Collectivist Housing From the 1950s Shouldn't Be Studied Only as a "Legacy Problem"

A utopian vision, a complicated present — more than sixty years on, it still shapes the cities we live in

The first collectivist housing built for workers in the early years of the People's Republic is now more than sixty years old. Some of it has been torn down; some still looks the way it did on the day it opened, and large numbers of people still live in it.

In early July, Shanghai's Pengpu New Village marked the "60th anniversary of its founding." One of the city's first workers' new villages, it looked back on the glory of its early days, when moving into a new village was a mark of status. Today this generation of public housing goes by the nickname "old, run-down, and small." New village, worker, collectivism — these words have grown unfamiliar in mainstream talk.

"This is a forgotten stretch of history," says the artist Shi Qing. Take Shanghai, where he now lives: whenever people talk about the city, they gravitate to one of two eras — "either the glamorous foreign concessions of the 1930s Republican era, or the economic takeoff after Pudong's development began in 1992." Where did the decades in between go? How did people live then?

People's taste in city space runs along similar lines. Next to the Bund's row of buildings, the towers of Lujiazui, the shikumen lane houses, or the Hungarian-born architect László Hudec, who has been fashionable in recent years, the old public housing blocks of the collectivist era seem to warrant no discussion at all — "they seem to be everywhere, and yet they look utterly unremarkable."

"It's not just Shanghai. Other cities are the same — the Tiexi District Workers Village faces an equally awkward present."

Four years ago Shi Qing, the artist Wang Haichuan, and the architect Qiu Zhaoda put on an exhibition called "Collectivist Architecture." Recently they held another conversation in Shanghai, picking up the thread: how did the utopian, experimental collectivist housing built more than sixty years ago shape our lives and the cities we live in now?

The 1950s: Remaking the City, Remaking "New People"

In the 1950s many cities faced severe housing shortages. In Shanghai, three million industrial workers and their families lived in shantytowns, factory buildings, and old-style lilong lane houses, with less than 4 square meters of living space each.

But for the builders of the time, the job was not simply to put up housing or lay a few roads. They had to remake the city, and tell people which way of life was "correct."

In Shanghai, the first things remade were the landmarks of the concession era. The racecourse became People's Square; its main building became the municipal library; the Oriental Hotel became the Workers' Cultural Palace.

Caoyang New Village, completed in 1952, came first. Its designer, Wang Dingzeng, did not line the buildings up along a Soviet-style central axis, as was then the fashion. He drew instead on the "neighborhood unit" idea put forward by the American planner Clarence Perry in the 1920s. The streets curve in arcs, and the residential blocks fan out to leave enough space between them for sunlight.

The new village came with what were then advanced amenities: gas and flush toilets. Caoyang New Village switched to gas stoves as early as 1964.

Everything about it stressed collectivity: kitchens and bathrooms were shared. It had a full set of public facilities and services — schools, a cinema, a library, a food market, a consumer cooperative, public bathhouses, a clinic, and an auditorium. The designers even set aside land for banks, post offices, nurseries, parks, and cultural centers to come. Apart from a round-the-clock bus line that carried workers to factories across the city, a new village was a miniature society in itself.

This resembled the danwei (work unit) system in many heavy-industry cities, where a large factory was a society of its own and the work unit took charge of a person's whole life, from birth to death.

Who got to be the village's first residents carried political weight too.

Yang Chen of Tongji University's College of Architecture and Urban Planning has studied Shanghai's workers' new villages, and traced how the selection worked. The municipal government ran open selections across industries, and factories also nominated their own people. In the end the first residents were model workers and intellectuals from various factories; some factories hung banners reading "One person moves into the new village, the whole factory is honored." "Choosing the new village's residents was in effect a way of stratifying the working population, by the nature of their work unit, their professional ability, and their political loyalty."

Once finished, Caoyang New Village became a model, and received visitors from around the world. Between 1955 and 1990 it hosted foreign guests from 155 countries and regions, more than 100,000 visits in all.

