My latest article, in this month’s issue of Frieze, is about new concepts for urban mass housing in China:
China stopped providing housing as welfare about 10 years ago and instituted a mortgage industry through state-owned banks; since then, real estate has become its most profitable industry. For many middle-class families, the housing market seems to offer the freedom to select their own lifestyle, the chance to “Live Your Dreams,” as one advertising campaign has it, and this is reflected in a blossoming of gated neighbourhoods in various faux-European styles. While the majority of new housing developments are cookie-cutter designs churned out by architectural firms in two or three days, a small coterie of progressive Chinese architects and Western designers are rethinking how architecture can achieve higher density, accommodate an increasingly diverse market, and tread lightly on existing vernacular architecture. But what sort of place-making can possibly address the needs of citizens uprooted from their rural homes and transformed into anonymous consumers of residential space in the city?