Must Old Beijing Die?

In the heart of Beijing, next to Tiananmen, a district of old hutongs has sat in limbo for 10 years. Its only decent public facility is a crude public toilet. Now a group of star architects is trying to offer a way out.

Night falls over Beijing.

Lights blaze all along the city's central axis. Walk south from Tiananmen, past the Zhengyangqiao archway, and you reach Qianmen Street, an "antique-style" shopping street rebuilt in 2008. To its west lie Dashilar, crowded with out-of-town tourists, and the hutongs where creative design shops have quietly moved in over the past few years. To its east lies the Qianmen East District.

Walk east through Xianyukou's food street of time-honored brands, and the lights dim and the noise fades. The rows of old-name shops and international brand stores end, and so do the creative boutiques. Passers-by glimpse crumbling gray brick walls only in the flash of passing headlights, while rows of old houses stand silent on either side of the lanes.

This is Xianyukou, in the south of the old city. It lies in the Qianmen East District, yet for more than a decade the area seems to have been forgotten. Qianmen Street was rebuilt, and Dashilar, host of Beijing Design Week, changes by the day, but the Qianmen East District has simply gone on decaying on its own.

Today very few original residents remain in the Qianmen East District. According to a survey by Jiakun Architects, from the Ming and Qing dynasties until 2001 the district's population density held steady at around 732 people per hectare. By 2005 it had plunged to 460. In 2008, when Qianmen Street was finished and opened to the public just before the Beijing Olympics, density in the Xianyukou area fell further, to 240. Six years on, it is just 115 per hectare.

The exodus traces largely to a 2005 government priority project called "Eliminate Danger, Remove Risk." These government-coined four-character slogans can be hard to decode, but what was actually done makes it plain: in the stretch of the Qianmen East District from Caochang Toutiao to Caochang Shitiao, more than two-thirds of residents were told, in stages, to move out of "dangerous buildings," and some of those buildings were rebuilt to their original appearance and then left empty. In August 2012 the government changed course again, publishing a new development plan for the Qianmen historical and cultural display zone that made the area an "Old Beijing cultural experience zone." The government said it would protect the fabric of the hutongs, keep part of the area residential, and encourage original residents to live there.

But since the residents were moved out seven years ago, the area's grocery stores and corner shops have closed one after another. The only decent public facility left is the public toilet. Nobody wants to come back.

A new directive is easy to issue. In practice, unclear property rights, chaotic demolition compensation, badly damaged houses and outdated municipal infrastructure are problems no one can avoid.

In the summer of 2014, Weng Ling, director of the Tian An Time Contemporary Art Center, received an unusual invitation. The Dongcheng District government and the Beijing Municipal Institute of City Planning and Design asked her to bring in people from different fields to discuss how to revive the Qianmen East District. It was the first Weng had heard that, in the heart of the city just southeast of Tiananmen, such a run-down area still existed, and she could hardly believe it. The center soon launched the "South City Project: Qianmen East 2014."

Years of cross-disciplinary curating in China and abroad had given Weng a wide network. At her invitation, eight teams went into the Qianmen East District to do on-site research and planning: the independent research institution Youfang, Jiakun Architects, MAD Architects, Neri&Hu Design and Research Office, Kengo Kuma & Associates, the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, MVRDV and K/R Architects.

"Protecting the hutongs is already a consensus. All demolition and rebuilding should happen only on condition that neither the fabric of the hutongs nor the character of the buildings is damaged," Shi Jian, co-founder of Youfang, told QDaily. In his view, the "new antiques" on Qianmen Street, rebuilt in late-Qing and early-Republican style, and the new houses built in the hutongs as copies of the originals, still damaged the spirit of the old city.

Liu Yuyang, principal architect of Atelier Liu Yuyang Architects and honorary associate professor at the University of Hong Kong's Faculty of Architecture, thinks the 10 years in which Xianyukou was forgotten were in fact a stroke of "luck." "If it hadn't been impossible to develop back then, for one reason or another, it would probably have been razed long ago, like Qianmen Street, and filled with 'fake antiques,'" Liu told QDaily. "But if you treat today's hutongs as living antiques and restore everything exactly as it was, they can only remain urban villages. I think contemporary design should step in and renovate them while respecting their historical scale and sense of space."