But the designer of that first new village was soon criticized. His plan was said to waste space — it provided only 1,002 housing units — and the public facilities and services it offered were judged to violate the principle of "production before livelihood."

Facing the housing shortage, Shanghai then rolled out the "20,000 Households" program; next to Caoyang New Village, these buildings were plainer and more tightly packed. Across the 1950s Shanghai built more than 200 workers' new villages in all, housing 600,000 worker families. Many other cities copied the Soviet Union, putting up two-story brick-and-concrete "Soviet-style expert buildings," and later the khrushchevkas.

The 1959 film Today Is My Day Off (《今天我休息》) was shot on location in Caoyang New Village. Its hero, Ma Tianmin, is a policeman who spends his day off pulled into one small crisis after another around the village — sweeping the lanes for someone, stopping a cyclist careening down the street, helping an old man who has gotten lost delivering pigs to a factory, going to the hospital to sit with an unconscious child. His day off shuttles him between the new village, the street, the factory, and the hospital; his private time goes to solving public problems. Ma Tianmin was built as an idealized symbol of the collectivist era.

Shi Qing has a project called "Shanghai Film Geography," in which he goes back to the locations of old films to show how time and space have changed. He shot a new version of Today Is My Day Off in Caoyang New Village. During the shoot, older residents recognized the man in the white police uniform at a glance and called out "Ma Tianmin!" At a screening at Shanghai's Yuz Museum in early 2018, by contrast, younger viewers knew neither the film nor Ma Tianmin — these "symbols of an earlier era."

Chongqing's Tongyuanju

The artist Wang Haichuan took part in that 2014 "Collectivist Architecture" show. He spent several years documenting a decaying workers' housing complex in Chongqing.

In 2009 Wang Haichuan stumbled into Tongyuanju. Chongqing's property ads at the time were full of "Spanish flair" and "Mediterranean flair." Tongyuanju, ringed by high-rises and elevated roads, still had its Soviet-style tube apartment blocks from the 1950s — red brick, gray tile — and it was slated for demolition. Many holdout residents, "nail households," had lived there for 60 years.

Wang Haichuan had worked as a landscape designer before turning to art. At first he recorded the buildings in oil paintings, then came to feel like an "image collector" — except there were no people in the images.

Everyone around was moving out, so why were some people staying? Who were they? How did they live? Wang Haichuan wanted to know.

Tongyuanju was built in the early 20th century to mint copper coins (tongyuan). After 1949 it was nationalized and turned into a munitions plant, the Changjiang Electrical Works, which expanded its residential quarter under the guidance of Soviet advisers. At its peak the plant employed 7,500 workers; counting their families and children, 17,000 people lived on the site.

People here still remember the old glory. In 1981, when ordinary Chongqing residents were still burning honeycomb coal briquettes, the plant's workers already had natural gas — no smoke, no ash, no smell. In 2001 the Changjiang Electrical Works was sold to Hong Kong's Rongqiao Group, and a long process of demolition and relocation began.

They seemed trapped inside those 16.9 square meters — 16.9 square meters was the standard size of a worker's dormitory room, and many families had lived in one for generations. So Wang Haichuan simply photographed the furniture and belongings inside every 16.9, then gave the pictures back to the residents.

"But he isn't asking you to stare at a speck of dust on the wall, or a strand of cobweb," says the critic Kang Xueru, who sees no chase after nostalgic beauty in the work: "What isn't shown, what you can't see, may be the most interesting part."

When Wang Haichuan hung a set of the 16.9 images in a museum, he felt there was a "moral problem" in it. Was this a form of "consumption"?

He found an empty room in the complex and started teaching photography, providing the equipment and showing people how to use it. Together with residents he finished a set of videos called Seven Days (《七天》), seven short films recording daily life in the decaying blocks: weddings and funerals, a demobilized soldier's account of his own life, prayers at a household church, people clearing out a vacant room to raise pigs. The music lovers among them still played tunes from the factory years most often, and one local woman picked up a camera and recorded the half hour it took her to walk from home to the food market nearby.

