ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the formation of an industrial landscape and a new form of urbanism in China during the 1960s and 1970s. In the aftermath of the Great Famine, the discovery of oil in the Northeast, formerly the Manchurian region, led to extensive urban development. The Daqing Oil Field, a much-publicized model of industrialization in the Maoist era, provided China with energy independence and contributed to the rise and fall of a new settlement model hailed as an “integration of urban and rural” and an “integration of industry and agriculture.” For its employees, Daqing maintained housing standards that were similar to those of the local peasants, and its decentralized villages composed of identical mud houses were intended to foster an equal society, a new way of pursuing “industrialization without urbanization.” The state’s industrialization strategies were translated into unique spatial patterns and built forms that not only shaped the development path of the country but also bound the lives and life choices of the common people with the fate and choices of the consolidating socialist state.
