The first floor sinking, occupied by migrant workers. Above, several condos have been inhabited, but most floors remain empty, unused except as placeholders on accounting sheets. A section of Houhai Bin Road is being reconstructed. The chilly smog undulates.
The research division of Urbanus has sponsored Fu Na and Chris Gee’s research in Caiwuwei these past three years. Just recently, they released three videos that take viewers on walks through what remains of Caiwuwei. Of note: Caiwuwei has been upgraded and polished into an exemplar of the potential of high density living that can be created through appropriations of handshake buildings. So commercial opportunities and low-cost conveniently located housing, with minimal investment in public spaces and amenities. Links:
The article title is “A Good Shenzhen Doctor was Beaten, He Refused to Prescribe Unnecessary Medicine or Vitamin Drip”. The article reminds Shenzhen readers that although it is common to abuse doctors in neidi, it has not been common in Shenzhen. Moreover, as the article points out, often the beatings occur even when the Doctor is doing her job.
The use of the word “good doctor” and the assumption that sometimes doctors deserve to be beaten for (corruption, expensive medicine, fill in the angry blank) underscores the tense relationships between patients and doctors in China generally, but also Shenzhen, our low number of reported conflicts notwithstanding. As in the US and elsewhere, in contemporary China lay people assume that role of medical care is to return patients to perfect health, immediately. More distressingly when this result cannot be obtained, patients and their families assume that their ongoing dis-ease is deliberate and that the Doctor is withholding care in order to receive a bribe. Hence, the beatings.
In my experience, it is important to know one’s doctor because some Chinese doctors do put a price tag on treatment. Sometimes they do prescribe expensive, unnecessary treatments. Like US doctors they often preen and show off their knowledge. But more often than not, like their patients, Chinese doctors are caught in an ugly web of mistrust and impossible desires. Doctors cannot heal everyone all the time, and they are shackled by all sorts or regulations and administrative cost. Moreover, as in the US, hospitals and clinics do turn away those who cannot pay but won’t die from lack of treatment. Also as in the US, patients want the best modern medicine without paying for it and often those who can afford medical care oppose government subsidies for those who cannot.
But there’s the rub: except for the very rich few people can afford out-of-pocket treatments and so they only go in when very sick or for antibiotics and other instant (preferably cheap) cures. There is little conversation about general prevention, and less about two unavoidable facts–our collective lifestyle makes us sick (cancer and diabetes, for example) and despite all our technology, we will get sick, age, and die. Hopefully, with grace and dignity.
The hope for graceful lives and dignified deaths changes the conversation about whither medical care. As a society, we need investigate what it would mean to provide equal and gracious access to care. We need to think seriously about what constitutes a dignified death. And we need to take responsibility for the contamination that our dependence on petrochemicals and nuclear power has introduced into shared environments because not only humans are suffering from our hubris.
I have been reviewing my photo archives and came across pictures of new village gates that I took roughly ten years ago. The pictures show village gates old and new and point to the persistence of community identity precisely because it is malleable to the needs of the present.
Mary Douglass reminded us that dirt was merely matter out-of-place, and correspondingly that the work of cultural categories was to keep human beings in line. Moreover, these lines are not neutral, but like dirt in the kitchen, have all sorts of practical and moral implications for the organization of human life. In turn, border zones comprise sites of categorical breakdown, where border crossing creativity is possible, and also illicit transgressions.
This morning, I stumbled across The Politics of Cross Border Crime, a book that documents prostitution, smuggling, and gambling along and within the borders of Greater China. According to author, Shiu Hing Lo, patterns of regional cross border crime have been changing. During the 1970s and 1980s, the main types of China-Hong Kong, China-Macau, China-Taiwan crime included illegal immigration, cross border robbery, airline highjacking, and drug trafficking. Since the turn of the millennium, however, crime has become more organized, with kidnapping, human trafficking, money laundering, and transborder triads strengthening their control over these activities.
Shenzhen has been trying to shed its frontier town reputation for shady deals and immoral excess. Nevertheless, the city’s internal borders (urbanized villages, older neighborhoods) and restructured borders with Hong Kong and East Asia provide ambiguous sites, where the unsavory might thrive. The most distressing reports of Shenzhen’s role in cross border crime entail forced prostitution of minors and virginal rape. According to Lo:
Cross-border prostitution is a serious problem in Greater China, where supply and demand are both out of control. On the supply side, many children are smuggled by mainland criminals from poor provinces to Shenzhen, where there were 1,000 child prostitutes in June 2006. On the demand side, many unscrupulous Hong Kong men demanded that prostitution dens provide young virgins for them…The main factors contributing to the grave problem of transborder prostitution in Greater China are a lack of strict enforcement for anticorruption campaigns targeted at Guangdong police, especially in Shenzhen’s infamous villages, and the HKSAR government’s failure to cooperate with the mainland government to severely penalize Hong Kong men who solicit mainland prostitutes, especially children.