Next to the people who "live across the river, or up in the hills", Wang Haichuan finds this group somewhat "out of step with the times": "They went into the factory very young, and the factory arranged everything for them — their wages, their lives, all of it. After reform and opening-up the market economy arrived. This was something they used to meet passively; now they suddenly had to be active about it, and they had no good way of coping. That's when a lot of people's flaws came out."

Tear Down or Keep: Two Answers, Russia's and Japan's

In the conversation, Shi Qing pointed out that collectivist housing is not the private property of socialist countries. It began with industrialization in Western Europe, when factory owners built housing for their workers in concentrated blocks. In the 1950s and '60s both East and West had to solve the postwar housing problem in their big cities, and collectivist housing went up in many places. Today all these cities face the same decaying buildings.

The Soviet Union experimented with every kind of utopian architecture. In 2017 London's Design Museum looked back at those wildly imaginative Soviet designs — Tatlin's Tower, for instance, which was never built. Its designer never completed a single building, yet he shaped Russian Constructivism.

Of the projects that did get built, the Narkomfin building of 1930 is the most famous. The six-story concrete block stands on columns and beams; the apartments are small, but an annex connected to the main building holds all the public facilities and services — a dining hall, kitchen, laundry, recreation room, library, and nursery. The roof is a garden and a communal solarium. The shared kitchen was meant to free women from the "servitude" of traditional housework. Life inside was fully collectivized: a wake-up bugle sounded at six every morning, and residents could do their morning exercises in the wide corridors.

What shaped several generations of Russians was the khrushchevka. These four- and five-story prefabricated blocks spread across the country and took Khrushchev's name. Like cars on an assembly line, they were made from prefabricated parts to a single model and repeated region by region. They were designed to last 25 years; Khrushchev believed they were only a way station on the road to communism.

Today these buildings from the 1950s and '60s are far past their intended lifespan. Public housing then traded design and build quality for speed, and it gradually became a landing place for low-income residents. During the Cold War, American cartoons mocked the "undifferentiated construction" that carried on into the Brezhnev era — countless faceless blocks, indifferent to local conditions, going up on hillsides and beaches, without balconies, their builders forbidding any ornament that wasn't strictly necessary.

Last year Moscow's mayor announced that the city would gradually demolish 8,000 Soviet-era khrushchevkas. The architectural historian Philipp Meuser criticized this tear-it-all-down approach; he wrote Towards a Typology of Soviet Mass Housing: Prefabrication in the USSR 1955-1991. Meuser argues that some khrushchevkas are worth keeping as buildings in their own right, and that what they need is new equipment in place of the old — better heating, running water, and waste disposal.

"But today's policymakers won't allow khrushchevkas to be treated as architectural heritage. For them, new is always better than old," Meuser says. The real force behind the demolitions, he argues, is not better living conditions but the maximum profit to be squeezed out of redevelopment. Like Meuser, people worry that low-income residents will simply be pushed into housing in worse shape.

Japan is working through the legacy of its public housing too.

In the 1950s many large cities began building danchi — big residential communities put up by public agencies — in suburbs far from the center. Between 1955 and 1960 the Japan Housing Corporation, aiming at middle-class families, built 257 danchi communities nationwide: 140,000 units for 500,000 residents.

At first danchi were sought after for their solid construction standards and their amenities. "nDK" was a standardized layout: each danchi unit had n small bedrooms plus a Dining Kitchen (DK) that served as both dining room and kitchen — enough for one nuclear family, a couple and their children.

In 1960, before a visit to the United States, the emperor and empress made a point of inspecting a danchi on the outskirts of Tokyo. Concrete buildings, the "three big appliances" — television, washing machine, and vacuum cleaner — a "modernized" Japan had been linked to the American way of life.

Unlike China's workers' new villages, danchi were purely residential. The early ones stood far from the city, offered no work inside the community, and lacked infrastructure and services. Husbands commuted by train, out early and home late, while housewives were "bored to death," shut inside long empty days.

