CIVICSPACE blog

I started this blog to record, examine, critique, and propose planning practices and projects. It became a defining space for me where I discussed topics covering land-use, transportation, art, housing, identity, and way-finding. Visit at http://civicspace.tumblr.com/.

The photos correspond to my post on October 28th, 2014. The following is the text from that post:

This is the second part of a 4 part series about development in China.

The physical and cultural landscape is ever changing in China. In Beijing there are neighborhoods termed hutongs. I understood them as old neighborhoods, or sections, of old town, but they are really clusters of buildings with a specific architecture, which create alleyways and form a network of streets. What is so interesting about these, at the moment, is their slow demolition. With China’s economy expanding, its capital city must follow and so, it appears, must remove these hutongs to make way for bigger, taller, and denser buildings. The pieces of demolished hutong aren’t immediately picked up by the municipality or demolition crew, they are left behind, possibly to be reused. Some are able to recoup lost cost by obtaining demolished materials, but this surely isn’t enough to make up for what is lost and not to mention cannot be good for a person’s health (digging through demolished buildings).

When the hutong has been laid flat then new buildings take their place to make room for more people and more business, which translates to new culture. Some businesses make it out of the hutong, while most don’t. Something immaterial is lost in the destruction of the material.