"Urban Village" Is Such a Tangled Subject. What Can a Biennale Do About It?

Shenzhen's urban villages are treated as a "family shame." What do they actually mean for this fast-growing city?

In 2005, architect Du Juan was one of the curators of the first Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. She missed a flight once and ended up staying near the main venue, the OCT-LOFT creative park. Out walking that night, she wandered by mistake into Baishizhou. At two in the morning the night food stalls were packed and loud — a different world from OCT, which in those days turned into a "ghost town" the moment the sun went down.

The next day Du Juan mentioned the walk to someone from the planning bureau, who called Baishizhou the filthiest, most chaotic, even the most dangerous place in all of Shenzhen. "It's not that people don't know this place exists. Everyone knows. It's just that no one thinks it's worth a look — some even see it as the city's 'family shame,'" Du Juan told QDaily. What people cared about, she said, was "what a modern city is supposed to look like."

The first Biennale, themed "City, Open Door," later added a section called "Urban Village."

On December 15, 2017, the seventh Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture (UABB) opened, on the theme "Cities, Grow in Difference."

Du Juan curated the "Urban Village Archive" section. In its preface she asked a question: in the 1980s, Shenzhen's plan was to grow, over 20 years, into a city that could hold 1 to 1.5 million people. By 2000, its population had already passed 10 million. How did the city come through unharmed, and go on to become an economic power in its own right? The answer, Du Juan believes, lies in the "family shame" no one will talk about.

As early as 2005, Shenzhen proposed redeveloping 40% of its urban villages within five years, all of it by demolition and rebuilding. More than a decade later, under the threat of demolition, some urban villages have already disappeared; the 300-odd that remain still give migrants a place to land. According to a white paper on Shenzhen's rental market that Lianjia released this past November, 11 million people still live in urban villages — 52.9% of Shenzhen's population.

This year's main venue sits inside an urban village itself: Nantou Old Town. Architect Liu Xiaodu, one of the Biennale's chief curators, called Nantou "a larger exhibition hall." He hoped visitors would walk the village's alleys and look at the living conditions behind the "grime and disorder." Besides Nantou, this year's UABB picked five urban villages in Luohu, Yantian, Guangming and Longhua as satellite venues.

Architect Meng Yan, the Biennale's other chief curator, explained the choice of Nantou: architecturally, the "old town" is unremarkable. But the remains of its old city wall have earned it the status of a "provincial-level cultural heritage site," which spares Nantou the wholesale demolition other urban villages face.

"What we want to answer is: if you don't tear it down, what possibilities does an urban village hold? You could call that the biggest ambition of this year's UABB."

Outside the Main Hall, the Old Town and the Artworks Together Form Contemporary Art

This year's Biennale had more than 200 participants. Within the frame of an old town, architects, artists and designers brought in imagery to fit the theme.

Nantou Old Town is 1,700 years old. Its original face has long since blurred. A museum next door lays out its history as the political, economic and military center of the Shenzhen-Hong Kong region under the Ming and Qing. The old town's core has been filled in by the urban village — dense "handshake buildings" clad in mosaic tiles of every color, the most typical spatial pattern of urban villages across the Pearl River Delta.

Meng Yan said that as far as preserved relics go, Nantou is nowhere near Dali. But it is a rich spatial sample, "showing the full spectrum of how the urban village evolved from the modern era to the present."

The Biennale's arrival has turned the area back into a testing ground.

On an open lot that served as the threshing ground for the Nantou commune in the 1970s, two corrugated-iron sheds have been pulled down and replaced by two new buildings of custom ceramic brick. Exhibition halls and a bookstore now stand where the sheds held a clothing-and-sundries market and a fruit supermarket.

The main exhibition hall was converted from three factory buildings and two dormitories in the north of the old town; their mosaic-tiled walls, a visual signature of their era, were kept. Street artist Boa Mistura painted two overlapping words, "Tradition" and "Development," on the wall of an old factory, calling the piece Balance · Understanding China. It answers an equally colorful installation nearby, WEGO, flown in from the Netherlands by the Dutch firm MVRDV and The Why Factory, a think tank at Delft University of Technology — a vision of the hotel of the future.

