"How to provide sustainable and affordable housing for middle and low class in China?"

Picture 1 /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Guest house in Beijing suburban area.

   Owning by an old women helping by three āyí (house keeper), this guest house is one of the numerous temporary housing you can find in and nearby Beijing (usually from 6 months to 2 years). Discussing with people I learned that most of people choosing this temporary accomodation are people coming from the country side. Decided to live with very low cost housing for a while in order to be able to buy one in the future. Regarding the context you can also find other customer profile, like for exemple, around Tsinghua university there is many graduated students who decided to pursuie their study and have to live there because dormitory are dedicated to first cycle students.

     But the most interesting aspect of this kind of guest house is the way it evolve. 

Picture 2 /////////////////////////// Example of the evolution of the guest house previously presented

    I can realized that most of this building wasn't desitaned to be guest house from the begining. Here is a simplification building evolving steps. 
    +1: Original building: originaly house or farm, this part has been built by construction company or people themself. Strong long life strucure. 
    +2: Extension 1: Here is the first extension built most of time by the first owner himself. Based on same construction principales it had been designed to welcome new child or grand parents moving from country side to cities.
    +3: Extension 2: Could be storage, bicycle parking lot or other functional spaces.
    +4: Extension 3: New floor. It depend on the period of construction but an interesting case is when people use prefab solution and make it fit directly on the 1st floor ( cf: picture 3).
    +5: Extansion 4: Buying by the actual owner, the house had transforming to guest house. Then the main point had been to optimize the space. 4 more rooms made with prefab solutions had been add replacing an vegetable garden. The building had been partitionate in full of as small as possible rooms. Today the whole block count 35 rooms.

     I had also observed this incredible ability to expanse building in many other cases (Historic districts: Hutong in Beijing, Jimolu in Qingdao / Country side: Qingdao and Beijing country side and suburban area.)

Picture 3 ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Prefab second floor

     Strong community

   The second aspect I had been interested in is the strong community developped in these guest house. Students cohabit with working peoples and every body respect Nai nai (grand mother in Chinese) as every body call the place owner. Every body share the same shower, the same living room or toilets in a friendly atmosphere. Some shift had been organized by guests themselves which permit this community to run well.
    When we ask them, people living there want to find a new place to live because they feel don't safe with renting. But they know they will sorely find an other place based on friendly community. Old people even regret their country side where everyone know his neighboor.

A group of forward-thinking collaborators plan to design and deliver a single family home in Ghana as an open-source house (image courtesy of Open Source House, http://www.os-house.org).

Most of us are aware of open source software (Linux operating system, for instance), but how about an open source house (OS-House)?

In June 2009, a "mixed, enthusiastic group of young people" (as they prefer to be known) came together to build an affordable, eco-friendly house in Ghana. They were deliberately targeting lower middle class citizens in developing countries so they could avoid donor dependence, according to the case study the group had posted online.

Would it be possible to developped this kind of association in China? 

   Jimolu is an area of the Qingdao cultural center. As Qingdao has been colonized by Germany its architecture is a real mixed between German architecture structures build with Chinese regional materials. Hopefully this history tresor survive to Chinese developpment and had been wildely investigate by Chinese community.

+ Who live in Jimolu?

Living here for many generations old people become attached to this area. By interviewing them I learned that their is three main reason why they don't want to move to brand new buildings:
- They can't find anywhere else a strong community as they have today. 
- Health: The old Chinese concept lead them to leave at the first floor ( close the earth ). Their are also affraid about elevator and can't use stairs.
-  Conveniency: Close to their market they can also get help from friends and don't want to discover a new area where they will need time to get used to their environment.

Most of those people are affraid about the future. They see more and more areas around erasing to build new roads or new buildings.

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At the opposite of my hypothesis, young people live their also. But this is for completely different reason. Indeed as real estate developper they speculate about the future of those district. Most of time they buy an appartment waiting for that the governement erased it and rehouse them in brand new one.

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For people who can speak french or Chinese, Connexions is magazine editing by the CCFIC ( chambre de commerce et de l'industrie Française en Chine). Each edition is about a whole and complex subject about Chinese society, politic. Well documented and involving many experts about Chinese context, I really recommended every body to have a look on it.

Download Pdf versions
- n53: Shanghai 2010, the chinese soft power
  n52: Global warming, China prepare itself
  n51: Social responsability of Chinese companies
- Download more

Management/ Time line

+Plannification is a key to anticipate your needs and never be block in your project. This is also a good way to commun icate your project and let people know about are your expectations.

Whole time line

Linked to the experts needs, my project time permitted me to get an over view of my project from the beginning (July 2010) to the end (February 2010). I dissect my project in four steps:
- Step 0: Opening the scope of my whole context.
- Step 1: Context refinement to precised my researches.
- Step 2: Conceptualization
- Step 3: Product development 

- Step 0: Opening the scope of my whole context.

- Step 1: Context refinement to precised my researches.

- Step 2: Conceptualization

- Step 3: Product development 

Picture by: Wayne Haag

   I have been created this blog in order to talk about my end-study project. In China for one year, I will stay here for another 6 months in order to complete my diploma project. But now let me introduce my subject.

Subject
   In the quick urbanization process of China nowadays (Urbanization rate today: 37% / 50% in 2050), how and where does people will live and in which city configuration? For many years the Chinese government have been used to erased buildings or district in order build brand new one with more housing capabilities and most of time providing a better way of life. But after years different problems come out. First of all it seems that a large part of the population cannot afford accomodation because the property speculation is growing faster than people way of life and their purchasing power. Even if the government is building more and more buildings in order to turn the demand low down than the offer, housing price keep going up. In this context the main problem is the quality of the construction espacially regarding the energy consumption. A chinese housing consumes 2 to 3 times more energies than developped countries because they are not built following energetic standards and even today these standard are rarely  applied.  Even if the gouvernemt is developing norms to reduce living area energy consumption, the way of building is very hard to change for many reasons: 
 - Province do not apply or do not have the ability to apply these norms.
 - Some sectors as collective heating are still manage by the government and suffer of low cost rate which do not low down the consumption. Here the country scale is important, indeed if changement are needed, it have to be deep one which is very hard to apply at this hudge scale of country. 
- The Chinese sustainable material market is just borning and green technologies take time to be adopted by all actors in the building sectors.

Architecture industrialization
    This is in this way that I focussed on the industrialization of architecture. Indeed the industrial way of producing bring quality and permit to reduce the producing cost. The main point is that you can concentrate talents and knowledge in order to developped energy efficient product at lower price with better quality. Then you can produce full of imputs product avoiding the chinese problem of provinces and knowledge transmission.