Who Are Those Designers Really Renovating the Old City For? | Is Old Beijing Dead? (2)

Nobody, it turns out, can answer that any time soon.

Designers and developers may be used to walking in and out of half-finished houses. Residents and other visitors are not.

Dai Liying, who has lived at Baita Temple for 37 years, thinks these houses are "a waste of money." As she sees it, the first purpose of old-city renovation should be "improving residents' lives." What hutong residents need "isn't a pretty show home," but to "make the house a bit bigger," "get the water pipes working," "get more electric heat."

Days after the colorful flags of the "Baita Temple Regeneration Plan" went up, Dai Liying walked over to Gongmenkou Sitiao to look at a few of the renovated houses. "It's just a show unit. What good is that? It wasn't built for ordinary people. I'm never going back."

The renovation reminded her of last year's Beijing Design Week, when display racks full of flowers and potted plants appeared in the hutong on Fuchengmennei North Street, where the Lu Xun Museum stands. "They tore it all down after half a month. Isn't that a waste of money? Why does nobody ask the residents around here what they think before doing this?"

Dai Liying has a 33-year-old daughter; the three of them live in a house that was originally just 8 square meters. In 2008 they spent 80,000 yuan turning it into two stories and 50 square meters, and she finds it comfortable. When the government came to her about vacating it, she refused.

"A two-bedroom in Xierqi — who wants that? I live here, my daughter upstairs, me downstairs, everyone with their own space. There's a hospital, a food market, a nursing home, a library close by; everything is convenient. Why would I move that far away?"

She has another reason for not moving. "When I bought this house, I bought the land along with it. Now they tell me to vacate, but they only count the 8 square meters on the deed, and they only pay for the house, not the land. Who would move on those terms?"

Dai Liying's house is privately owned. Her husband once ran a factory called Hongqi at Qianmen; in 1956 the factory was turned over to the state, and in return he was allowed to buy in the hutongs, so he spent 800 yuan to "get one room." That room was confiscated again during the Cultural Revolution. It was returned afterward, "but it had been used so hard it looked nothing like before — completely run down." The two courtyards next door, No. 20 and No. 22, were knocked through into one while the state held them, and their own gate was sealed up, so to this day people from those two courtyards come and go through Dai Liying's gate, which troubles her a great deal.

"I married in in '79, and it wasn't until we exchanged deeds in 1983 that I realized the two courtyards were supposed to be separate. In 2005 I took part in a housing survey, which let me look at the archives, and I saw the old floor plans, so I took them [the neighbors] to court. But the court wouldn't let me pull the archived records. With no evidence, I couldn't win the case."

As for daily life: once the hutongs switched from coal to electric heating, each household's heat was calculated from the floor area on its deed. Dai Liying's house is now two stories and 50 square meters, so heat rationed for 8 square meters obviously falls short.

Some things she can settle herself. Early this year she paid 3,000 yuan to have the connected courtyards from No. 20 to No. 24 laid with tile, "much more comfortable to walk on now."

Not long after, the hutong rolled out a "water pipes to every home" policy. "They dug the tiles up and left a mess, installed the water meters, and never connected the water. I went to the housing bureau, and the housing bureau told me to find someone at the water company. When I found the water company, they said, 'Auntie, there are plenty of cases like yours. You can use the shared tap in the courtyard anyway, and you don't even pay a water bill — what's wrong with that?'"

(I)

In the hutongs there are many residents like Dai Liying.

Ownership of old Beijing's housing has changed at least as messily as its urban planning. According to records kept by Wang Jun, a reporter for Xinhua News Agency, when Beijing finished surveying and registering every house in the city at the end of 1953, 67% of its housing, counted by room, was privately owned. In 1958 the central government restructured part of that stock and pressed owners who rented out more than a set number of rooms to put the excess under joint operation by the government and the owner — roughly 16.8% of the rooms registered in 1953.

During the Cultural Revolution, Beijing took over the private property of more than 80,000 homeowners, a floor area amounting to more than a third of all housing in the city in the early years after 1949. When the Cultural Revolution ended, the government could not force everyone who had squeezed into other people's houses to move out, so it "returned the property with its occupants": the deed went back to the owner, but the owner had to sign a lease with the occupant, at a rent the government set. By 2003, Beijing began clearing large numbers of these tenants out and returning the rooms to their owners. During the same years, another policy encouraged private money to buy up courtyard houses.

