned into farm manure; kitchen scraps were ground to powder and pumped up to the roof with it. Up there was a rooftop garden, lit by a lamp that gave off pink light for the purpose, because plants absorb short-wavelength violet and long-wavelength red most easily. Construction rubble had been packed into a path along one side of the Lettuce House; rain ran off the roof and soaked away through another path laid out for the purpose, so that the water could be fully recycled.

Sitting in a one-square-meter green wooden hut in the backyard, Niu Jian took a photo of himself, looking blissful. He posted it on Weibo and called it a "forest-bathing room."

Niu Jian watering the front courtyardThe four large barrels in the bathroom turn waste and kitchen scraps into farm manure

Several designers from the Collaborative Innovation Eco-Design Center at Tsinghua University's Academy of Arts & Design designed and built the containers and handled the clean energy, household-waste treatment, gray-water facilities and biogas system. It began as a research project on sustainable development, and Niu Jian's family took part as both test subjects and homeowners.

For architects, building an eco-house that runs on clean energy or treats waste with biogas is no longer hard. But Niu Jian suggested to Liu Xin, the center's director, that they add vegetable growing and manual work. He likes to make his own tools; in summer he hoses down the front courtyard, then gives the flowers a sprinkle from a watering can.

Liu Xin said this was what made Niu Jian "different": he meant to live the new way of life himself.

Before long, Niu Jian announced that this was only the first phase of the "Sustainable Living Lab." He would launch a second phase on his own, recruiting volunteers to build a shared community of 10-15 households. There, people could not only live a "pastoral life" but also meet like-minded neighbors, and together they would build a shared space.

"I would love to move into your community, and I'd like to bring my studio along too," wrote one Weibo user who makes organic skincare products. So many people were interested that Niu Jian published his phone number and "spent a dozen hours a day answering Weibo messages."

It looked like the same thing Zach Klein, founder of the video site Vimeo, had done. On 50 mu of forest in Sullivan County, New York, Klein founded the Beaverbrook community. Its members leave the city to build cabins and barrels with their own hands, coming and going as they please. In the 1950s and 1960s the land was home to a back-to-the-land movement and an intentional village.

At the Beaverbrook community, people learn to build the frame of a cabin

More and more people are trying out new ways of living like this.

Tang Guanhua, founder of the "Self-Sufficiency Lab," lived with his wife on Laoshan, a mountain in Shandong, for five years. This October they set up a "consensus community" called "Southern Living" in a village more than an hour's drive from Fuzhou, planning to recruit 90 members and go back to the land.

The village is cold in winter and few people have come. Most are beginners, so the community's facilities are going up slowly; the time set aside for building a cabin may be enough only for a wooden stool. For now, "Southern Living" has rented a guesthouse.

Niu Jian has no plan to make people build with their own hands. His past attempts to practice a new way of life in China have left him with no faith in that.

About ten years ago, Niu Jian left a state-owned company to work at the Institute of Vegetables and Flowers of the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, studying balcony greening. Back then he wanted people to learn from Europe and plant gardens beside their houses or on their roofs, a kind of "humane decoration."

"It's not very likely," Niu Jian said of that early idea, sitting in a container at the Beijing Camping Park in November. "Getting a fool to live a good life isn't that easy." Visitors had once come in a steady stream, but they soon found they could not afford the time and labor. A garden takes three years to show results, and most people have to learn every task from scratch.

Niu Jian wanted to win back these frightened-off "fools" and offer them another option. Such people need something they can "see, touch and experience" before they understand an idea. So he decided to move his family into six shipping containers and show them "a life tens of millions would envy." Just as he had imagined, people came gladly and found that a family could change the way it lives without upheaval. The media played this up and dubbed him "Uncle China," and Uncle China seemed to have effortlessly set city dwellers an example of life in a "land of peach blossoms," a hidden paradise.

Now Niu Jian rejects that label: "We are not making a hidden paradise. We are making a paradise on earth, and we want to change the genes of the city, which is the community." This is different from what Stewart Brand described in the Whole Earth Catalog 50 years ago, and different from Zach Klein and Tang Guanhua.

