Experiencing Urban Infrastructure in Tianjin

Jonathan Ochshorn

This is an Accepted Manuscript of a book chapter published by Routledge/CRC Press in Narrative Inquiries from Fulbright Lecturers in China: Cross-Cultural Connections in Higher Education, 1st Edition on June 18, 2019. The book itself is available here.

Introduction

China has embarked on a program of infrastructure construction that has transformed its urban centers to a remarkable extent, especially over the last two or three decades. Cars, taxis, buses, roads, and highways; subways, high-speed trains, and railway terminals; planes and airports; along with all sorts of other public amenities, from shopping malls to public toilets, have radically altered the experience of living in, and traveling between, Chinese cities. Based on observations made during a five-month teaching appointment in Tianjin—a sprawling port city of 15 million people just southeast of Beijing—this chapter recounts infrastructural adventures that I experienced as a U.S. architect and teacher with no Chinese language skills, but with a strong desire to explore this rapidly developing urban territory.

Infrastructure is here used in a broad sense, encompassing not only the state-run urban and interurban transport systems that support the expanding economy, but also other systems that, even when organized by private capital, provide a similarly systemic underpinning for the requirements of daily life in Tianjin.

Housing infrastructure

After our Fulbright orientation in Beijing, I am driven with my wife, Susan, to the nearby city of Tianjin with six pieces of luggage and two boxes of books (the latter having been shipped in advance via "diplomatic post" to the U.S. Embassy in Beijing). Beijing and Tianjin are literally contiguous (with a smaller city, Langfang, interrupting what would otherwise be a more consistently continuous border), yet the experience of driving from Beijing to Tianjin feels more like leaving one city, traveling through mile after mile of non-urbanized land, and then finally entering what feels like another city. In other words, while the political boundaries of the cities are quite enormous, the actual urbanized areas within those boundaries are quite a bit smaller. Between those urbanized areas are large zones of agricultural land, interspersed with small dense settlements containing row after row of repetitive walk-up, multi-story, south-facing apartment blocks. As we enter the more urbanized area of Tianjin, some buildings get taller, a few begin to stand out because of their unique form, and we exit the highway, driving the last few miles on a more conventional grid of urban streets.

We drop off our boxes at the School of Architecture and then drop off our luggage at our nearby campus apartment on the third floor of a six-floor walk-up for foreign scholars, the apartment block being similar to the south-facing units that we passed on our drive from Beijing. Each bar-like housing block has a front and a back facade, with the southern exposure being most valued. For that reason, the spaces, or streets, between the housing blocks are not at all symmetrical, as they often are in Western residential districts. In a typical suburban or urban street in the U.S., for example, one would expect to find entrances to dwelling units or apartments on both sides of the street, irrespective of their solar orientation. Here, however, as we drive east down the "street" between the apartment blocks, all the entrances are on our right, that is, on the northern facade. On the left, or southern facade, we see an array of fenced-in back yards for the first-floor units, sometimes with roofs and walls enclosing the yard and creating an extra ground-level room. Between the two apartment blocks are parking spaces, some of which, toward the northern facade, are covered with corrugated steel panels supported on lightweight steel frames.

The southern, sun-facing side of each apartment contains a large balcony, often enclosed in glass, where occupants can hang up their laundry to dry. In our apartment, this balcony is accessed from the master bedroom; we also have a closed-in balcony on the northern facade that contains a small two-burner gas stove (but no oven) adjacent to the kitchen. In other words, our apartment spans from north to south, allowing through-circulation of air—something difficult to accomplish in apartment arrangements where a double-loaded corridor, typically connected to fire stairs and elevators, splits the slab into two distinct zones. We, of course, have neither an elevator (I did say "walk-up") nor a corridor, but rather a single stair at the northern entry that serves three apartments on each of the six floors. Several of these six-story, 18-unit modules are then placed side-by side to create a block-long slab with multiple north-facing entrances, each with its own stair.