Yona Friedman, the celebrated French architect, now 94, built a "street museum" on the lawn out of iron hoops and mesh screens, meant to gather residents' memories of daily life. The Italian street artist Hitnes painted a huge mural, A Sumptuous Feast, covering two gray brick walls with "ingredients": rice, noodles, octopus, a black cat, teapots, roosters, greens, geese. The Japanese architect Yoshiharu Tsukamoto raised several giant chimneys on the open ground between the old factories and the workers' dormitories, meant to stand for a "Flame Gourmet Club"; their smooth aluminum skins suit the mood of the old factory rather well.

Residents had known for a while that the Biennale was coming, but they were still curious about the changes around them. Standing outside the new building by the old threshing ground, they peered through the bright glass at a foreign curator marking up a poster, until he looked up and waved back at them. When the curator Meng Yan led dozens of people down the main street — less than two meters wide — microphone in hand, guiding a media tour, residents stepped back onto the steps along the road and raised their cameras at the rare sight. "There weren't this many people before," said a woman selling Zhanjiang-style beef offal. Dipping tripe into a pot of boiling broth, she explained that she normally didn't set up her stall until the afternoon, but had moved her hours up to the morning for the Biennale's opening.

To keep order during the Biennale, notice boards with yellow text on red were put up at both entrances to Nantou Old Town. To "maintain the tidy appearance of Nantou Old Town and keep fire lanes clear and passable," they said, "all vehicles are prohibited from entering the old town" between 8 a.m. and 7 p.m. daily; shared bikes were banned at any hour. Residents trying to ride electric scooters home were stopped one after another by uniformed auxiliary police, and in the end had to park near the entrance and walk the rest of the way.

Inside the Main Hall, Three Exhibits That Look at Life in the Urban Village

1. "Whole Family Furniture" (QKEA)

Artist Huang Heshan's piece at this year's UABB is a set of stools, made by residents of urban villages across Shenzhen out of wood or stainless steel, simply welded or bolted together. Huang Heshan and Jiang Fan traded chairs bought at IKEA for the residents' own, and assembled the collection as "Whole Family Furniture" (QKEA). Copying IKEA, he gave every chair a price tag and a description.

Huang Heshan wrote an IKEA-style introduction on his own WeChat official account: "In search of the most ingenious and resourceful designers, we traveled to every urban village in the city. These people are artists of life, giants of technique — not only do they control production costs beautifully, they design the most attractive shapes for their customers. With them on board, the future of Whole Family Furniture is bright!"

Huang Heshan and others call these resident-made stools "wild design." At a Yixi talk, he said he first went to look at urban villages out of a taste for the exotic: scrap cardboard, walls, doors and windows, pavement, utility poles, even stray dogs could all be pasted over with small ads. "People mock it and look down on it, but it is precisely this disrespected design that does the most basic and most massive work of passing information along at the bottom of Chinese society."

2. A "Concentrated Living Experience"

Xu Zhiqiang teaches at the School of Architecture and Urban Planning at Guangzhou University. In a space of just over ten square meters at this year's Biennale, he rebuilt at 1:1 scale the layout of a family workshop — living quarters and a garment workshop in one — with the sound of machines running in the background. Xu Zhiqiang told QDaily he wanted visitors to put themselves inside that concentrated living experience and understand it that way.

In 2016, a friend of Xu's was building a new house in a Guangzhou urban village, and Xu found that almost none of the architecture he knew applied to how houses actually get built in urban villages.

Villagers have their own body of experience, unlike a city dweller's, for wringing the largest return out of the lowest cost with the simplest, most effective methods of construction.

One landlord who put up a new six-story house in 2007 had kept the complete paperwork, and showed Xu Zhiqiang the documents and receipts. In 2007 a contractor supplying both labor and materials charged 700 yuan per square meter (today the price is 1,200 yuan). The six-story building, 660 square meters in all, cost 460,000 yuan. To cut costs further, the landlord bought every raw material himself and left the contractor only the building work; he thought through every detail, from how many wall bricks and doors and windows he would need to how to carve the place into rental units so he could get his money back as fast as possible.

