A comparative study on the spatial patterns of Chinese row houses in colonial cities in the early 20th century

Abstract

This paper aims at finding the diversities of morphological features of the urban housing complex and their transformations built around early 20th century in Qingdao, Tianjin, Shanghai, Wuhan, and Guangzhou the five colonial cities of China. These housing estates are successful past attempts at procuring change-ready buildings to live in and hence a valuable asset from which the current people can derive benefit especially in today’s context of economic globalization. The paper firstly introduces a general background of these houses by focusing on their evolution and the current status. Then it introduces the representative cases selected from these cities on the spatial characters of typical unit layout. Based a systematic morphological framework, the paper compares characteristics of these housing estates in different spatial levels. It concluded that the diversity of row housing in different cities were largely credit to the traditional house patterns in the contexts.