2016.08.11 Thu, by Translated by: 陈煜峰
The Difference Between Two Smiles: Gentrification in Beijing

This piece is included in Ran Dian’s print magazine, issue 3 (Spring 2016)

The monumental silhouette of the White Stupa Temple or Baitasi (its other name is Miaoying Temple) fills the horizon between the areas of Fuchengmen and Chegongzhuang. It is the oldest presence of Tibetan Buddhism in Beijing, designed by a Nepalese architect and built in 1271 by will of Kublai Khan himself, who, according to the legend, had arrows shot in the four cardinal directions to determine its bounds. Small bells hang from its canopy to scare away evil spirits.

The surrounding settlement is one of the last few low-rise residential areas in Beijing, which also hosts another city treasure, the Beijing Lu Xun Museum. As is true for most of the hutong (lane) communities, some old residents have moved out and new immigrants have started to occupy one of the city’s busiest areas near the West Second Ring Road.

With the project “Baitasi Remade”, the Beijing Design Week Committee, in collaboration with the Xicheng district government, private enterprises such as Beijing Huarong Jingying Investment and Development, local residents, and a great number of artists and designers, organized more than 40 exhibitions and forums from September 24 to October 4, 2015, scattered across four venues. These were named, respectively: “Info Hub”, “Reading Hub”, “Making Hub”, and “Sales Hub”. According to the long-term plan, the development solutions proposed through this project will begin a transformation that will take three to five years.

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

Mr. Wang Yuxi, general manager of Beijing Huarong Jingying Investment and Development, said that “after collecting and analyzing the big data of the Baitasi settlement, the change will happen with respect to the rights of the local residents while connecting the area with the modern city, making it a better place to live.” He added that more artists, architects, and designers are needed to stimulate innovation in the area.

Having witnessed the opening days of the project in person, I can say, without discussing the details of each single event, that compared with what happened in previous years in different areas, an approach of bringing the “creative industry” to Baitasi has been more thoughtful and less aggressive. That said, the arrival of hipsters, creativity, and development companies has for some time been a problematic issue for such projects. It is often seen as the first step toward the implementation of rapid and rapacious economic models of gentrification whose final outcome, instead of empowering local communities and promoting the notion of “inclusiveness” they appeal to, end up using art and design as Trojan Horses to infiltrate these areas with the logic of speculative capital through real estate. In general, when the creative industry is brought in, we see an early period of pleasant bohemian diversity and trendy multicultural integration, which nevertheless carries the germs of what is going to happen next.

The differences and distances between the local community, the new creative one who just settled in, and the external visitors and investors progressively leave the cultural and anthropological sphere (the interesting one in which they interact with mutual enthusiasm, respect, and curiosity) and are forced into the economic one, which turns their interaction into a fierce confrontation in the name of inequality, privilege, and violence.

Since the mechanism is well known, a growing sense of distrust has even reached the point of triggering violent refusal and aggression toward the creative actors themselves. This happened recently in Shoreditch, London, while Beijing Design Week was going on, when hundreds of protesters and anti-gentrification activists carrying pigs’ heads and torches attacked the Cereal Killer Café, daubing the word “scum” on the shop window and accusing the owners of being symbols of the logic of exploitation.

Although it is difficult not to think that gentrification follows the same path everywhere, I believe that today, more than ever, we should try not to reduce the complexity of each specific reality to a general and dualistic mechanism of bare, antagonistic forces. In fact, this is exactly the paradigm that a certain ruthless neoliberal thinking is using everywhere in order to undermine the perception of difference and complexity, and put forward the brutal logic of economics as the only key parameter of reality. Whatever the premise, we must try and look for ways to bridge existing gaps and to build a dialogue whenever possible.

Why am I talking about all this? It is because I try to understand how an artist, a designer, an architect, a writer, a poet, or any other “creative” individual should go about this kind of activity in order to bring his or her own work and practice into this kind of context. Which are the right questions to ask? How can a meaningful dialogue with the community take place? Is dialogue ultimately possible?

In the case of Baitasi, we can look at the local lifestyle and environment as if we were taking a walk around. In the area, the sociocultural environment is undergoing a process of dissolution and redefinition, the speed of which is undetermined but contingent. Yet if one wanders, leaving the main alleys for the hutongs, one plunges immediately into that typical and unique sensorium that has charmed all of Beijing’s longtime residents. After a few steps, the cacophony of sounds from the large boulevards packed with cars disappears and is replaced with a dense and comfortable silence, as if you had traversed an invisible membrane. Other noises and sounds become very sharp and clear: the wind blowing among the courtyard trees, the screeching of old bicycles, the echoes of small domestic actions—sweeping, cooking, arranging things. You hear people’s footsteps; you hear them clearing their voices, spitting and throwing cards and insults around improvised playing tables in the way only practiced gamblers do. You hear mothers and aunties calling little kids and commenting on the weather and the price of vegetables. These and other daily lives compose a contemporary epic, before gentrification will wipe it all out.