Fifteen square meters can be divided into a living room, a bedroom and a bathroom. To save on the fit-out while keeping later maintenance to a minimum, the landlord graded his tiles. The tiles for the living room and bedroom were the better ones, at 4 yuan each; those for the bathroom walls and floor cost 0.8 and 1.2 yuan.

To save more, he tiled only the walls of the corridor and the stairwell, since shared space does not get dirty easily and needs no upkeep. Many of the units were left with part of their walls bare white, and to keep the whitewash from flaking off, tenants had no choice but to cover them with tape.

In the end, fitting out one such rental unit took 2,805 yuan of labor and 6,433 yuan of materials. Each floor held five units, each renting for 400 yuan a month. By the landlord's reckoning, the six-story building would pay for itself in three years.

Contractors in urban villages are the key figures who help landlords squeeze the most space and the most rent out of a plot. One contractor showed Xu Zhiqiang and his team a series of floor plans for self-built houses; a single room with no living room, and a one-bedroom-one-living-room unit, were the most common layouts.

Xiaozhou, the old village inside Guangzhou proper with the strongest Lingnan water-town character, is a similar case. In 2012 the orchards villagers had lived off were largely requisitioned by the government, and rent became their only income. From late 2013 to 2015, controls on self-built housing were loosened in Haizhu district, where Xiaozhou sits: houses were tacitly allowed to reach five and a half stories, or to be added onto an existing three and a half. The "sliver of sky" views common in urban villages began appearing on a large scale. This kind of "architectural design" plainly cannot be covered by conventional building methods.

Chisha village, at the edge of the area the "Zhongda Fabric Market" reaches, is one link in the enormous garment supply chain formed by a stretch of connected urban villages. Homes, garment factories and small workshops are mixed into the dense cluster of buildings. Factories with bigger orders tend to sit in self-built houses on the village's outer rim, where the buildings are larger, fire safety and ventilation are better, and it is easier to house and feed workers; workshops with smaller orders rent the cheaper residential blocks deeper inside, packing production and daily life tightly into cramped rooms.

Xu Zhiqiang surveyed one such house, hemmed in on all sides so tightly that barely any air got through; only the fifth floor had decent daylight, and every other floor needed the lights on during the day. Poor as the conditions were, every floor of this five-and-a-half-story house was rented out, and the tenants used the space not only to live in but to run small businesses making clothes and LED lamps.

The owner of one family workshop told Xu Zhiqiang that running a small workshop at home paid about the same as a factory job. But the first let them find time to take the children to and from school and go out with them on weekends; the second would mean leaving the children back in their hometown, rarely to be seen.

The couple had their 24 hours of living and working scheduled tightly: while one went to fetch the kids, the other kept working; at night one put the children to bed while the other went back to the machines. When orders piled up, the two of them worked day and night shifts, without a break, and looked after the children at the same time.

Cheap rent in urban villages gives tenants a chance to hold family life and work together. "A factory like this, in a space like this [small, badly lit], really isn't good. They all say that if they had money they'd move, because they have kids, they have a family life. But they don't have the money, so this is where they stay," Xu Zhiqiang said in the interview.

3. Furniture Suited to High-Density Living, a Neglected Kind of Design

Du Juan is now an associate professor in the Faculty of Architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Over the past two years she has taken part in a "low-efficiency" project, designing furniture with her students for the tenants of subdivided flats in an old neighborhood near the university.

"It isn't that they can't afford it. IKEA furniture simply can't be got into their homes — many sofas can't even make it up the stairs or into the lifts of old tong lau buildings."

A subdivided flat is what you get when a landlord or a subletter cuts one rental unit into several separate rooms and rents them out one by one. Of the 20-odd households Du Juan worked with, the smallest was eight square meters, home to a family of five.

Over two years they produced three rounds of designs and served more than 20 households in all. One household finally "canceled the order."

"All these years I've worked with the government, with developers, with Shenzhen's villagers — a huge group in Shenzhen [most of Shenzhen's urban villages have turned their village collectives into joint-stock companies]. But when it finally comes down to redeveloping an urban village, nobody puts the people who actually live there first. I keep thinking: apart from working top-down, is there a way for architects to step in from the bottom up?"