All this taking public, giving back and selling has left hutong ownership tangled: some houses are state-owned, some private, some unclear. Because each family's rooms in a courtyard are in fact very small — often only about 10 square meters — residents built all kinds of extensions in the courtyards to get by, turning courtyard houses into crowded compounds. Across one housing survey and deed update after another, some structures that started out illegal may by now be legal, while others sit in limbo.

An organizer of "Meet Shichahai" told QDaily that during fieldwork in the hutongs her team met an old man who had moved several times within the hutongs in the space of a few years — sometimes because his landlord sold the house to the government, sometimes because of demolition, sometimes because a neighbor told him, "There's a state-owned house here, the person in it left, the state is leaving it empty and hasn't even locked it. Move in — you won't even pay rent." Some branches of "the state" don't quite remember which houses are empty either: "when they remember, they come and collect a bit of rent."

Shifts in the vacate-and-relocate policy have also done much to churn this district. Many people remember the government's relocation terms changing "every single day": there has been forced relocation and relocation by application; some terms were generous, others left much to be desired. Sometimes each household in a courtyard could be handled on its own; other times more than 85% of the residents had to agree to move, or nobody in the courtyard could move at all.

Policy aside, for some residents vacating a hutong courtyard is the hardest sort of family quarrel. Zhang Shuhui, founder of Bazuo Architecture Studio, told QDaily that while renovating No. 41 Qinglong Hutong with Huarong Jinying, the company handling relocation in the Baita Temple area, he ran into a case like this: everyone in a nearby courtyard had agreed to move, except that in one household a second son had divorced his wife and the property had been split down the middle. The ex-wife, who no longer lived there, would not give up her few square meters of ownership on any terms, so the whole courtyard was stuck.

Problems like these mean that the property the government recovers for old-city renovation is scattered here and there — and in some courtyards it may end up owning only half, with the other half still private.

When the government convened various parties to try new uses for these spaces and gathered feedback through Beijing Design Week, much of the response was: "Too loosely organized. A mess."

(II)

"Hardly anyone doesn't want to leave. Who wants to live in a house this cramped and this run-down? In the end it's all about money," one resident told Zhou Ziping, who was there as a volunteer.

Wang Xia runs a community bookshop in a hutong by the entrance to the Lu Xun Museum, in the Baita Temple area. A friend of hers lives in Dashilar: "A 10-square-meter house, and she still hasn't moved out. My friend told the government, give me 5 million yuan plus two apartments, or there's nothing to talk about." The friend doesn't actually live there anymore; she rents the place out for 1,000 yuan a month.

But some residents feel that next to Dongcheng District — which had to relocate and rebuild in a hurry for the Olympics, offered relatively generous terms, and finished most of its relocations long ago — Xicheng District, which started somewhat later, offers terms that are "just not as good anymore."

It isn't that nobody wants to fix up their own house; privately renovating a courtyard house simply costs too much. Zhang Shuhui told QDaily that for a small architecture studio an ordinary design job might pay only 20 to 40 yuan per square meter in design fees, and a public project perhaps more than 100 — but renovating a courtyard house can run past 3,000 yuan per square meter.

At fees that high, the people who can pay are rarely the original residents. They are the government, or the individuals and companies that have spotted the heat in the cultural-creative and tourism markets and are willing to rent houses to run guesthouses or creative businesses.

While we were talking with Zhang Shuhui, a middle-aged man who owns two properties in a hutong near Jishuitan came over to ask for a phone number. He was looking for someone who wanted to run a guesthouse, and wanted to hand the renovation and the operation over to them. "I'll just collect the rent. Simpler that way."

"Sure — there's one right nearby. She's already made seven or eight guesthouses in the hutongs."

The person Zhang Shuhui meant is Su Rui, founder of the guesthouse brand Zizai Changtou. She came to Beijing to study in 2008; after graduating in 2012 she rented a place in a hutong in Dongsi, and by the end of that year she was running a guesthouse there. Most of her guests are between 18 and 35. Su Rui told QDaily that all eight Zizai Changtou guesthouses are rented from private owners, then designed and rebuilt by her into guesthouses.

"The rent pressure is real, especially after Chinese New Year this year, when it jumped." So besides lodging, Zizai Changtou also earns money from a gallery, exhibitions, French food and other lines.

