China: The Clash of Ancient and Modern

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By the time the type had run its course in the 1940s, examples in Spanish, Tudor, Moderne, and other styles had proliferated and close to three quarters of the population of the city was housed in some form of longtang.

Each a little world

What makes this architecture remarkable, however, is less the character of its individual elements than the way they function urbanistically. Typically, you enter a lilong (a neighborhood of longtang) through a gateway off a major street, then turn left or right onto a lane. From the entry axis, smaller cross axes lead to parallel lanes, creating semi-autonomous neighborhood formations on part or all of their blocks, sometimes connected to adjacent developments. The lanes are almost purely pedestrian and often support an array of retail and other commercial activities, including offices and small-scale manufacture. Each of these places is a little world, housing the necessities of daily life and powerfully conducing a sense of community via the inevitability of encounter with one’s neighbors in the lanes. Although densely packed, the low scale of the buildings—which face lanes both front and back—permits the penetration of light and air.

Of course, the quality of the lilong varies enormously and many—built from the get-go for the poor—were surely wretched places, lacking adequate sanitation, shabbily constructed, and without public amenities, especially green space. But the model is brilliant. Although they are enclaved, they are not forbidding “gated” communities. In the insane hurly-burly of the city, they are islands of relative calm. And, in the face of the alienation by numbers of the modern metropolis, they create a tractable scale and an extremely rational increment of development, helping to forge the kinds of community interaction that more contemporary high-rise projects (the default alternative) seldom achieve.

Although the architectural types that make up the hutong of Beijing differ from the lilong of Shanghai, the genius of their organization is similar. Low, tight, and intimate, they are wonderful neighborhoods, tractable on foot, intimate, and diverse. Indeed, so singular, delightful, and increasingly rare are these places, that many are enjoying (or suffering) the fate of gentrification. On my recent visit, I went house shopping with a Chinese colleague who hoped to find a congenial situation in one of the better hutong, but the prices were at Manhattan levels. The market may be cruel, but it’s not stupid.

To lament the disappearance of these tight-grained communities has become something of a bromide, and the issue of saving such endangered places is hardly foreign to the Chinese. The mistake, however, is to reduce the question simply to one of preservation, to see these forms as an unrepeatable historic condition. As we all confront the need to create radically more sustainable forms of urbanism and restore the morphological basis of communities worldwide, we have a lot to learn from the lilong and hutong of China.

Provided by Architectural Record—The Resource for Architecture and Architects