Can Architecture Change the World? Reflections on the Phenomenon of Gentrification in Tianzifang

Updated: Jul 26, 2023

Author: Marco Voltolina

Analysis of gentrification in Tianzifang, Shanghai, China

Throughout history, there have always been philosophers, writers, architects and urban planners that have conceived powerful utopias: visions of ideal cities where the physical configuration of space had the power of ensuring the good functioning of a harmonious society. In the last decades, however, we seem to have lost this ability. Today, we live in an age of disillusion, where the powerful political ideologies of the last century have been replaced by indecisive short-sighted policies, while in novels, movies and TV shows the dreams of optimistic utopias have transformed into nightmarish dystopias - like those featured in the famous Netflix series Black Mirror - that take place not only in a darker future, but also in our very present.

According to Canadian architect George Baird (b. 1939), contemporary architecture is dominated by a "post-utopian pragmatism" (Zhu, 2005, p. 484). In other words, today the general understanding is that the goal of designing buildings and cities is to solve purely architectural questions, as architecture does not have the power to act on wider political and social issues. The criticality that had characterised most of the 20th century's modern architecture, constantly resisting and challenging dominant culture (Hays, 1984, p. 15), has disappeared, so that now even a world-famous architect like the Dutch Rem Koolhaas (b. 1944) can claim that “if it turns out that ‘criticality’ constrains efficacy, then to that extent ‘criticality’ must give way” (Baird, 2004).

In this article, we are going to discuss whether in today's world there is still room for architects and urban planners to criticise and challenge the dominant paradigms, whether it is possible for them to actually change the world. To do so, we will start from the story of the renovation of the Tianzifang district in Shanghai.

Tianzifang is an example of lilong neighborhood, that is a residential development realised in Shanghai between the late 19th and the early 20th century. Specifically, it was in 1933 on the southern edge of the French Concession and it features several houses made in the shikumen style, a kind of traditional Shanghainese architecture that mixes Chinese and Western elements. While many lilong across the city have been demolished in the last decades, Tianzifang met a different fate. In 1998, in fact, a process of bottom-up regeneration began to take place in this neighbourhood, turning it into one of the first "creative districts" in China.

The transformation of the area started when Zheng, the leader of the local sub-district government, decided to rent out some old factories of Tianzifang for very low prices. Artists and artisans, like painter and film director Chen Yifei and photographer Er Dongqiang, established their studios and workshops in the warehouses, and the area quickly became an art community full of creative workers. In 2003 there were in Tianzifang 68 art and design studios, with a total of 650 employees (Chen, 2015, p. 72). This first phase can be described as a "win-win" period where residents, artists and the local government successfully collaborated with each other. Starting from 2004, residents began to rent their own houses to artists and designers. In 2006, the number of art and cultural industries had risen to 132 (ivi, p. 73). Tianzifang gained more and more fame and recognition, as well as the titles of “Creative Industries Cluster” and “triple-A national tourist attraction.” In 2008, a Management Committee Office was established. The Government recognized the special situation of Tianzifang and adopted a policy, called Ju-ga-fei, that allowed residents to legally rent out their dwellings for commercial uses. This caused rents to rise to extremely high levels, while the number of residents started to dramatically decrease. It was the official beginning of the gentrification process: within a very short time, most shikumen houses were transformed into fancy shops, bars and restaurants. Since 2012, Tianzifang entered a new stage of its evolution, characterized by a high commercialisation. As the 10-year-contracts between state-owned factories and artists ended, property rights were transferred to real estate companies, that were not willing to provide cheap rents. Many artists were forced to leave Tianzifang and move elsewhere, and the creative climate of the area is now fading.

The gentrification process, caused both by the government and real estate companies, has brought dramatic changes to Tianzifang, driving away artists and low-income residents and transforming the area into a monotonous succession of commercial activities (figg. 1-3).