"Urban village" is no exaggeration for the state of the old hutongs in the Qianmen East District. Youfang's team studied 31 hutongs and more than 600 courtyards in the surrounding area. They took their research back to 1750 and, working from the Complete Map of the Capital in the Qianlong Era, drew a 1750 map of the area from the Qianmen East District to Zhengdongfang. "This map is extremely accurate, both as a city map and as a map of how the courtyards relate to one another. It shows how many rooms each courtyard had, so you could also call it a map of property rights," Shi Jian said. They then laid this year's Google Maps view of the same area over it. The parts marked in green, scattered through the district's hutongs large and small, stand out sharply.

The Qianmen East District studied against the Qianlong-era map of the capital

Youfang team's spatial study of the Qianmen East District

Pointing at the map, Shi Jian said: "These are what we call illegal structures. When people talk about Beijing's dazayuan, the 'messy compounds,' what exactly is messy about them? It's these illegal structures. The government doesn't recognize them; they don't exist in any of its survey maps. Since the founding of the People's Republic, and especially after the Cultural Revolution, a huge number of add-on buildings went up. The government doesn't recognize their property rights, but in real life they are there."

On the map, the hutongs' outer layout is unchanged, but inside they have been transformed beyond recognition.

This tangle of property rights gives every developer a headache. It also explains why developers have tended to prefer wholesale demolition and rebuilding, enormously wasteful as it is: knocking everything down seems more efficient.

Ma Yansong, founder of MAD Architects, considers wholesale development and demolition completely unacceptable. At the forum and academic symposium for "South City Project: Qianmen East 2014," Ma said: "I remember living as a child in the area behind Wangfujing. The courtyard had trees, and you could see the seasons change. Ginkgo nuts fell and we roasted them; when it rained, there were snails. When it comes to protecting the old city, we first have to be clear: what are we protecting, and what are we protecting it for? The conflict between the old city and the city's development grows sharper every day, so what we should protect is the community ties and the social ecology. A lot has already been torn down here. My suggestion is: keep what hasn't been demolished, leave alone what hasn't been touched, and think about what to do. Don't fake some roofs and build fake antiques with carved beams and painted rafters. Let it change slowly by itself, and renew itself slowly."

Qianmen Street is the textbook case of wholesale demolition and rebuilding. Since the rebuild, the shops along the street have sold all manner of things, but the bustle is hollow and business is poor. Dozens of merchants shut down in 2012 and 2013.

"In China, whenever a single developer takes on a whole district for old-city renovation, it usually ends in wholesale demolition and rebuilding. Abroad, neither governments nor developers can demolish whole districts at once, so they naturally end up with many small developers renovating building by building," Liu Yuyang told QDaily. "The advantage is that every household's demands get answered, so disputes are less likely. Developers and architects work with each building's particular features and tailor the renovation to it, which avoids identical, wholesale demolition and rebuilding."

Liu himself once renovated a small siheyuan, or traditional courtyard house, on Guanshuyuan Hutong in Beijing. The courtyard sat at the dead end of a small hutong right next to the Imperial Academy, and it was a mess. He boldly borrowed the imagery of Jiangnan gardens, paid close attention to the building's structure and its relationship to the surrounding community, and turned it into an exhibition space for ceramic art. The courtyard was later rented out again as a studio, but its new tenant has kept his design untouched. The messy little compound has been given new life.

Liu Yuyang's renovation project on Guanshuyuan Hutong, Beijing

Some people are already doing door-to-door surveys of this kind in the Qianmen East District. The team of Meng Yan, partner at URBANUS Architecture & Design, surveyed 480 households in the area. "Each household's needs, family situation and finances are different. I think this diversity should be kept, and the emotional bond between people and the place they live should be rebuilt," Meng said.

Compared with the orderly, regular grand compounds of northern Beijing, the fabric of the southern hutongs is finer-grained, more flexible and more varied. In Meng's view, it is precisely because the south city has so many small, crooked, crowded and scattered courtyards, all on a small scale, that it has more potential to hold real contemporary urban life, and could turn from closed communities into open urban living space.

