The Evolution and Retrofitting of Work-unit Communities Under a Self-organizing Logic: Cases in Nanjing, P.R. China
Citation
Liu, Jingping. 2021. The Evolution and Retrofitting of Work-unit Communities Under a Self-organizing Logic: Cases in Nanjing, P.R. China. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard Graduate School of Design.Abstract
During China’s thirty years planned economy era (1949-1978), including the following two decades, the work-unit system has played a significant role in the country and has effectively promoted its economic growth by virtue of the system’s combined political, economic and social functions. However, as the domestic and international environment changed around the 1980s, the government slowly abandoned the work-unit system after deeming it an impediment to the country’s modernization. While the policies could be implemented quickly, the system’s physical space, which mostly consists of the working quarter and the living quarter, was not so easily erased. In reality, because of the economic situation’ limitations and the political priorities concerning the working quarter redevelopment in the reform’s early stage in the country, there has appeared a separation of working and living, and a lag of the work-unit community (the living quarter) development in the country. While large numbers of working quarters have been regenerated, relocated or demolished, and lots of researches have been done on the work-unit redevelopment, the majority of which are centered around the working quarter, most of the work-unit community are left behind and faced with the lash of the market economy, rapid urban development and physical deterioration on their own. Today, forty years have passed since the 1978 economic reform, due to all kinds of changes that have happened in the country, such as the new economic situation, urban sprawl and the existing stock-based development policy, there now exists a viable housing stock in the work-unit community area and it would be necessary and enforceable to retrofit them.In this context, in order to fill the gap of the work-unit community study in the country, to provide innovative research ideas and methodologies for the field, to provide strategic support for the national existing stock-based development policy, and to enrich the research on work-units in the second-tier cities of the country, this research aims to explore reasonable and applicable retrofitting strategies that would follow the inner self-organizing logic of the work-unit community. This will be done by studying both the administrative and morphological evolution of specific work-unit community cases in Nanjing, with the self-organization theory as a supporting theory and the typo-morphology approach as the primary physically-oriented methodology.
In summary, administratively, residents’ sense of autonomy is the key to the retrofitting of the work-unit community. In the meanwhile, other participants in the community management should assist residents in the process, especially the street office, residents’ committee, planners and designers. Morphologically, three main retrofitting strategies are finally proposed. Namely, to increase the degree of openness in a limited way, to improve the competition mechanism in the work-unit community, and to focus on variable retrofitting strategies.
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