For the government, a proposal to renovate a property and then merely rent it out looks both wasteful and unrealistic. Take Baita Temple. Across Fuchengmennei North Street is Financial Street, where the gold signs of China Zheshang Bank and Kunlun Bank are visible at a glance. Housing here costs at least 100,000 to 150,000 yuan per square meter; for the 150-square-meter space Bazuo Architecture Studio rents, the government's acquisition cost alone would be at least 15 million yuan. On rent alone, even at 20,000 yuan a month, it would take in 240,000 yuan a year — at least 60 years to break even.

Once a space like this comes back, what should be done with it? What use fits best? Everyone is looking for that answer.

(III)

Zhang Ke, a designer at Standardarchitecture, thinks "China's architectural 'front-line alley fighting' can't be won."

Zhang Ke has more work across the three districts than anyone else: one project each in Baita Temple and Shichahai, two in Dashilar. One of them, "Micro Yuan'er" at No. 8 Cha'er Hutong, won a 2016 Aga Khan Award for Architecture, making him the second Chinese designer to take the prize. He made the remark above when he brought this project to this year's Venice Architecture Biennale and spoke to Archiposition.

Three years ago, Beijing Dashilar Investment Co., Ltd., a unit of Guang'an Holdings, invited him to renovate No. 8 Cha'er Hutong in Shichahai. While doing his research he came across a satellite map marking old Beijing's cultural protection zones and its demolition-and-rebuilding projects, and was shocked. "I had no idea this many Beijing hutongs have already been flattened — and it happened in just the past year, some of it inside the protection zones, and it's still going on."

"Beyond a client hiring you to do one or two courtyards, what else can an architect do? I have no answer to that. Of the time we put into these courtyards, roughly 30% to 40% was time nobody paid us a design fee for. You also have to find your own sponsors, get the government to approve the thing, and match wits with the neighbors."

Because so many parties are involved, anything can go wrong in a hutong renovation.

The Baita Temple Regeneration Plan also ran an international competition, "The Rebirth of Beijing's Small Courtyards," hosted by Tsinghua University's magazine World Architecture, in which 24 shortlisted teams designed proposals for several courtyards supplied by Huarong Jinying. On QDaily's visit we met a tenant at No. 22 Gongmenkou Sitiao who said his landlord had decided partway through not to take part in the renovation. At No. 31 Gongmenkou Sitiao, two households live in a small courtyard piled with discarded junk, each with two bunk beds. One resident told us this is collective housing for Beihai Park's cleaning staff; they knew nothing about the renovation, only that a poster had been stuck on the gate since July, and that people had come by on and off afterward, taken photos and left.

By Zhang Ke's account, No. 8 Cha'er Hutong had 12 households; three of them had still not moved out when he took on the renovation, which makes it a "co-existing building." In the middle stood several kitchens the 12 families had built around a thousand-year-old scholar tree. Zhang Ke kept the kitchens of the families who had stayed and tore the rest down, still wrapping a display area around the tree; the wing rooms emptied on either side became a children's reading and activity space, which draws kids from nearby Tan'er Hutong Primary School.

"They cooperated completely, because once you finish the renovation their conditions are better, their few rooms are worth more, and they're delighted."

On another Dashilar project, "Micro Hutong," the neighbors would often "turn around and go report us to the municipal party committee," until "the Beijing Municipal Commission of Urban Planning held an expert meeting at the end of last year and said what we're doing in these few cases is fine, but won't be promoted as a model."

When QDaily visited Micro Yuan'er this time, only two households were left. We met Grandpa Wang, the main character in the promotional comic that the cultural brand Drawing Architecture Studio drew for "Micro Yuan'er". He thinks "too many people have been coming lately," and that this "isn't a renovation, it's an exhibit for Beijing Design Week. If they were really renovating, they should renovate my house." What he is prouder of isn't "this exhibit" but the thousand-year-old scholar tree. "Have you ever seen a tree this big? A tree this old, you'd only find in the Forbidden City."

As for the children who come to play: "They're all spoiled rotten, they can't even walk properly, driven around every day. What are they doing in craft classes? They should get an old Red Army soldier in to tell them stories about the past."

The old man who minds Micro Yuan'er's reading room, meanwhile, dislikes the phrase "the government is helping with the renovation." "What do you mean, helping? This is what the government is supposed to do. They took the houses back and this is what they turned them into? What happened to 'six households into four'? Forget it, there's no point going on."

