Refactoring neighborhood : changing strategy of resettlement housing in Beijing after 1949

Abstract

After 1949, the massive urbanization take place in many traditional and new cities in new China, as one of the most unique cities in China, Beijing experiences the unprecedented development in last few decades, the thesis project starts from the general research on urbanization of Beijing to lead to the key phenomenon during the process - resettlement. The research on a series of resettlement housing projects throughout the history of Beijing from 1949 is an essential part to understand the evolution of the resettlement housing strategy in Beijing. Based on the design methodology of different projects and the various analysis of the resettlement housing strategy from different researchers, this thesis project tries to summarize the characteristics of the resettlement projects in different area, and to find out the changing trend of the typical resettlement projects. The research is not only focused on the building design and spacing, but also concentrated on open spaces, public facilities and all elements that impact on the relationships of neighborhoods. On the other hand, the resettlement that spontaneously happened in the traditional residential area is also an important part of resettlement in Beijing. The different between the government conducted resettlement housing project and the spontaneous resettlement phenomenon produce the different way of neighborhood communication, therefore the thesis also focuses on how the traditional building and street shape the neighborhoods communications and its differences with the new resettlement housing. With the constant urbanization, the massive resettlement is still happening in Beijing today, and the government is introducing more large scale resettlement projects in these years, the Dongcheng-Chaoyang cooperative resettlement plan is a large resettlement planning of center-area population evacuation, which plans to evacuate 10,000 people to Chaoyang district per year from 2011 to 2020. The thesis project plan to propose a new strategy in one part of Dingfuzhuang resettlement site in connection with the main issues of previous research, which to restructure a new type of neighborhood experimentally.