HOUSING CHINESE DREAMS

The Chinese Dream is President Xi Jinping's integrative and transformative vision for China, with the goals to achieve "a great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation". However, the realities in China seem to be far from the conditions of a dream. The emerging Chinese middle class are eager to join the army of slaves to their impossible mortgages for their bedroom town homes, in fulfillment of what the modern Chinese psychodynamics have collectively decided to be a necessity in pursuance of a good life. So, where are the capacities of the Chinese Dream for the individuals in this modern times? The dream has to address the deteriorating sense of belonging and home of the millions of working middle class, before it can even consider itself a collective effort. The individuals should be encouraged to dream and strive, in order for this to happen, the fundamentals of a good living environment must be collectively accessible. Studies on the collective forms of housing in China's recent history had shed light onto the importance of urban elements such as the hutong network and socialist work unit in social control. However, a case study on China's gated housing models had also opened up discussions on what a complete razing of culture, history and forced resettlements had done in the name of providing quantities of housing within China's neoliberal shift. This thesis explores the elements of providing quality living environments for this group of people that have been called upward-mobile, tech-savvy and entrepreneurial. With the idea of owning a house becoming increasingly important to the Chinese middle class, architecture attempts to bridge gaps between the realities of the sub-par housing towers in gated peripheral areas and the dying traditions of collectivism. By looking at the success of the hutong and danwei dormitories as spaces for social order as well as spaces for commercial and social interaction, a translation of this is deemed to be emulated in modern housing. A super-hybrid of dwellings and designed "programmatic infection" is bound to happen by studying the development of "dream-like" housing prototypes in history.M.S. in Architecture, July 201