Lo concludes that:
Unlike the official rhetoric that underscores the mutual benefits of economic integration, the reality is that economic liberalization along the PRC–Hong Kong–Macao boundaries has generated an increase in criminal activity in the region. As economic relations between Taiwan and mainland China have become closer since the presidential election of Ma Ying-jeou in March 2008, cross-border crime between the two places is destined to increase further.
This kind of report distresses me for two reasons. On the one hand, the prostitutionalization of Shenzhen has been an ongoing theme in reports about the city. Indeed, finding prostitutes, establishing their level of willingness, and complaining about their mercenary tendencies have been common metaphors to describe reform and opening and what it has meant for social mores in the SEZ. A similar rhetoric is used within Shenzhen to describe and undermine urban village neighborhoods. On the other hand, as Lo notes, prostitution and human trafficking have increased because Shenzhen and urbanized villages do offer more spaces for unregulated commerce, which may be either an opportunity or a risk for society. In this sense, there is need for increased vigilance to protect children and vulnerable residents from triad members and traveling businessmen who have more in common than we like to think.
Sigh.
Yesterday, the mass movement of Chinese literally known as “Spring Shipping (春运)”, but could also be translated as Spring Rush began and will continue until February 24. This year it is estimated that there will be 3.6 billion one way trips made during these 40 days. This is roughly one round trip per Chinese person. Some people will make more than two one way trips, and some will stay in place, but the figures indicate the scale of movement as people travel to be with family or to have fun.
Today, the city felt emptier and it will continue apace until the end of the first week, or after the 15 the day of the first month.
Party on!
One of my favorite details at the Value Factory is the approach. Impressions below.
Apparently the Shenzhen school uniform is the talk of the national under 18 virtual community.
All Shenzhen public students wear the same uniform, regardless of the school they attend. On buses and in the subway, students either wear the elementary uniform or the high school uniform so one doesn’t know what school they attend, only that they attend. In fact, the Shenzhen school uniform is so recognizable that in the press and online it stands for the city’s youth. Thus, for example, the scandal of the youthful parents and their baby photo (from a tv series that admits high school students are having sex) as well as the explicit sexualization of Shenzhen little sisters in their school uniforms and a website for student couples to upload pictures of Shenzhen school uniform lovers.
Elsewhere in China commonality is marked by joining Party youth organizations because schools have their own recognizable uniforms. Cui Jian famously used the Young Pioneer red handkerchief to blindfold himself and in doing so evoked the trauma of a generation. In Shenzhen, the ubiquitous school uniform has taken on a similar generalizing function to the red handkerchief. However, instead of evoking a national identity, the school uniform symbolizes an explicitly Shenzhen childhood and teenhood.
I first heard about the national significance of the Shenzhen school uniform at a biennale forum. We old folks onstage were discussing if there was a common Shenzhen culture or civic identity. A student in the audience said there was. He mentioned that young people in Shenzhen have ideas and dreams that are shared, and also that these dreams and ambitions are different from the rest of the country. He then underscored his point by citing the omnipresence of the Shenzhen uniform both online and at Chinese universities. It seems that Shenzhen students continue to wear the dark blue sweatpants even after they get to college. Part of the charm, it seems, is that the uniform really is so ugly one grows to love it.
Back in the day, there was active debate both within and outside Shenzhen over how a civic identity might be created. Fortunately for us moldy oldies, the young people of the city have done it despite us. A selection of Shenzhen school uniform pictures, including a link to the highly popular digital comic book, Days When I Wore A Shenzhen School Uniform.
The day before yesterday I participated in a Biennale forum on high density living. I thought high density living referred to number of people living in so much space. Rumor has it, for example, that there are roughly 19.5 million people living in Shenzhen — a mere 4 million over the official unofficial population count (read generally accepted and quoted). Shenzhen has an official area of 1,952 square kilometers, which would make the SEZ’s estimated actual population density to be around 10,000 people per square kilometer. The population density of people with hukou would be significantly less dense, around 1,300 people per square kilometer, but no one believes that figure. On the recently updated Chinese Wikipedia the population density is given as being 5,201 per square kilometer.
