In and around Beijing with Mr Yang and others : space, modernisation and social interaction

Abstract

The aim of my PhD project has been to understand how Hutong residents’ ideas about living space have been different from those living in the high-rise compound and how their concept of living space has been changed by both internal and external factors, meaning additional affiliated functions and governmental city-planning.

I conducted my fieldwork in Beijing between July 2009 and September 2012: fourteen months in total, interspersed with trips to St. Andrews. I spent ten months from July 2009 to May 2010 living in a Hutong called Xingfu Street (the word translates as ‘happiness’). Then I moved into a high-rise apartment outside the inner city, called Suojiafen Compound, for a further four months.

This study concerns space in the contemporary city of Beijing: how space is humanly built and transformed, classified and differentiated, and most importantly how space is perceived and experienced.

In the end I have developed the concept “overlapped” space as a way to detect the “personality” of space in both Hutong and high-rise apartment: how they differentiated from each other and how they have been transformed in different way by the residents inside.