QDaily emailed Zhang Ke for his view on this and has had no reply. But in his interview with Archiposition he did respond: "At this experimental stage, someone will always step up to obstruct you. Tear down every addition and make a courtyard look exactly as it did 200 years ago, and nobody will stop you. Flatten it overnight, and nobody will stop you either. It's building at this small a scale that runs into every kind of obstruction and difficulty."

Su Rui of Zizai Changtou thinks along much the same lines as Zhang Ke. She has lived in the hutongs for four years: "What I feel most strongly is that 'transforming people' is the hardest part, and the part you have to get past — otherwise renovating the hardware is pointless. Changing the thinking, the manners and the habits of the hutongs' original residents is the real key to renovation."

She would rather not give examples. "Anyone who has renovated a courtyard has run into it. Nothing unusual."

(IV)

But Xu Tiantian of DnA thinks the many limits of the hutongs' old houses and courtyards are, for an architect, part of the appeal. "An architect can't just build and build and build. Behind the limits of a small project there's all kinds of hidden information, and the architect has to think about how to express something inside those limits. That's what makes it interesting."

Xu Tiantian is one of the four lead designers on this year's hutong renovation projects under the Baita Temple Regeneration Plan (the others are Dong Gong, Zhang Ke and Hua Li). Huarong Jinying invited her last November, but when Beijing Design Week opened, the building — called "Box Courtyard" — was still unfinished, because the construction team was slow. It hosted a Dutch graphic design show anyway.

"You can see the wall structure has kept its original position, and a lot of it is still bare and needs reinforcing. To get more light in, I designed torn openings at the four corners of the roof, so daylight comes through. There's no glass over them yet, so for now they're covered with other materials."

Unlike the other three designers, who were given crowded courtyard compounds, she had a modern block to renovate. Both kinds of housing are common in the hutongs. A crowded compound is a courtyard house extended sideways within its own yard; a modern block is the "concrete box" residents put up after tearing a courtyard house down.

"A block isn't like a courtyard house, where private space is small and shared space is large. It has whole stretches of usable space. My building here covers 150 square meters and has two floors."

Huarong Jinying thought space this large was rare, and that it could become a hutong art gallery that doubled as an artist's studio, pulling creative types in. So in Box Courtyard's layout, the ground floor is an exhibition hall, the second floor has three or four small rooms, and the third is a roof terrace under a canopy propped up on PVC and iron pipes of different heights.

If Zhao Shujun, who was unhappy with No. 1 Lechunfang, came to look at this building, he might offer the same verdict: "Where's the courtyard house in this?"

While working out the design, Xu Tiantian took the Baita Temple problem to the University of Hong Kong to discuss with her students, and they turned up some interesting things. "The White Pagoda is 50 meters tall and white all over; we call it 'Big White.' You can see it from anywhere in this district, and it looks different depending on where you stand. The white of the pagoda and the gray of the hutongs together make a kind of fragmented beauty. So in the design we put that image into the building too. From outside it's gray, partly because hutong renovation rules don't allow much decoration on the exterior; inside it's all white, and the torn-open corners and the curves at some of the edges are meant to recall the corners and edges of the White Pagoda you see from different points in the hutongs."

"The White Pagoda Temple was in fact built by a Nepalese — it's a symbol of a foreign religion. It too arrived at some point in time and mixed in with the traditional courtyard houses, making a kind of cultural conversation. 'Box Courtyard' is like another building inserted now: foreign artists come in through it and blend into this place. That echo is what's interesting."

Xu Tiantian had never done a hutong renovation, but she has done a lot of rural building projects. She finds the two have much in common, and that the working method is much the same: "A place has its own texture, community and cultural character — texture as in texture, fabric. People say villages all look alike, but what really sets them apart is culture. In Songyang, for example, each village has its own specialty — brown sugar, Hakka red yeast rice wine, fried tofu, radishes — and the question is how architecture can help build that industry up."

"And in a hutong, because of the changes across different eras, you can see the layers of texture residents have laid over one another — 300 years old, 50 years old, 20 years old, inserted bit by bit, at small scale. Look at that socialist-era block next door: it too is a new layer inserted in some era. What we should do is add a new layer of texture, not break the one that's there."

(*With the interviewees' consent, Zhao Shujun, Dai Liying and Li Yi in this article are pseudonyms.)

The cover image and the photographs in this article were taken on site with a phone.