Author(s)/Creator(s)

Bangyuan Shi

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.ARCH I

Date

Spring 5-2016

Keywords

micro-urbanism, architecture, china, urban, typology, individual

Language

English

Disciplines

Cultural Resource Management and Policy Analysis | Other Architecture | Urban, Community and Regional Planning

Description/Abstract

This thesis offers a critique of the diminishing communal life int he contemporary Chinese city which is created by the gap between large-scale master planning strategies and the contemporary need to focus on the individual instead of the structure of communities.

China's New Weird proposes an alternative to large-scale urbanism through the use of micro-urbanism strategies that preserve the relative scale and character of traditional urban settlements, like those of the "hutong", while also addressing the contemporary need to increase inner city population densities. The intention is to adapt the patterns of space and use that are found in these traditional environments into more modern building techniques and contemporary urban spatial planning.

The occupants of these traditional settlements consist of the elderly and migrant workers without nearby families. These two groups are lacking the social ties normally available to them in the traditional "hutong" typology. The "hutong" type offers a finer grain of distinction among progressive zones of private and public space. To achieve these aims, this thesis proposes a reformulation of the spaces of the "hutong" that will preserve the intimacy of the "hutong" type while also increasing the density to match the modern needs. The goal of this thesis is to develop a prototype of a neighborhood with a renewed sense of hierarchy of shared space deigned to cultivate a greater sense of communal life. The new community will start from a human scale, then moving up to large scales to build up a prototype of neighborhood with systematically sequential shared space.

Source

local input

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Download
COinS