Gentrification
Gentrification used to be a new word for me before this studio. I started to think about it when I began to study the area from Redwood City to Palo Alto. These technical giant companies and the suburbanization directly or indirectly result in gentrification. As my previous blog mentioned, gentrification is identified as this — “Gentrification is any facet of urban renewal that inevitably leads to displacement of the occupying demographic.” The reasons for gentrification are newly developed housing space, suburbanization, rising bourgeoisie, demands for certain lifestyles such as centrality, convenience, and so on.
The phenomenon of displacement also occurs in urban areas in China. With the fast development of China in the past few decades, urbanization and suburbanization happen in different areas, which will result in displacement and gentrification. It is called “Villages in Cities”. They usually located in the new town center, and owned by native people who used to live there when it is still a village or suburban area. With the urbanization, people, usually young people move there for cheaper rent than other well-developed areas. However, their disadvantages are also obvious. They are all old and almost worn-out, with unreasonable living space, poor environment and they lack communal space. But the native people are happy with the results because their houses worth more and they will get more money from tenants. Therefore, equality in the process of gentrification is not an absolute concept. It is more about the perspectives from which we are thinking about the problems.
In China, there have been some attempts to renew those “villages in cities”.
It is the Open Door Policy in the early ’80s that kicked off the parallel evolution of the indigenous villages and the SEZ of Shenzhen. As Shenzhen is going through an urbanization process from the ’80s and evolved into a metropolis of 12 million inhabitants as it is today, the rural indigenous villages that operate as different administrative entities transformed itself into urbanized mini-cities within its host.
Shenzhen became a Special Economic Zone in 1979. This event triggered a massive influx of people from all over China to settle in this new city. But in the past decade, the cost of living has reached such a level, that many are leaving Shenzhen for their home town or other cities where the living condition is more affordable.
As a result, in a bid to retain talents, Shenzhen created an affordable housing program to ease the housing pressure. In the past decade, urban renewal concerning urban villages often means mass demolition, total eradication of any traces from the past, an abrupt replacement by brand new complexes with malls, offices, and residential. However, nowadays, to renew villages in cities and change them into apartments for young people became one of the strategies. Shuiwei Village is one of these examples.
It is the first time the government leased the property from the villagers, in this case, an ensemble of 35 “handshake” tower blocks converted into affordable housing.
To create this community, the intervention is not so much happening inside the towers, but rather in-between. In these voids between the towers, designers created an infrastructural system with 7 elevators inter-connected by a lateral system of sky corridors on the 5th and the 7th floor. This 3-dimensional circulation system forms at the same time an important public space for the community, providing an extension of the limited living space to the individual units.
This project shows an attempt to alleviate the bad effects of gentrification and displacement. Bring lands back to native people is not as important as they will get more benefits if they rent the houses to new residents. However, returning a sense of community and the culture that native people used to live with is much more important. In highly developing cities, their homes started to change and old things in their memories began to go away even though they get benefits from it. The only way to solve the disappointment is to bring their culture back for their nostalgia.