"They can only change one group of people. And on the whole they are running away, running away from the city, not taking it on. From the start they never looked for a large-scale model that could help many people," Niu Jian said. "We want to act both globally and locally, and change the wrong way humans have lived for the past 200-plus years."

Liu Yuelai first met Niu Jian this spring and "could clearly tell he was thinking about how to make this thing big."

Liu, assistant director of the High-Density Human Settlements Ecology and Energy Conservation Laboratory at Tongji University, was then teaching a course on landscape and community, and he invited Niu Jian to give a talk at Tongji.

Academics were plainly fascinated by Niu Jian's experience and ideas; none of them, after all, had ever spent a year living in shipping containers. More than 200 people signed up for the talk, and Liu had to ask the university for a bigger lecture hall. He also collected questions on Weibo from people who could not attend. A Weibo user called Devil_angel96 had carefully studied the coverage of Niu Jian's container life, drew up a dozen or so technical questions and asked Liu to put them to Niu Jian.

Niu Jian could not answer them.

Lü Mingyue, a postdoctoral researcher in sustainable design at Tsinghua's Academy of Arts & Design, wanted to make the Lettuce House a key case study in her thesis. After the first phase ended, she asked Niu Jian for data and performance figures on the treatment system, the area under plants, and the use of wind and solar power. But Niu Jian's new-life experiment had recorded no such data.

People also wanted to hear what trouble he had run into in the containers and how he had dealt with it. Niu Jian always said, vaguely, that everything was fine. The one time he answered such a question on Weibo, about how the indoor temperature was kept comfortable in bitter cold and heat, he said these problems would all be solved in the second-phase shared community, and that they were not hard.

Liu Yuelai hoped Niu Jian would offer something more concrete, especially now that he meant to turn this new-life philosophy into a business.

Early this year Niu Jian found partners and set up a company. To keep the ownership clear, his wife and son, who had lived in the Lettuce House with him, stepped out of it. Niu Jian also called on companies. In April, Hanergy, Wanruo Environment, Jingpeng Global, Xiaomi's home-furnishing business, Anjie Chengdong, the Beijing International Camping Park and Yishe Eco-Tech met Niu Jian at a Man Coffee in Beijing and agreed to supply products and services.

They all said yes readily. "Because I'm doing the new life, I'm expressing a new way of living. I'm ahead. So they want to come over to the winner's side. Everyone wants to stand with the winner, with the advanced, not with the backward," Niu Jian said.

"What he says sometimes sounds like bragging," Liu Yuelai said. "What he needs to do now is build trust and explore what's possible." Liu accepted that the first phase was partly "a show," but did not think that was the heart of the matter.

What Liu most wanted to know was whether the "shared community" Niu Jian was promoting for the second phase could actually work, and whether it would really produce the kind of public life Niu Jian described.

"The shared space is going to be a hard problem," Liu said.

Before that, Niu Jian ran into other problems.

In April this year, the six containers were moved to the Beijing Camping Park because they were occupying land illegally. Alongside them, on the right, the containers were extended with three self-contained apartments, a fitted kitchen, a shared lounge and a backyard. The Wanruo Environment team also designed a new water-supply, drainage and waste-treatment system, but a heavy snowfall in Beijing at the end of November still froze the containers' water pipes.

At the start of the year, Niu Jian, his wife and son had left the "single-family ecological laboratory" and moved to a place called Jiugong, 14 kilometers away. As in most places, the building management would not let Niu Jian put a garden on the rooftop terrace, not even a planter. Building a sewage-treatment system was out of the question.

Meanwhile, a dozen or so containers sit empty deep inside the park, like an art installation that rarely draws visitors. Only one volunteer, a quiet former cyclist, has lived in the old containers since January.

"I haven't yet worked out how to recruit volunteers to come here for the experiment," Niu Jian said in an interview in October.

The volunteers were supposed to move into the community this spring. Last winter Niu Jian told his eager followers on Weibo that the first phase was only a small trial run, and that the second phase would hit like an "atom bomb." "Explosive, earth-shaking. In the future I won't be able to hide anywhere. That'll be a real nuisance," he added, sounding a little worried.

Now the project is on hold.

