Housing Shanghai : the evolution of the workers' new village 1920s-2010s

Abstract

Recent scholarship on Chinese cities has explored the emergence of the work-unit system (danwei) as a result of urban policies shaped primarily by socialist ideology under the Chinese central government since it came to power in 1949. From this perspective, the work unit system has been conceptualised as a product whose spatial forms and administration structure are largely homogenous across the nation. This dissertation aims to challenge this perspective by examining the Worker’s New Village, a new housing typology that was built in the periphery of Shanghai around the same time when the work-unit system was just began to be implemented in 1949. By a careful examination of the evolution of this housing typology and tracing its history against social housing development from the 1920s to the present, I aim to reconstruct the local history of urban housing by illustrating the pioneering ideas and experimental projects for housing Shanghai workers before 1949. More importantly, this research shows how the historical development in a transforming urban society have been shaped by a confluence of factors, including the imaginations and actions of planners towards a better society, the desires for quality housing of social organisations (including the work-unit) and individuals, as well as the specific social and political agendas of local and national governments. Archival research from this projects shows that the building of worker’s housing in Shanghai actually started from the “New Village” projects by religious groups in the 1920s and public housing projects by Nationalist government in the 1930s, and many ideas from these projects were inherited by the post-1949 Workers’ New Village projects by the Socialist government. The study therefore investigates workers’ housing projects respectively from 1920s, Nationalist era (1927-1948), early Maoist era (1950s-1960s) and the transformation of Workers’ New Villages after the Deng Xiaoping reform (1978-2000s), looking into the formal evolution, conceptualisation of the ideal urban housing, agenda of the designers and constraints of urban reality. The findings reveal the half-century evolution of the Workers’ New Village, which was conceptualised and experimented by religious organisation in the 1920s, further developed in Nationalist government housing projects in the 1930s and eventually materialised in urban scale by the Socialist government in the 1950s. The dissertation has conducted a focused examination on the Workers’ New Village with multiple research methods, including archival study, spatial analysis, statistics and interview, and concludes that it was not a product solely of the Socialist ideology and the work-unit system, but a result of an evolving architectural ideal in a transforming urban society. By reconnecting the pre- and post-1949 Shanghai urban history, the study not only clarifies the specific role of the work-unit in building Shanghai’s urban housing in the Maoist era, but also reveals the significance of Shanghai’s pre-1949 inheritance, such as planning and building professionals and housing experiments, in shaping and reshaping the urban built environment across significant historical transitions in the Maoist as well as post-reform era.