MICRO HUTONG RENEWAL, BEIJING

China may be the quintessence of the displacement of people from the countryside to the city, and the model used to accommodate this flow of people into the new urban settlement has been to raze everything to the ground and densify the city with high-rises. What is striking is that this was the model originally used in the Western world and that proved to be flawed and consequently had to be abandoned.
Zhang Ke is looking for viable alternatives based on ancient Chinese typologies to this way of making cities. He is revisiting the traditional hutong, a structure grouped around a central communal courtyard that serves not only as a source of light and ventilation but also as a space for social gathering and interaction.
This typology, despite its delicate scale and consequently high living standard, has a great density on its borders, which means that it could be very efficient in an urban context and a competitive alternative to the suburban highrise. Zhang Ke’s exploration of the hutong is not only a conscious, responsible attitude to avoid stumbling over the same modernist stones once again, but also keeps alive valuable living traditions, culture, and even craftsmanship that, thanks to this type of urbanization, is rapidly disappearing. This attitude of carefully looking at the existing and giving it new life was also deployed in his work in Tibet. In the case of metropolitan China, Zhang Ke is trying to say that, before going for the tabula rasa and then building high-rise structures to maximize real estate profits, we may give the benefit of the doubt to local typologies that may be just as effective but that have the additional bonus that they might well preserve culture and living traditions, a sort of bulwark against encroaching global homogenization.