In 1971 Nikkatsu, a venerable studio that had gone under, revived itself on erotic films and spotted a "business opportunity" in the danchi wife. Through the 1970s it made 20 erotic films on the "danchi wife" theme, and danchi stopped being a place people wanted to live. After the 1980s they came under further pressure from privately developed commercial housing.

But unlike Moscow, Japan did not simply tear its danchi down. After 2000 it began studying how to revive these declining districts. Huang Qiuyuan of Waseda University has written about danchi "regeneration plans."

Muji has taken part in danchi regeneration as well, supplying interior renovation designs for aging danchi — 29 templates in all — and working with the public agencies in charge of regeneration to design a special tatami mat.

More Than Sixty Years On, Who Lives Here Now?

In 1990s China, as welfare housing allocation ended and commercial housing swept the country, workers' new villages were gradually "de-work-unitized." Housing from the Northeast's First Five-Year Plan era was mostly of doubtful quality, and some Soviet-style buildings developed sinking foundations and failing wiring.

Lü Fei, an associate professor at the Harbin Institute of Technology's School of Architecture, has studied the workers' new villages of Northeast China; most of the people living there now are low-income or elderly, and cannot afford to improve their conditions.

Shanghai's workers' new villages have not yet been demolished on a large scale, but they face the same problems: cramped space, tangled property rights, and an aging community.

Yang Chen has studied the different generations living in the new villages. Compared with the first generation of model workers and the third generation of young people, it is the second generation that feels the greatest loss. He told QDaily where that feeling comes from: this second generation saw workers at the height of their glory, then lived through the "Down to the Countryside" movement. Some started families elsewhere and later came back to Shanghai with the whole household, packed in with parents or siblings in cramped rooms — the source of the family conflicts so common in Shanghai. Some took over a parent's job at the factory only to be laid off soon after; some missed their chances to get out of the new village; and with tangled legacy disputes over housing property rights on top of that, they ended up "trapped" there.

But new people have moved into the "old, run-down, and small" blocks as well. Next to commercial housing, the new villages are a low point for rent and prices, and this public housing from the collectivist era has become a landing place for lower- and middle-income residents and for new arrivals to the city.

Four architects from Tongji University — Feng Lu, Zhang Bin, Zhuang Shen, and Fan Wenbing — launched a long-term study called "Shanghai Project" in 2014, starting from Tianlin New Village, to trace how people improve and use their living space on their own initiative. They documented residents' illegal additions from the standpoint of building structure, finding spatial needs that go unrecognized. "When you look closely at these illegal structures, there's even scientific building technique in them."

How people won their neighbors' consent to build those additions also became a focus of the research. Zhang Bin argues that "micro-service businesses" — knocking through a wall to open a shop, or turning a residential unit into a commercial one, like a barbershop, a small food stall, or a fruit stand — bring life to the aging new villages.

In recent years all of it has been stopped by crackdowns on illegal structures and by centralized cleanup campaigns.

Shi Qing's "Shanghai Film Geography" also carries on the 1984 film Under the Bridge (《大桥下面》). At the end of the original, the male and female leads talk about fate: "If the country does well, we'll do well." Thirty years later Shi Qing went back to the film's location, Sanguantang Bridge. The bridge had been rebuilt, and the landscape on the two banks had changed beyond recognition — on one side prices had passed 100,000 yuan per square meter; on the other, the old, dilapidated houses were still standing.

"In the 1980s people carried a sense of hope. That hope wasn't invented by a screenwriter; it really existed, across the whole era. People were looking forward to a future that didn't ask about your background, one you could earn through ability and hard work."

In Shi Qing's new script, the fates of workers, of self-employed traders, and of those who used overseas connections to "escape" abroad have all changed enormously. Some adapted quickly to the tide of the market economy; others got "trapped." Workers once held high were quickly forgotten.

Is today's city better? Better for whom? These are the questions Shi Qing and people like him want to keep asking.

(Cover and header images from Liberation Daily; banner from Muji.)