When Liu Yuelai met Niu Jian again in Shanghai in early December, on a day of pouring rain, he heard that Niu Jian had "already met 1,000 people."

The property developer Vanke approached Niu Jian as soon as the first phase ended and told him that Wang Shi had been following the "Lettuce House" and thought it worth investing in. Niu Jian said it ended, as he had expected, on bad terms. He has his own complete theory and method for rolling it out; Vanke, a big company, has its own too, and neither would give way.

Smaller companies showed more interest in this murky, slow-moving project. An eco-landscaping startup on Beijing's West Fourth Ring Road sought out Niu Jian at Beijing Design Week in September to explore working together. A small Shanghai property developer suggested he put up a new building on a plot on Chongming Island and run the "shared community" experiment there, since life in "containers" is a hard sell.

More than six months after the first phase ended, Niu Jian had left the plant-covered containers behind for good.

Niu Jian told us this kind of sustainable "communal" living can happen anywhere, even in a water tower. What matters is to install a reasonably sustainable ecosystem inside it and to solve the shared-space problem that worries Liu Yuelai, much as the American urban planners Andrés Duany and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk wrote in the 1996 Charter of the New Urbanism: to recreate the warm, traditional neighborhood.

Niu Jian is trying to merge the two problems completely. "The reason the global (ecology) is in such a bad state today is that our homes are too big," he said. If a large share of private space is given over to shared space, total energy use will fall, and people will gain a new way of living in a sharing economy.

So long as one does not dwell on the fact that private space will be taken away, which suggests commercial deceit and extreme collectivism, this picture of a new life is rather appealing.

MDA is an American architecture firm. Its principal architects, Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett, brought the well-established "cohousing" model from Denmark to the United States in the 1990s. MDA has since built 20 cohousing communities in the US. Like Muir Commons Community, the first cohousing community in the US, each has at its center a shared kitchen, dining room, living room, children's room, gym, lounge, offices, laundry room and guest rooms. More than twenty households live there long term, using fairly sustainable energy and recycling systems, and they hold regular shared dinners and gatherings.

Before it was finished in November 1990, this project, the first of its kind in the US, took several years to plan. Residents finally moved into Muir Commons in the summer of 1991.

By comparison, Niu Jian looks far too impatient. In his latest plan, the second phase starts in 2016, with 10-15 families moving into a 1,000-square-meter multistory experimental building; by 2017, 100 families would move into 10,000 square meters of standard multistory housing, to rent or to buy.

This is a long way from the original Lettuce House, but it looks closer to what Niu Jian wanted all along: he never meant to sell a nostalgic pastoral life.

Liu Yuelai recalled that when he brought up the utopian socialist Robert Owen, who bought 1,214 hectares of land in Indiana to practice a new way of living, Niu Jian replied, "Times have changed": Owen's world had not yet industrialized. Liu thinks this is exactly what separates Niu Jian from Tang Guanhua. Unlike Tang, who withdrew to Laoshan to resist consumption, "Niu Jian wants to use industrial products." He knows that when people try to change how they live, the poverty of country life is "far too big an obstacle."

But it is easy to worry that this "paradise on earth" is too earthly. Pulled by market demand, it could well end up as just another YOU+ apartment block or Ziroom.

New York already has too many startups like this. They always make a "shared room" sound irresistible, with like-minded people living together in good order. Take away the ecosystem, and it is hard to tell Niu Jian's "shared community" apart from them.

Some critics also argue that these companies will end up charging higher rents in the name of shared space.

Niu Jian would do best to slow down. Liu Yuelai suggested he recruit volunteers in Shanghai and build another sustainable living lab. Liu's lab could set the containers down in a neighborhood, help upgrade them and collect detailed experimental data. All of this would lay the groundwork for a large-scale rollout later.

Whether Niu Jian will go along is hard to say. He is still riding high: "I'm like an octopus. You'll soon see all eight of my arms reaching out, very soon."

Even if change comes more slowly than he expects, he will probably be, as he puts it, "not surprised, not excited, not dejected. People often ask me, but I've never been dejected."

Yet when he thinks of the "fools" who will not pay for the good life he has built, Niu Jian still looks angry.

Images from gooood, QDaily, Muir