Figure 1. An alley of Tianzifang with a monotonous succession of shops and restaurants. Source: Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 3.0

Figure 2. An alley of Tianzifang with a monotonous succession of shops and restaurants. Source: Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 3.0

Figure 3. A shop in Tianzifang. Source: Wikimedia Commons - CC BY 3.0

Now let us suppose that an architect or a urban planner decided to address the problem of Tianzifang. How could he to solve it? According to existing literature (see for example Brown, 2014, and Price, 2014), there is a variety of strategies that they could adopt in order to deal with gentrification. If we imagine to take these solutions and adapt them to the specific context of Tianzifang, we obtain a recipe that looks more or less like this:

Analyse and monitor the situation, understanding current trends and trying to effectively anticipate future changes;
Grant affordable housing to the most vulnerable groups (artists and long-time residents, especially senior ones) by means of rent control or tax abatement;
Ban large-scale luxury development (e.g. luxury housing, hotels, shopping malls etc.) in the area surrounding Tianzifang, and encourage instead middle-low-income housing;
Strengthen the identity of the neighbourhood by organising activities for the residents (meetings, festivals, events etc.) and by rising awareness of the historical value of the area;
Make the Tianzifang Management Committee a vehicle for real public participation, in which residents, artists, business-owners and the local government share the powers of deciding how to spend the budget, of giving authorisations for changes of function, of regulating activity hours, of mediating conflicts.

These strategies can effectively help control gentrification and mitigate its negative effects. However, they cannot completely eliminate the phenomenon: in the long term, the value of the area could increase so much that the residents or the government would eventually yield to the private developers’ wishes. And, even in the remote possibility that Tianzifang’s problem could really be solved, gentrification would still affect the rest of the city.

If we look a the bigger picture, in fact, we find out that gentrification is a wider and more complex phenomenon that affects not only Tianzifang, but the whole city. Since 1992, when the government allowed urban land to be leased to private developers, an impressive process of urban redevelopment has taken place in Shanghai, bringing with it massive demographic and socio-economic changes.

Firstly, we can notice how the population in the central area of the city has decreased from 51.4 % of the total in 1990 to 34.9 % in 2008, as shown in table 1.

Table 1. Population distribution in different areas of Shanghai. Source of the data: He, 2010, p. 348.

Secondly, we can understand that the nature of this trend is not merely quantitative, but also qualitative: it is a class remaking process, in which low-income people are pushed to the outskirts, often against their will, while affluent people are attracted to the redeveloped inner city (He, 2010, pp. 350-351). Extensive areas of the center have been demolished and residents have been relocated in the periphery, where land is much cheaper. This is clearly shown by Shanghai’s census data: if we compare the changes between the distribution of occupational groups in 1990 and 2000, we can see that the ratio of professionals to total employed population in the central area has increased, as shown in table 2.

Table 2. Population change by occupational groups in Shanghai. Source of the data: He, 2010, p. 350.

As we can see, gentrification is a complex phenomenon that cannot be effectively addressed at the scale of a single neighborhood. Tianzifang’s problem is just a small piece in a much larger puzzle. A puzzle whose pieces are not to be found just in Shanghai, but in the whole world.

If we look at the even bigger picture, in fact, we realise that gentrification is today a global phenomenon, intrinsic to the neoliberal social, economic and cultural system in which we live, a system designed to maintain and increase inequalities: “No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalised; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation” (Smith, 2002, p. 427).

According to Scottish geographer Neil Smith (1954-2012), the current globalised gentrification process has five dimensions (ivi, pp. 441-443):

The new role of the State: urban policies no longer aim at guiding and controlling economic growth, but aspire to fit themselves to the market in search for the highest returns, either directly or as tax revenue; this leads to an intensification of partnerships between public and private actors.
The new role of the global capital: now it is not only interested in huge projects in urban centers, but also in modest developments down to the local neighborhood scale.
The emergence of the revanchist city: any opposition to gentrification is suppressed in order to keep the city “safe.”
The outward diffusion of gentrification from the urban center.
The generalisation of gentrification: it is no longer a regulated process limited to specific places, but a phenomenon that is pushed everywhere by an ambitious effort of both the public and the private sector, with the purpose of “regenerating” the whole city.

Gentrification, globalisation, neoliberalism: these forces seem to have penetrated every aspect of our world. It looks like everything is too complicated and architects should just give up. There are even memes on the Internet (fig. 4) that mock naive architects who aspire to change the world.

