ABSTRACT
The city of Lhasa, historically the cultural centre of the Tibetan-Buddhist civilization that has influenced the entire Himalayan plateau, today is the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region of China. The past 50 years have sometimes seen tumultuous development, resulting in a great loss of historic structures and the exodus of some of the religious and business elites. China’s ‘open door policy’ arrived almost a decade later than elsewhere on the Tibetan plateau and Tibet remains one of the poorest and most subsidized regions in China. In the mid-1990s, when the project discussed in this chapter was initiated, the city of Lhasa consisted of three starkly different parts: a bustling modern town dominated by traders and businessmen from other Chinese provinces, large industrial and administrative tracts of land, and the historic Tibetan old town. Here, most buildings were nationalized in the 1950s and served as low-cost housing but the experience was similar to that in other regions and cities with subsidized housing in the historic centre, such as East Berlin, Moscow and Beijing: lack of private initiative for maintenance caused a dramatic decline in building quality. The cheap rents also attracted poor Tibetan migrants from the countryside, with many families sharing a flat originally designed to accommodate just one family. Because of the decline in living quality and lack of infrastructure, wealthier people moved out of the old town so that the area started to effectively become a slum.