From my standpoint, this low-rise apartment block design, repeated thousands of times in Chinese cities, has both positive and negative qualities. On the plus side, the consistent attention to solar orientation is extremely valuable, especially if you are air-drying laundry, but also just to guarantee that each apartment will have direct access to a good deal of sunshine. Two thirds of the apartments, including our own, also have a northern exposure, which promotes air circulation. This benefit becomes merely "theoretical," however, when the outdoor air quality reaches an unhealthy level, which turns out to be quite often, and windows remain shut. The walk-up stair is good (lots of exercise) and bad (too much climbing, especially if you are feeling ill or otherwise incapacitated); we are placed in a third-floor apartment which is high enough above the ground to feel relatively secure and quiet, but not so high to feel oppressive.

On the negative side, the relentless differentiation between north and south facades creates a building with an unimpeachable internal logic as a building, but with much less success in creating a viable social space within the streets between building blocks. In some cultures, it is the street, rather than any individual building, that determines the identity of what might be called home ground, and it is primarily the design and functionality of building facades that create the space of the street. Where the street-building interfaces on both sides of the street support semi-private zones of entry stairs, stoops, porches, or small yards, the spatial and social reading of the street becomes even more complex and far richer. From this type of street, one not only sees buildings on each side but can also access those buildings.

In contrast to this model, the pattern of streets within my residential district in Tianjin is merely the utilitarian outcome of design decisions that have only considered the logic of the building itself as a self-contained entity—the street merely serves as a mode of access and a location for parking. Each street is almost literally bisected into two strips, the northern side with its private yards, and the southern, more public, side given over to parking and entrances for a different housing block. In such a street, the northern edge is walled off and often inaccessible, except perhaps for the ground-floor apartments, which partake of a schizophrenic existence—connected via a public entrance on a different street further north down the block while having a private yard facing another building's public entrances across to the south.

To be fair, my critique is a bit idealistic and somewhat hypocritical, in that it presumes that the contrasting "Western" model, where the street is intended to foster a sense of community, is more than a nostalgic relic from a bygone day. Even in the "New Urbanist" model city of Seaside, Florida, where street-facing porches are mandated in the town's design guidelines to encourage precisely this type of street-centered community, the residents' behavior doesn't correspond to the architects' and planners' vision. Instead, people "seldom sit out on the porches so the social function for which they were designed (that is, to keep eyes on the street and as a place from which to greet passers-by) has not really been realized."¹ The truth is that this apparent lack of community-oriented public space is more a function of changing lifestyles—in which both parents are at work all day, children's "free time" is largely organized for them in structured (i.e., not in the street) activities, and village-based multi-generational extended families have become increasingly obsolete in the wake of rapid urbanization—than because of any particular design strategies invoked, whether in U.S. or Chinese cities.

Multi-story walk-up apartment blocks are the prevalent housing type in Tianjin, but there are also high-rise residential towers and older low-rise apartment buildings that have a more traditional relationship to the grid of streets. Based on a Tianjin master plan,² Zhang and Brown estimated that the overwhelming majority (80 percent) of housing in Tianjin takes the form of multi-story walk-up apartment blocks, much like the one we are living in near the University, with the rest split fairly equally between high-rise and low-rise buildings. My impression is that since this study was written, a greater percentage of current housing in Tianjin is being constructed as high-rise units. These percentages appear to be an artifact of large-scale demolition of traditional low-rise housing, in so-called Hutong districts, that has occurred within the recent past. One urban blogger³ investigated "before" and "after" satellite images from Google Earth and concluded that "between November 2000 and January 2004 almost the entirety of the area within the old city walls [of Tianjin] … and a considerable part of historic districts outside the walls, was destroyed. Apart from a couple of important temples, hardly a building escaped the destruction. Between 2004 and 2009 the entire area was rebuilt primarily with high-rise residential buildings and a grid of large wide avenues." This is especially remarkable because, according to Campanella, "Chinese cities entered a kind of urban architectural time warp during the Cultural Revolution. … Most cities experienced almost no physical expansion in this period."⁴ It was only during the 15 years of rebuilding after the Tangshan earthquake of 1976⁵ continuing with the radical economic and urban expansion of the twenty-first century—including the government's "massive capital injection amounting to 4 trillion yuan (approximately $586 Billion US)" in response to the economic crisis of 2008⁶ — that a large percentage of the traditional Hutong districts were demolished and replaced with 6-story walk-up blocks and high-rise towers. Susan and I later walk through the old city district and down the nearby "Ancient Culture Street," where we buy some art supplies; all of the recently demolished storefronts, I now realize, have been reconstructed in a homogeneous, bland, but vaguely "ancient" (and not entirely unpleasant) style.