Meme about architects who want to change the world

Figure 4. An Internet meme that mocks naive architects who aspire to change the world. Source unknown, meme found on Instagram

Even though there is no easy, immediate way to solve the issues of gentrification and neoliberalism, we should remember that the practical side is not all there is to Architecture. This discipline is not only about solving concrete, tangible problems, but also about imagination and ideas. Architecture has the power - and the responsibility - of giving great contributions to the political, social and cultural debate. Contributions that can have a huge impact on the whole population, as buildings and cities constitute the space where people of all kinds conduct their everyday lives.

So the first step for architects to really change the world is to outline a vision, imagine new utopias, establish innovative paradigms that fight against growing inequalities and go towards a society based on sharing, in which everyone has equal access to power, wealth and knowledge.

Of course, architects cannot do everything on their own, so communication and exchanges of ideas between different disciplines are essential. For example, if we look at the work of several contemporary economists, sociologists and politicians, we can find that one possible solution to the problem of inequality - and therefore to gentrification - would be to implement a Universal Basic Income (UBI), that is “a periodic cash payment unconditionally delivered to all on an individual basis, without means-test or work requirement” ("About Basic...", 2020).

Now, let us suppose that an architect or a urban planner adopted this idea of the UBI as their own utopia. How could they actually contribute, with their plans and designs, to pushing forward this idea?

In order to make the UBI a reality, some conditions have to be met:

Advancements in technology should enhance automation, so that more and more alienating jobs would be handled by machines;
People should realise that the purpose of life is not just to work, but to engage in fulfilling activities that involve creativity, critical thinking and participation to public life. This would lead to the rise of a popular movement that would demand the implementation of the UBI.
A new worldview should be spread and accepted, one that values every human being as a free individual, without social hierarchies.

At this point, we start to see how Architecture can actually play a role. Firstly, it can be a powerful engine for technological advancement. The demands of the building sector can push forward entire fields of research. Of course, we should always keep in mind that technological progress is not good in itself: there are technologies that cause alienation and other ones that actually improve human life. Among the latter, Fab Labs are an excellent example of how architecture and technology can enhance each other. They are workshops open to the public, offering digital fabrication and empowering individuals to create smart devices for themselves, tailored to their own personal or local needs. New ways of creating the city of the future are currently being explored in Fab Labs all over the world, by transforming and shaping the way how materials are sourced and used.

Secondly, Architecture can enhance inspire creativity with its poetic and emotional spaces and expressive shapes, but also integrating different forms of art in buildings and cities, and by letting its users create decorations. Moreover, it can be a vehicle of participation: strategies like interactivity, involvement in the design process (e.g. Giancarlo De Carlo’s Villaggio Matteotti, in Terni, Italy) and self-building (e.g. Alejandro Aravena’s Quinta Monroy, in Iquique, Chile) give to the people a chance to express themselves and establish an authentic and deep connection with their own living environment.

Thirdly, Architecture, by giving shape to new spaces, can also give shape to new mindsets and worldviews. If architects create buildings and cities that are non-hierarchical, inclusive, and flexible, then they also create the conditions for society to evolve in the same direction. Some even advocate the abolition of the hierarchal relationship between architect and user of a building, thus achieving a complete implementation of the principle of participation. We can imagine a future in which architects play just the role of consultants, as imagined by French architect Yona Friedman (1923-2020) in Architecture de survie, or in which projects are no longer the work of an individual, but of a collectivity, as envisioned by Italian architect Carlo Ratti (b. 1971) in Open Source Architecture.

We can now go back to Tianzifang, with the awareness that, even if Architecture cannot provide easy solutions for gentrification, it can nonetheless contribute to building a new world in which this phenomenon no longer exists. Strategies like protecting the presence of artists, organising activities and events for the residents, implementing real participation in the Tianzifang Management Committee, can all be actually very effective: not just because they mitigate the negative effects of gentrification, but because they help to create the conditions needed for the UBI to become a reality. This way, Tianzifang can set a powerful example, becoming a concrete utopia that gives us back the possibility of dreaming of a better future.

Of course, the reasonings we have made about the UBI can - and should - also be made with a variety of ideas, tools, strategies and visions. Architecture can give a meaningful contribution to any important issue that affects our society, from establishing a more harmonious relationship with Nature to implementing new forms of political participation and direct democracy, from spreading knowledge and art to everyone with the abolition of censorship and copyright to promoting the role of spirituality in people's lives. We just need to take a few steps back and look at the bigger picture, at the longer term.