ATMOSPHERIC DISTURBANCES

DESIGN ABSTRACT

> TRANSIENT LIVING >> Migrants and the City >

By 2025, half of Beijing’s population will be migrants, a result of an influx of internal rural – urban migration.  This wave of internal migration is accompanied by a long standing rural – urban and local -nonlocal divide which has been institutionalized by China’s household registration system, known as hukou.  Those of a nonlocal hukou status are still excluded from many urban economic and social welfare services, and a low income restricts home ownership for migrants to about 1%, resulting in the majority of migrants renting in unstable, overcrowded and low quality housing.  With most migrants living in either private/public rental housing and dormitory housing, rapid urbanization has also prompted informal housing to maximise housing density.

In comparison to local residents, there is a level of impermanence and instability in the residential patterns of migration settlement in Beijing, informed by factors such as proximity to employment, duration of residence, employment status, income level, gender and family status.  A degree of adaptation is therefore imposed, resulting in a high level of intra-urban migrant mobility; about 20% of migrants have continued to move after their arrival in Beijing, by up to 10 moves within four years.  The process of moving from rented rooms, to squatter dwellings, and then to houses, is an urban condition which is prominent in the chosen site of Jishuitan, Beijing – where there is a juxtaposition between the existing mix of traditional and modern building typologies, with many migrants initially settling in abandoned hutongs at the foot of the high-rise blocks.  As the mobility rate of many self-employed migrants such as street vendors is primarily determined by their work location and how profitable that location is for business, Jishuitan provides the urban conditions necessary to explore such transient levels of change, with its existing retail district as an initial point of attraction.  This has further attracted the migrants to set up food markets to which migrants import produce from rural areas to supply to the local demand.

To keep in line with prospective government initiatives for the integration of migrants into urban life and providing dwellings for migrants, involves the idea of developing and habituating oneself to a certain pattern, in order to adapt this drifting culture.  This directs the project to set up a new live-work strategy consisting of a food market and affordable housing for incoming migrants, to allow this progressive transformation.  This new typology will be expressed through a new rotational growth strategy to determine the constant transient flows and atmospherics which begin to ever-shape the shifting city skyline (through counter-construction).  By applying an urban nodal network system of attractive and repulsive forces identified through previous investigations, static and temporary conditions are controlled to generate a labyrinth of contracted and expanded spaces.  A diverse spatial composition of constant reconstruction within the city, creates a complex disturbance that will create the freedom of play, changing the urban environment into an instrument for traversing cultures.