Contemplating a New Danwei Urbanism
Abstract
Market-driven Capitalist urbanization is no longer a viable option for
China as it has produced increasingly monotonous and segregated cities
that deny culture, history, ecology, and human connection. Cultural
efficiencies generated from the interconnection and proximity of distinct
entities found in traditional and Socialist-Era Chinese urbanisms have
been overlooked in favor of market-oriented efficiencies from Western
urbanization patterns. The thesis argues that China needs to develop a
post-Capitalist Socialist urbanism in which efficiency is based on a shift in
orientation from formulaic compositional systems to open-ended layered
systems that encompass the dialectical complexity of the city. Socialist-
Era Danwei Urbanism is revisited for its potential to facilitate efficiencies
from the sharing of resources between various parts of daily life existing
in the same urban block. The danwei (work unit) is a walled community
containing the workplace, subsidized employee housing, and social
amenities within an urban block. Many danwei, however, have moved
some housing and amenities into areas far from the workplace rather
than densifying the existing site. A New Danwei Urbanism builds density
in a process of disintegration and formation, gives presence to absent
ecologies, and establishes collectivity with a network of covered spaces
while respecting autonomy at the local level. It embraces a dialectical
reading of the city as a unity of contradictory yet interdependent systems.
These layers present an alternative approach in which the danwei facilitates
informal social and intellectual exchanges in the urban block.
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Cite this version of the work
Wei Xue
(2016).
Contemplating a New Danwei Urbanism. UWSpace.
http://hdl.handle.net/10012/10911
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