Du Juan chose tenants, not landlords, as her "client." She wanted the furniture to be genuinely useful to these highly mobile families without giving up her design principles. The only piece turned down was a wardrobe: for a family on the second floor troubled for years by noise, Du Juan specified an unusual material — a sound-absorbing wool fabric — but the mother worried her two children would knock it apart, and in the end refused it. Du Juan took the design back, repaired the wooden wardrobe the family already had, and returned it to them.

"From some angles this is just a piece of furniture, but I keep telling my students it's 'architecture at the scale of furniture.' It's free, but we want it to last decades in use. If the owner feels the slightest bit uneasy about it, we'd rather not put it in at all."

This is not the kind of commission an ordinary architecture practice would take. In time, labor and design cost, it is a bad bargain. "That's exactly why you can find almost nothing on the market designed for them. There's no furniture suited to this kind of high-density living — no materials either."

"A table for so-called 'low-income people' tests a designer harder than one bound for a museum, a mansion or an ordinary household — in materials, quality, joints, durability, and how easily it comes apart and goes back together."

Du Juan doesn't see this as simple charity work. She hopes it can one day become a model and a product.

Shenzhen has no public housing, Du Juan says, but it has urban villages. Carrying more than 50% of Shenzhen's population, urban villages offer better conditions than public housing would: these bottom-up communities hold not only homes but shops, schools, hospitals, even factories, which give people work.

The Urban Village: What Cramped Living Means for a City

The seventh Shenzhen & Hong Kong Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture did not address housing justice head-on. Around the world, the "enclaves" that once gave newcomers a place to land are all facing displacement — some to rents the market has pushed up, some to government order.

At the opening, a reporter asked what the Biennale could bring to Nantou Old Town. Xue Feng, secretary-general of the UABB organizing committee, said: "To put it crudely, the show hadn't even opened and the rents had already gone up."

Turning the meaning of the urban village into an object to be consumed is, plainly, cruel. The urban village is less a way of life than a way of living that people had no choice about, built up year after year. This word, which folds together urban planning, individual rights, economic growth and the preservation of architectural history, has no tidy, one-size-fits-all answer. What it needs, perhaps, is careful discussion, and more patience.

At the Biennale we met Abby Chen, a curator based in San Francisco, where Chinatown faces a similar crisis. In the local government's renewal plans, the tech industry is the new direction of growth; the tech workers pouring into the city have pushed rents up, and a fresh wave of gentrification has "driven out" some artists and tenants.

Many longtime Chinatown tenants have already moved away; some are still fighting. But Chinatown's residents and businesses have institutional ways to fight. Abby told us it isn't only tenants: developers of local affordable housing have joined with property owners, tenants and vendors to form an important "voting bloc" in local politics. They have pressed the local government for years and offered solutions, and to some degree they can protect their own rights.

Du Juan and Meng Yan had a short argument about gentrification at one forum. Meng Yan thinks gentrification is unavoidable in the end; the only difference is when it arrives and what form it takes.

Du Juan, for her part, has tried hard to protect the interests of urban-village tenants. Look back at the history of the Shenzhen Biennale and it is inseparable from gentrification and urban development. From the first Biennale's "City, Open Door," which powered the growth of OCT-LOFT, to the conversion of abandoned industrial buildings in Shekou over the past two editions, these cultural events have helped turn post-industrial districts like Shekou into the city's new "rich neighborhoods."

"A country with a mature rule of law has to recognize the existence and the rights of residents who own no property. A city's vitality also rests on whether people can find somewhere to live without spending every day afraid of being thrown out tomorrow. Developed countries all have laws for this now. Of course they didn't have them from the start either; it took public protest, advocacy by NGOs and lobbying by cultural figures before any of it became policy. That change may have come 100 years ago, or 50 years ago — either way, it was a process."

"If we want to prove we have made progress, this would prove a country's maturity better than ten Olympics."

(Unless otherwise credited, all images in this article were provided by the organizers of this year's Biennale. Photography by Zhang Chao.)