It is easy to criticize the demolition of these Hutong districts, using the same sort of arguments about "community" or architectural heritage that still inform debates about the preservation of neighborhoods in both developed and developing nations. However, as Campanella argues after extolling the "humanistic urbanism" exemplified by the Hutong districts of Beijing: "Of course, it is easy to be seduced by all this, especially as a foreigner who has never had to spend a cold winter night in an old hutong flat heated, if at all, by a tiny coal stove. It might make for good urbanism, but most housing in these old neighborhoods was terribly overcrowded, unsanitary, and unsafe. Decades of deferred maintenance took a heavy toll on the structures, and many units lacked running water, a kitchen, or private bathroom. … The very real need to upgrade housing combined with the emergence of a real estate market and the ensuing development binge spelled its doom."⁷⁸

As it turns out, the appearance of these taxis takes place in the immediate aftermath of two huge, and consequential, taxi wars. The first, between 2012 and 2015, pitted two Chinese companies against each other, both seeking to dominate the emerging ride-hailing market: "They [the two rivals] provided subsidies to service providers and sent online coupons to millions of potential patrons. They fronted so much money to both providers and users of the service that the market knew that this was not sustainable, even though both companies had deep-pocketed financial backing. In 2015, the investors for the two companies came together and facilitated their merger. The merged company carried the name of Didi Chuxing."⁸ The second battle began when Uber, the San Francisco-based transportation company, made an aggressive move into the Chinese market in 2014, while its two Chinese rivals were still battling each other for market share. Uber's strategy ultimately failed, although the merger of Uber China with Didi Chuxing was not exactly a financial blow for Uber. Manjoo reports that the "$2 billion Uber spent tackling China is now worth about $7 billion in the new merged entity."⁹

Even if the impact and significance of the Uber-Didi merger and the Hong Kong Handover cannot really be equated, the two events nevertheless effectively bracket and highlight two decades of radical change in the relationship between China and the West. And such an equation may not actually be that far-fetched. Manjoo, for example, argues that "Uber's deal with Didi … points to [a] series of accommodationist deals in which giants cede large parts of the world to one another, pragmatically carving out their spheres of influence like players in The Great Game."¹⁰ From this standpoint, battles to control the emerging digital, internet-based infrastructure underlying markets in areas such as commerce (Amazon vs. Alibaba), search (Google vs. Baidu), social media (Facebook vs. WeChat), and transportation (Uber vs. Didi) may well be comparable in importance to prior (and current) battles for sovereignty over, or access to, physical territory. It is no accident that these battles to control digital infrastructure coincide with China's Belt and Road Initiative, which seeks to develop an expanded global physical transportation infrastructure.¹¹

The quake that has been memorialized here, one of the most deadly in human history, originated in the neighboring city of Tangshan in 1976, killing hundreds of thousands of people there as well as over twenty thousand in Tianjin alone.¹² After returning to the U.S., I read a geological study that examines historic seismic activity along the Tangshan-Hejian-Cixian fault zone—the same fault implicated in the disastrous Tangshan earthquake of 1976.¹³ The report concludes that a 100-mile long seismic gap directly under Tianjin appears to be still holding back 8,000 years of accumulated and unreleased tectonic energy that could slip at any moment (any moment, that is, within the next two thousand years), causing a magnitude 7.5 earthquake centered in Tianjin. Although I have an adventurous spirit, my tolerance for risk is low, and I'm happy to have discovered this new information after returning home.