Population density can be appropriated to give us a sense of forms of social inequality. Baishizhou, for example, is located in Shahe Street Office, which has an area of approximately 25 square kilometers. The estimated population is around 260,000, giving us an average population density of 10,400 people per square kilometer, which is close to the guesstimated municipal average above. However, when we account for Baishizhou, we see an interesting realignment.
Baishizhou occupies an area of .6 square kilometers (the rest of the area’s original holdings has already been annexed by the state). It has a guesstimated population of 140,000 people. This means that Baishizhou has a population density of 23,333 people per square kilometer, while the rest of Shahe, which includes Overseas Chinese Town and Mangrove Bay estates has a population density of 4,898 people per square kilometer. So Baishizhou has a population density which is over twice the municipal average and OCT and Mangrove Bay areas have a population density that is less than half the city average.
I was wrong in thinking that population density is the only way to operationalize unequal access to space. In archi-parlance (that’s a personal neologism for “how architects and urban planners talk about the world and stuff they’re building), there are two more definitions of density that they’re interested in measuring– floor area ratio (FAR) and dwelling unit density (DU). And if you’re wondering do they further abstract these descriptions of the built environment by using acronyms, the answer is a resounding yes! The density atlas provides an illustrated explanation of terms. Below, I try to work through what these terms might tell us about the spatialization of unequal access to space through and within Shenzhen’s urbanized villages.
FAR density refers to how much building occupies the space. And it’s three-dimensional. So floor area ratio means the total area on all floors of all buildings on a certain plot. Thus, a FAR of 2 would indicate that the total floor area of a building is two times the gross area of the plot on which it is constructed, as in a multi-story building. So, a FAR of 10 would be ten stories, if the base was consistent (as in a box). (And yes, I’m grappling to get my mind around this kind of abstraction so I think in simple terms, or word problems if you will.)
In order to calculate DU density, you posit so many square meters per person. A 100 square meter building with a FAR of 6 would have 600 square meters. If we then posit 20 square meters per person, our 600 square meter building could shelter 30 people. In other words, if we were to take standard person to space ratio used by many Shenzhen urban planners, then 30 people could comfortably live in one handshake building.
But clearly that’s a calculation for one, single purpose building. Once we start allocating space for functions, we need to make value judgments. How much space for business? For women’s restrooms in public spaces? For sleeping? In other words, to allocate spaces within the built environment we need to make decisions that will reveal and confirm our sense of what is the good life and how we will share that life and it’s material components. To return to our hypothetical 6-story handshake building, if we give the first floor to business and then build subdivide a floor into (3.5 X 6) 21 sq meter efficiencies (still above the magic 20), three on one side of the hallway and one on the other, we would get four rooms. However, if we further subdivide those rooms, we could get eight even smaller rooms (leaving space for hallway and stairs).
In practice, design is not that simple. But the numbers do begin to operationalize inequality in terms that resonate the ethical discourse modern education has equipped us with. For example, the layout of Handshake 302 shows a living space of (4.335 X 3.06) = 13.2651 square meters. There is a small cooking space and toilet which also allows for standing baths. Our neighbors live in similar sized rooms, and share the space and rent among two or three roommates. This suggests that the actual DU in a Baishizhou handshake efficiency can be as low as 4.4 square meters per person. At 850 per month, wear talking a rental cost of 64.1 yuan per meter.
In contrast, it costs 18,600 to rent a condo at neighboring Zhongxin Mangrove Bay, for example. The flat has four bedrooms, two living rooms, and three bathrooms that take up a total of 265 square meters, or slightly less than half a handshake building. It is a family home, so let’s guesstimate a pair of grandparents, a set of parents and one kid, totaling five people. Each of them enjoys 53 square meters of living space. Each square meter has a rental cost of approximately 70 yuan, which is not that much higher than Baishizhou.
Admittedly, one can tell many stories with statistics, but the square meter story of Baishizhou and its neighbors is one of gross inequality. Mangrove Bay residents can occupy anywhere from 15 to roughly 18 times the space of Baishizhou renters, and pay about 22 times the cost for that privilege. At this scale, one can begin to imagine what razing Baishizhou means in terms of affordable housing on the one hand and potential profit on the other. Point du jour, however, is that there is no “standard” square meter per person ratio, just expanding levels of inequality.
So, some stats du jour that should give us pause to reflect on the values we are constructing into the built environment.
Useful maps of Shenzhen administrative divisions online here. Includes municipal and district maps.
Shenzhen Noted 