ABSTRACT
After three decades of fast development, China today faces urgent problems accumulated in the recent past. These include expanding income and social disparity, the loss of public goods such as a clean environment and social welfare (housing, health and education), and the destruction of historical urban fabric. In the last instance, it includes not only the demolishing of physical courtyard houses and lanes, but also the erosion of an overall urban public space with humane, habitable, accessible and green qualities. Although current government policies aim to correct the one-sided development, with many regulations issued forcefully to protect the environment and aspects of social fabric and public service, critical knowledge for urban design in the Chinese context is, however, still missing. For example, there has been a call to make Beijing ‘humane’ (yiren weiben) and ‘habitable’ (yiju), yet a body of critical studies that is both empirical and critical, historically founded and practically normative, is hard to find. How to reconstitute a habitable city for the public and the majority with humane and ecological qualities? How to imagine a new urban public space of these qualities that is modern yet suitable for China? How should modern Beijing evolve with useful legacies from its ancient past and cultural tradition? Can traditional Beijing with a 500-year history teach us anything critical and constructive today? Can we situate the discourse on Beijing in an international context so that the project contributes to a global dialogue and debate? To offer a preliminary answer to these questions, I will first employ European theorists’ reading of Chinese and Asian urbanities as mirror reflections on the Chinese situation, before turning directly to traditional Beijing, on which I will make four observations.