In this chapter, I have focused mostly on hard infrastructural elements like housing and transport systems, but China's educational system, a component of the so-called soft infrastructure "necessary for the maintenance of economic, health, cultural, and social standards"¹⁴ also engages my attention while lecturing about U.S. practice in the areas of building technology and sustainability. The importance of, and contradictory impulses within, soft infrastructure can be seen in the persistence of traditional Chinese culture, harnessed to preserve "such traditional virtues … as patriotism, respect for law, courtesy, integrity, solidarity, diligence and frugality" in order to counteract any potentially disruptive influences arising from China's move toward a market economy.¹⁵ I think about two examples from my own experience with China's modern educational infrastructure in relation to traditional Chinese culture: one involving seminar instruction and the other involving so-called linguistic instrumentalism.

In the first case, the persistence of traditional Chinese culture can be seen in the apparent reticence of Chinese students to speak out in class.¹⁶ This concerns me since I intend to offer one of my courses in a seminar format, in which class discussion is a key pedagogic element. When I taught architecture students at the Chinese University of Hong Kong just after the "Handover" to Chinese sovereignty in 1997—and in spite of explicit American influence on the department's curricular design along with an engrained British colonial influence—behaviors rooted in traditional Chinese culture that tended to inhibit discussion were nevertheless present. Tunney Lee, the Founding Chair of the architecture department there and former Head of the Department of Urban Studies and Planning at MIT, tested various strategies in an attempt to overcome these tendencies, e.g., interrupting the flow of a lecture by having small groups of students caucus together and, as a group, pose questions or formulate responses.

Gu Mingyuan, a noted Chinese scholar in the field of comparative education, suggests that while traditional Chinese culture easily adapted to certain teaching methods imported from the Soviet Union in the period after 1949 because and to the extent that they were actually consistent with traditional Chinese values, "we could not accept seminars (classroom discussion), a widely adopted teaching method in Western universities, as an effective way of enhancing a student's independent thinking."¹⁷ And while China's "transformation towards a market economy … prompted reforms in the classrooms," including even the use of seminars,¹⁸ my own experience in Tianjin reinforces the prevailing stereotype in which students seem to prefer the traditional lecture format rather than the seminar-discussion format I had originally intended. Faced with a largely unresponsive class, and without the benefit of a seminar-friendly classroom setting (i.e., with chairs set in rows in front of a lectern instead of chairs deployed around a large table), I take the path of least resistance and do most of the talking myself. Still, I begin to wonder if at least part of the reticence of my Chinese students to speak out in class is due to their insecurities with spoken English, rather than to a culturally-specific aversion to the expression of individuality within a group context.

On the other hand, my one-on-one interaction with students in an architectural design studio context is more productive: perhaps this is because "Chinese teachers assume the role of mentor and role model far more so than Western teachers"¹⁹ In other words, the more informal (and personal) type of academic interaction that occurs in the design studio, where the instructor assumes the role of a mentor, seems to work out better than the seminar format where a student's individuality may be viewed as a threat to the "solidarity" of the group, or where a student's questioning may be viewed as a challenge to the authority of the teacher.

The role of English in Chinese education, however, has another dimension altogether, which brings up my second example of soft infrastructure in relation to traditional Chinese culture. Some scholars situate English instruction within a "discourse of linguistic instrumentalism, which emphasizes utilitarianism of learning English for sustaining economic development of a society and for social mobility as individuals."²⁰ My own experience in Tianjin appears to challenge this instrumentalist view, as I am initially asked to teach a cohort of visiting international students rather than the Chinese architectural students whose exposure to English-language coursework would presumably benefit not only themselves, but also advance China's "economic competitiveness in the global market."²¹ Be this as it may, the Fulbright staff in Beijing is not at all happy about my proposed teaching assignment and intervenes, insisting that the American interest in funding me as a Fulbright Scholar requires that I interact primarily with Chinese students. It amuses me to think that I am simultaneously considered a tool of both Chinese and American foreign policy objectives, while I naively embark on this Fulbright adventure as if it is in my interest! Ultimately, a compromise is reached in which the number of international students in my classes is limited to about 10 percent of the total enrollment.

