The Existence and Future of Urban Villages
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Yu Hsiao Hwei Art, Making Cities: The Existence and Future of Urban Villages he Shenzhen section of the 7th Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism/ Nantou Old Town with Shenzhen skyline in Architecture (UABB) opened on December 15, 2017, in Shenzhen, background. Photo: Zhang 1 Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) T China, through to March 17, 2018. In the wake of more than Organizing Committee. thirty years of urbanization at break-neck speed in Shenzhen, and the whole Pearl River Delta region, UABB 2017 aims to call for alternative models of urbanization based on the concept of “coexistence” and embracing “heterogeneity” and “diversity.” The 2017 edition of UABB was jointly curated by curator and artistic director of MAXXI, Rome, Hou Hanru, and the two founding partners of URBANUS Architecture & Design, Shenzhen/ Beijing, Liu Xiaodu and Meng Yan. Themed as “Cities Grow in Difference”2 and involving more than two hundred participants from over twenty-five countries, this was a gigantic event, which, in addition to its main venue in Nantou Old Town, had five satellite venues, located at Luohu, Yantian, Longhua (Shangwei and Dalang), and Guangming New District, and a dozen other collateral exhibitions that unfolded simultaneously across the city, as well as a series of public talks, performances, and workshops taking place during the three months of the Biennale.3 UABB in this new edition featured two innovations. First, it implanted exhibitions into the urban village of Nantou—and the villagers’ daily life— with architectural projects and artworks spread throughout the streets and alleys, in the parks, houses, and factory buildings. Mounting an exhibition 46 Vol. 17 No. 2 Nantou Old Town. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee. at a white-cube art museum or even at an industrial site repurposed for cultural use is one thing, but intervening directly in the real urban environment, amid shops and restaurants, and interacting directly with villagers, is quite another. Co-curator Meng Yan, who was in charge of the architectural section titled “Urban Village,” stressed more than once that “the vibrant intensity of the street life [of Nantou Old Town] is where this Biennale really takes place!”4 Second, as an event that claims to be “currently the only biennial exhibition in the world to be based exclusively on the set themes of urbanism and urbanization,”5 UABB 2017 was deeply engaged with contemporary art, with an entire section titled “Art, Making Cities” and curated by Hou Hanru, aiming to make “art as a key variable for a full picture of urban development.”6 Nantou Old Town. Photo: Zhang Chao. © UABB (Shenzhen) Organizing Committee. Urban Villages: From Demolishing to Documenting and Rescuing Although UABB has chosen for the first time an urban village as its main venue, it has in fact dealt with urban villages since its inception in 2005 (when it presented a special section on urban villages), and has interrogated and explored the subject in successive editions. Urban villages (城中 村 cheng zhong cun), or, literally, “villages in the middle of the city,” are a particular phenomenon resulting from China’s rapid urbanization and the dual rural-urban land ownership system, where rural lands that are Vol. 17 No. 2 47 not regulated by centralized urban planning and are mainly composed of crowded multi-story buildings become “villages” surrounded by skyscrapers and other modern urban constructions and infrastructures.7 Engaging with the complex realities of urban villages allows one to go beyond the legend of Shenzhen rising from a sleepy fishing village of 30,000 inhabitants to a thriving megalopolis with ultra-modern high rises and a booming economy. As Shenzhen is likely the city with the most urban villages in China, and about fifty percent of its total population lives in these villages, their management and redevelopment has been one of the priorities of the municipality’s urban renewal plans since the mid-2000s. Back then, as Shenzhen continued to further accelerate its urbanization process, the city government was planning a large-scale campaign to renovate its urban villages. In October 2004, a “mobilization meeting for the inventory of illegal constructions and transformation of urban villages of the Shenzhen municipality” was held; in 2005, the there was a compiling of Suggestions for Implementing Temporary Regulations Regarding the Renewal of Urban Villages (Old Villages) of the Shenzhen Municipality. Then, in 2006, with the demolition of Yunong Village by explosives, dubbed “China’s No.1 blast” by the local media, the city government rapidly embarked on a new wave of urban renewal projects, and hundreds of urban villages successively disappeared from the map of Shenzhen following different renewal approaches such as “demolish and rebuild,” “partial transformation,” and “comprehensive improvement.”8 This wave of demolishing the urban villages, which were commonly regarded by government officials and urban planners as the “cancer” of