Beyond Visual Mundanity: Building the Workers’ New Village in the 1950s Shanghai

Abstract

Since the last decade, there has been much debate on whether the half-century-old Workers’ New Villages (工人新村) from the Maoist era should be considered one of the representatives of Shanghai’s urban culture, competing with the much-publicised lilong (里弄) housing and the conspicuous development of skyscrapers. The observers of Chinese cities, in favour of the statement or not, all seem to associate the workers’ housing with backwardness and images of repetitive residential buildings of low standard and quality, quite the contrary with what the housing was originally projected and perceived. The paper will contest this generally accepted assumption by presenting the Workers’ New Village as a developing urban housing typology in the context of the early 1950s and one of the important instruments of the new government to urbanise Shanghai. Apart from the Socialist ideologies and the work-unit system, these housing projects inherited the architectural ideas from the disrupted Republican public housing in the 1930s and developed a phased approach of considerable flexibility that pooled resources and efforts from the government, enterprises and individuals. The paper will illustrate the development of Caoyang New Village (曹楊新村) to explain how this new mode of urbanisation was able to develop the urban peripheries into the sub-centres of Shanghai today and to realise the urban ideals of comprehensive housing with limited investment. In this sense, the legacy of the Workers’ New Village has been undervalued and contains a much-needed sustainable strategy the visually fascinating lilong and skyscrapers have failed to provide.