Architecture professor recounts
June 2005 research visit to China

Last June, Robin Abrams, associate professor of architecture at Texas A&M University, traveled to China with three Ph.D. students Bin Kang, Xuemei Zhu and
Zhipeng Lu, to work on a number of research initiatives addressing issues of neighborhood conservation, design and housing. Abrams recently shared a few observations from that summer 2005 trip.

The trip was made possible from an International Research Travel Assistance Grant (IRTAG) from Texas A&M and by funding from the College Research and Interdisciplinary Council.

Abram's summer in China:

We traveled to Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Nanjing, Suzhou, Shanghai and Beijing.

Along the way, I gave talks on housing and urban design, reviewed studio work, and met with architecture students and faculty at the University of Hong Kong, South China Technical University (Guangzhou), Nanjing University and Tsinghua (Beijing).

It was a joy to work with students, both undergraduate and graduate, who impressed me not just with their command of English, but with their enthusiasm for learning.

Each of the Texa A&M participants had a particular research agenda addressing issues of neighborhood conservation and design and housing.

I was investigating and documenting the three eras of housing and neighborhood design: Imperial, Soviet, and Contemporary.

Chinese cities are facing unprecedented demands for housing provision, with each city coping in different ways.  Guangzhou, the city most affected by rapid growth and insurgence of “floating population” is tearing down its historic fabric at a frightening rate, moving low-income residents to remote suburbs and building enormous gated high-rise towers for middle income residents. They are also double-decking city streets to handle increased automobile traffic.

Shanghai, in contrast, has a “Red Roof” program in addition to high-rise building. They are attempting to upgrade much of the Soviet housing through paint, elevators, balconies and shiny red tile roofs. This is all occurring on a scale that a western urban designer finds difficult to comprehend.

I realized rather quickly that a western “expert” in many ways has little to contribute to the urgency and massive scale of Chinese cities, although there are parallels to post-war Britain, my other research focus. I found that housing solutions that were proven unsuccessful in Britain — high-rise living for example — seem to be not only acceptable to the Chinese population, but desired. This brings up several further research questions, relating to the social logic behind housing acceptability – which is the direction my research has now taken.

Bin Kang was undertaking his doctoral research, studying two housing communities, one from the very end of the Soviet era, the other new – by the same developer, located in the same suburb of Guangzhou, and only four years apart in construction, but light years apart in terms of quality of the external environment.

Kang specifically studied the quality and use of outdoor spaces, and their affect on neighborliness and sense of belonging.

Xuemei Zhu and Zhipeng Lu were engaged in very preliminary research for their dissertations. Zhu was studying how children move about the city, and Lu’s is interested in the elderly, and how they engage with the city.

All four of us returned to Beijing in November 2005 to participate in the US/China Relations Scholarly Exchange sponsored by Texas A&M. This travel was funded by the US/China Relations Program and by College of Architecture’s international faculty travel funds.

Our research was shared with other faculty at Peking University. Other college faculty participating in the conference were Chang-Shan Huang and Chanam Lee, who presented their current research.

— The End —