the city and resulted in the forced migration of large numbers of the population, has provoked a lot of attention and public debate on issues of fairness, equity, and justice with regard to the villagers, and motivated many people to self- consciously document and preserve in various ways memories of these urban villages. Among the numerous initiatives is Bai Xiaoci’s four-year photographic project—the Shenzhen-based photographer and blogger documented the everyday life of some sixty urban villages, which, for him, are “what best represent Shenzhen, what really embody the spirit of Shenzhen.”9 The Shenzhen branch of the Southern Metropolis Daily even initiated a project entitled “Rescuing Urban Villages,” and published a series of in-depth reports on the demolition process of several urban villages, tracing the history of urban villages in Shenzhen, investigating their present status, and proposing various alternatives for how transformation might take place as an alternative to the controversial process of total demolition.10 Calling for a New Concept of Urban Diversity The 2017 edition of UABB strengthened its focus on Shenzhen’s urban villages, and proposed site-specific projects for the transformation and renewal of Nantou Old Town, at a time when the number of urban villages in Shenzhen had fallen from more than a thousand ten years ago to three hundred and twenty today, and when the push for their survival has arrived at another critical moment. Due to Shenzhen’s land planning policies, which dictate that nearly fifty percent of the city’s total territory should be a protected ecological area,11 thirty percent should be devoted to industrial 48 Vol. 17 No. 2 use, and the remaining share should consist of basic infrastructure such as schools, roads, hospitals, etc., the lack of space for commercial and housing purposes has become a most pressing challenge, and, more than ever, the redevelopment of urban villages is seen by the city government and developers as a means to solve this problem. At the same time, urban villages' typical “shake-hands” buildings, which were often hastily and illegally constructed and thus don’t meet modern fire-safety and hygiene standards, inevitably will be renovated, upgraded, or replaced. Yet, in contrast to the cliché that characterizes urban villages as “dirty, chaotic, and substandard” (zang, luan, cha), it is their hybrid, anarchic architecture and their turbulent, vibrant, and colourful street life that the curatorial team sought to celebrate and put in the limelight, to provide a sharp contrast, and, probably, an antidote, to the homogeneous and generic cityscapes with globalized high-rise apartment buildings and shopping centres that are based on a “generic” urban model.12 UABB’s interest in urban villages is not something new, and the 2017 theme of "Cities: Grow in Difference" was already announced in October 2016. But the controversial large-scale clearance operation that Beijing authorities launched in November 2017, in the wake of a fire that killed nineteen people in a Beijing urban village— forcing hundreds of thousands of low-income migrant workers to leave the capital—resulted in extra attention on UABB, which opened one month later, two thousand kilometres away. Against the backdrop of Beijing’s actions, UABB 2017—which is organized by the Shenzhen municipal government and thus can be regarded as representing an official position with official endorsement—claims that “respecting otherness is a test of the degree of tolerance of a city,” and that “urban villages are valuable for the bottom-up spontaneous potential,”13 are both thought-provoking and meaningful. If what we are witnessing in Nantou Old Town is a scenario common to most urban villages in the urbanization process of China, the situation there is also more complex. Nantou is not one of those urban neighbourhoods that grew out of what previously were rural settlements during the rapid industrial urbanization that followed China’s “reform and opening-up” policy in 1978. Nantou’s “urban” history can be traced back to the Eastern Jin dynasty (317–420 AD), and Nantou had long been the seat of local government during the Ming and Qing dynasties (and before that for the imperial salt monopoly). It was with the move of the Bo’an county seat, and, with its corresponding administrative resources, from its historical site in Nantou to Cai Wuwei that Nantou’s development gradually began to lag behind and become a “village.” Today, on the 1,700-year-old historical site of Nantou Old Town, high-density “hand-shake” buildings and the characteristic “pre-modernized” streets (lined with family-run workshops, food stores, butcher shops, small restaurants), a factory compound (still active in the months prior to the opening of UABB 2017, but later turned into exhibition spaces for the Biennale) are juxtaposed with a dozen sites designated for historic preservation (in fact, many are later replicas of old buildings).14 The wide range of architectural and spatial styles makes Nantou Old Town one of the most distinctive among the hundreds of urban villages that remain in Shenzhen.