URBANUS team: Courtyard within a Courtyard

Meng argues for renovating the Qianmen East District in phases, in batches, even one household at a time. This closely resembles the Roppongi redevelopment in Japan that Liu Yuyang cited. "Old-city renovation is really about one generation giving way to the next, and building-by-building renovation lets residents make that handover naturally. The redevelopment of Roppongi in Tokyo, for example, took nearly 20 years. After many of the old people who lived there died, their children, who had often long since moved away, gave up the houses of their own accord, and then the renovation moved in. It's a natural process."

Kengo Kuma and Ma Yansong also proposed building-by-building renovation.

Kengo Kuma: Void/Particles

MAD: Conceptual plan for the protection and development of the old city in the Qianmen East District

Kuma sees the Qianmen East District as the place that bears the oldest marks of history at the heart of China. He proposed a scheme called "Void/Particles," which, like traditional Chinese medicine, avoids damaging the existing fabric: it seeks out empty lots and corners in the hutongs and inserts small spaces there to serve different community functions.

Ma Yansong prefers to call his approach "acupuncture": slipping small added structures into the gaps where buildings have already been torn down. "Hutong Bubble 32," a project he has already completed, adds a bathroom and a staircase up to a roof terrace. It looks like a life form from another planet, its smooth, curved metal skin reflecting the courtyard's old buildings, its trees and the sky. It brings showers and toilets to old-city homes that lack them, gives old buildings new life, and can revive relations between neighbors.

MAD: Hutong Bubble

Whatever their different renovation schemes, the teams agreed on one thing: the area needs lively new residents. After all, if you want to preserve the memory of the old city, it is people who carry the culture.

Terence Riley, a partner at New York's K/R, cited Venice in his talk. He considers it a textbook failure of old-city revival: it preserved only the physical space and the architecture, and neglected the lives of the people who live there.

Beijing is no different.

Many people come to Beijing curious about its most authentic street-level culture and want to wander the hutongs. The folk charm of the old hutongs is what gives old Beijing its aura. But walk down Xi Damochang Street today and the seasonal cries of street hawkers are long gone. An old man sometimes leans in a doorway, watching stray dogs trot slowly past, and now and then a car passes through, its engine breaking the silence.

"Only by drawing people back to live real lives here, and by driving a sustainable business model, can the old city renew itself naturally and settle into a virtuous cycle," Ma Yansong said.

In fact, the original residents who have always been rooted here care most about every tree and blade of grass, and have the most right to be heard. But as Shi Jian put it: "For original residents, renovation and development involve unequal information. They generally don't know what the development is really for, or what the place will become."

The rebuilding of Qianmen Street is widely regarded among architects as a failure

Zhu Xiaodi, chief architect of the Beijing Institute of Architectural Design, one of the organizers of this Qianmen East District project, also believes that original residents are usually the weaker party in old-city renovation.

Take the residents forced out in 2005: apart from taking the money and leaving, they had no power over the pace of change in the city or over their own living conditions. Zhu even sees the question of people as a root cause of why old-city renovation stalled. "In this area now, whether the homes are private property, work-unit property or directly managed public housing, everyone seems to feel that sooner or later the government will demolish them and move us out. So everyone is thinking about how to bargain with the government when demolition comes, and no two people will settle for the same terms."

On that basis, Zhu proposed "private ownership of housing," which would give property holders ownership, the right to dispose of their property and the right to use it. He calls it "the starting point for protecting Beijing's old city and developing its culture." The government would turn from demolisher into a provider of the city's public resources. Only when original residents become masters of their own future, and see that they may gain from the old city's renewal, will they want to protect it.

Beyond private ownership, Zhu also proposed tackling the severe shortage of resources in historic districts by developing public space underground: breaking with the old single-story, flat planning layout and building out as much of the first and second basement levels as possible.

Under Zhu's proposal, the first basement level would be developed courtyard by courtyard, with the new space belonging to the property holders, giving residents more floor area and meeting the needs of modern life. The second basement level would be a public layer for the city, handling municipal infrastructure and parking in one place.

Whether this "private ownership" strategy is a utopian fantasy or can actually be put into practice depends, naturally, on the thinking of government decision-makers. As for the future of this old hutong district, everyone still seems to be feeling their way.

Images from BCA, Designboom, MAD and Atelier Liu Yuyang Architects