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

Artists and writers who come in from the outside might not seize the mysterious moment when you see a party member discreetly entering the door of one of the few high-end traditional courtyards. Nearby, some middle-class guy “who made it a bit” (but not enough to move to the suburbs yet) is celebrating his new-car-washing ritual, pouring liquid soap on the hood of his (Audi, Volvo, BMW, Mercedes, Jeep), gently caressing it with a large sponge. Somehow, through some modification of space-time, the narrow hutongs can even accommodate cars. Only Beijng’s fluffy cats seem to continue with an obstinate strategic resistance by urinating on the cars’ alloy wheels, forcing the owners to use rectangular wooden boards to protect the precious “feet” of their expensive new toys.

The hutongs’ unwritten laws are endless, subtle or even invisible, very complex, and severe, all carefully supervised by retired people wearing red bands on their arms, each of whose wise and cheerful countenance hides more than fifty years of intelligence experience. If you have lived here long enough, you know that this is a whole, organic, unpredictable, un-designed rhythm of time, architectures, objects, humans, vehicles, behaviors, conventions, sounds, smells, and noises. It has the quality of a “form:” something more complex, pulsing, and alive than the sum of its constituent parts. It is not a harmonious space in the repressive, nostalgic fashion promoted by the Communist Party’s rhetoric, and it is in no way smart, ecofriendly, or pristine enough to satisfy the gurus of cutting-edge urbanist theory.

This is a once-unified space that has been torn apart and is now held together, wounded and fractured, against all odds, only by the flexibility and the resilience of its community. In this sense, with its living contradictions and missing-future logic, Beijing’s old center remains poetic and real.

I worry that well-meaning cultural projects such as “Baitasi Remade” exist only as the “language” of a certain discourse that cannot be rooted consistently in time because in doing so, it would lose its very specific quality: to be applicable anywhere, in a quick, invasive, and systematical fashion, aiming for a strong but temporary presence. I am afraid this kind of operation is too similar in design to the notion of exporting democracy or progress, because the forces behind it do not have culture and community as primary objectives.

At most, they are merely gimmicks with hidden purposes, and instrumental in pursuit of different goals. Intervening with a top-down, large-scale plan (no matter how conceptually respectful it is) in a local area ultimately modifies its economy and causes a shift of sensibility, as its inhabitants might perceive themselves differently in comparison with the new “trendy” atmosphere. If they are not pushed out, local people are at risk of becoming caricatures of themselves. In the end, there is no difference between the preservation of the last buffalo at Yellowstone and the “taking care” of a community of individuals who are “typical” and different because they just don’t belong in the world of the dominant economic paradigm.

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

When it comes to community-related projects, the problem for contemporary art, architecture, and strategic design is not much different from that of a more open participatory and socially engaged practice: there are no guarantees, no magic formula, and no theory with which to reach out to a community of people with no previous experience or exposure. There will always be a degree of intrusion, a level of imposition, and a distance that it won’t be possible to reduce completely. It will never be a dialogue between equals unless artistic practice systematically becomes available to everyone at home or in the workplace, and everywhere else—but then it would be something else that we do not know and cannot name now.

The difference we can make is that of choosing a more or less flexible approach, and a degree of compromise and deviation from the original idea if we see that this can open up the dialogue in a better way, as opposed to assuming that our concept/project/design should not be influenced once it has been defined. I think this involves a degree of responsibility that many people would deny in favor of total artistic freedom, but, honestly speaking, once in direct contact with reality and relational issues, this expression loses any meaning. Even if we plan to provoke or subvert, how can we not respond if we want the work to be meaningful? In the end, no matter how we might sympathize with the hutong inhabitant who delivers water bottles all day, or study his situation and that of his peers with big-data methods, when he is riding his sanlunche down the alley, we lose him. I remember walking around Baitasi during Design Week enjoying all sorts of architectural experiments, urban planning projects, community-related workshops, challenging visions, and eco-sustainable projects, all hosted with benevolence by the local people in their neighborhood. I enjoyed both the projects and the hospitality, but I kept asking myself how much of all this was accessible, enriching, or empowering for the local residents. I truly believe that the mere presence of something actually modifies an environment, especially if we are talking about a creative experience. I am not sure if this sudden modification without lasting engagement is really worthwhile, but still I want to think that it is. I felt proud to take part to an independent artists’ group show in an abandoned courtyard that tried to be so minimally poetic and anti-design as to become a sort of question mark from inside the whole event.