Overall, my personal experience as a Fulbright Scholar is mostly positive and my engagement with cross-cultural analysis will be extremely valuable as I refine and reconsider my own teaching and writing after returning home. I leave China knowing that the mix of traditional and contemporary cultural practices I have experienced in Tianjin, embedded within increasingly state-of-the-art infrastructural elements (both hard and soft), are not likely to survive in their current form as modernization and urbanization move forward with incredible speed. And I can't help but be aware that the basis for the proliferation of cheap goods and cheap transportation is the widening income gap between China's capitalist elites and the agricultural, factory, and service workers who still struggle with low wages, long hours, disruption of family cohesion, and unhealthful environmental conditions. This remains true despite the well-known fact that "as many as six hundred million people in China have climbed out of poverty" since 1981 and have seen their economic conditions improve."²²

¹ Jon Lang and Walter Moleski, Functionalism Revisited: Architectural Theory and Practice and the Behavioral Sciences, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. (Surrey, England and Burlington, Vermont: 2010), p. 117

² Henry Zhang and David Brown, "Understanding Urban Residential Water Use in Beijing and Tianjin, China," Habitat International 29, (2005),pp. 469–491

³ "Demolition of Tianjin's old city," Bricoleurbanism (April 12, 2010). Online here

⁴ Thomas Campanella, The Concrete Dragon, Princeton Architectural Press (New York: 2008), p. 179

⁵ Lauri Paltema, n.d., "Tangshan Earthquake, 1976," DisasterHistory Online here

⁶ Lorin Yochim, "Navigating the Aspirational City: Processes of Accumulation in China's Socialist Market Economy," in Spotlight on China: Changes in Education under China's Market Economy, ed. Shibao Guo and Yan Guo. Sense Publishers (Rotterdam, Netherlands: 2016), p. 354

⁷ Campella, op. cit., p. 149

⁸ Xin Guo and Frank Gallo, Multinational Companies in China: Navigating the Eight Common Management Pitfalls in China, Emerald Publishing Limited (Bingley, UK: 2017)

⁹ Farhad Manjoo,"Even Uber Couldn't Bridge the China Divide," NY Times, August 1, 2018. Online here

¹⁰ Manjoo,"Even Uber Couldn't Bridge the China Divide," ibid

¹¹ Peter Cai, Understanding China's Belt and Road Initiative, Lowy Institute for International Policy (Sydney: 2017)

¹² "40 Years Ago, the Tangshan Earthquake Hit Tianjin, Tangshan City, 64% Houses were Destroyed," BestChinaNews, July 28, 2016. Online here

¹³ An Yin, Xiangjiang Yu, and Jing Liu-Zeng, "A Possible Seismic Gap and High Earthquake Hazard in the North China Basin," Geology Vol. 43, No. 1, 2015, pp. 19–22

¹⁴ McKinney, Jerome, Budgeting for Sustainability: An Approach for American Policy-Making, McFarland (Jefferson, NC: 2017), p. 67

¹⁵ Wing-Wah Law, "Social change, Citizenship, and Citizenship Education in China Since the Late 1970," in Spotlight on China: Changes in Education under China's Market Economy, ed. Shibao Guo and Yan Guo. Sense Publishers (Rotterdam, Netherlands: 2016), p. 39

¹⁶ Ken Levinson, "Cultural Differences and Learning Styles of Chinese and European Trades Students," Institute for Learning Styles Journal 1, fall 2007.

¹⁷ Gu Mingyuan, Cultural Foundations of Chinese Education, Brill (Leiden, Netherlands: 2014), p. 216

¹⁸ Lei Zhang, Ruyue Dai, and Kai Yu. 2016. "Chinese higher Education Since 1977: Possibilities, Challenges and Tensions," in Spotlight on China: Changes in Education under China's Market Economy, ed. Shibao Guo and Yan Guo. Sense Publishers (Rotterdam, Netherlands: 2016), p. 182

¹⁹ Levinson, "Cultural Differences," op. cit., p. 13

²⁰ Yan Guo, "The Impact of the Market Economy on English Teachers," in Spotlight on China: Changes in Education under China's Market Economy, ed. Shibao Guo and Yan Guo. Sense Publishers (Rotterdam, Netherlands: 2016), p. 119

²¹ Guo, "The Impact of the Market Economy on English Teachers," ibid.

²² Cynthia Estlund, A New Deal for China's Workers? Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA: 2017), p. 2

First posted August 9, 2019; last updated August 9, 2019