But again, who among the residents could have grasped the logic of this intervention and the implicit references to critique and resistance? By entering the complex cultural “form” of Baitasi with our philosophical and aesthetic conflicts, and with supposed intellectual, scientific, and sociological expertise, who are we talking to? Who is the audience for all this? What does a three-to-five-year development plan that needs more artists and creative people around imply?

Building high-thinking and quite expensive re-interpretative models of courtyard houses next to the current ones is important to send a message about the preservation of the city’s heritage. But, frankly, who will eventually live in those houses (they will be showrooms in most cases) and who could afford them, if they were to become an actual policy and not just a pilot experiment? And then what is the heritage? Aren’t people a major, if not the fundamental, part of a place’s heritage? Aren’t these people those who “know more” about the place, those who have occupied it longer, those who shaped it in their own way? The whole point about intervening in historical areas is built around the notion of memory, but memory has a narrative, while in operations like this, barely any consistent narrative is built. There is no social memory added, just the transient non-narrative and intrusive actions of a bunch of experts who next year will be targeting another place somewhere else. A new group will eventually come around and experiment further and so on until the five-year plan is accomplished. In this way, the persistence of the memory activity becomes a fetish thing, emptied of its original organic sense.

The title of a 2005 work by the Palestinian artist Walid Raad is “We Can Make Rain but No One Came to Ask”. The problem with the so-called “culture industry” is that it is not something demanded, or wished for, but comes as a top-down, highly competitive and quickly implemented process that too easily generates disruption instead of sustainable development. And the worst danger, as suggested by the Shoreditch episode, is that instead of fostering a desire for culture, the shift of sensibilities can result in people feeling embattled, ignored, and excluded to the point of rejecting this culture with a big “C” that is “fooling” them instead of “emancipating” them.

陈启智,《抓住胡同》系列,2014–2015 / Yves Chan You, Hutongs Grab series, 2014–2015

陈启智,《抓住胡同》系列,2014–2015 / Yves Chan You, Hutongs Grab series, 2014–2015

In a memorable interview in the early 1970s, Pier Paolo Pasolini, talking about gentrification and consumerism, said, “Before society became permeated in all aspects by economic and consumerist values, lower classes were proud of their popular model because, although illiterate, they somehow were in touch with the mystery of reality. As a natural consequence, when they started being ashamed of their ignorance, they also started to despise culture miming the small-bourgeois attitude imposed on them.” Today’s China is quite different from Italy in the 1970s, but it would not be completely odd to think of few similarities based on some common characteristics of the two societies (the family and community model and the importance of the informal networks of relationships). Saskia Sassen in a recent article for the Guardian entitled “Who Owns Our Cities—and Why This Urban Takeover Should Concern Us All” expands a large-scale analysis of all aspects of aggressive gentrification in various big cities around the world. At one point she remarks: “A large, mixed city is a frontier zone where actors from different worlds can have an encounter with no rules of engagement and where the powerless and the powerful can actually meet. This also makes cities spaces of innovations, large and small. And this includes innovations by those without power: even if they do not necessarily become powerful in the process, they produce components of a city, thus leaving a legacy that adds to its cosmopolitanism.”

Within such a mixture of complexity and incompleteness lies the possibility for those without power to have a voice and assert, “We are here, this is also our city.” I think this statement should be a memento to artists and creative people whenever they engage in public space and historic-area renovation programs. Even in China, despite the further layer of complexity represented by the gray areas in which government policies and authority cannot be challenged or verified, it is still important not to lose trust in the possibility of mobilizing vibrant energies that can have a valuable impact on public space and local communities.

To borrow from Jean Baudrillard, the organizers of projects such as Beijing Design Week should first ask themselves what the difference is between the smile of the critical distance, and that of collusion.

陈启智,《抓住胡同》系列,2014–2015 / Yves Chan You, Hutongs Grab series, 2014–2015

陈启智,《抓住胡同》系列,2014–2015 / Yves Chan You, Hutongs Grab series, 2014–2015

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)

“白塔寺区域重建”项目,北京设计周,2015(图片由北京设计周提供)/ “Baitasi ReMade” project, Beijing Design Week, 2015 (courtesy Beijing Design Week)