Handshake Urbanism: Urbanus renovates Nantou, Shenzhen – and gentrifies the neighborhood

Walking into Nantou, a neighborhood of “handshake buildings” (where the structures are close enough that you can reach out and greet your neighbor in that manner) in the middle of Shenzhen, China, and you find insertions that you might not notice at first.

One of the buildings, which consists of several structures that have grown together, sports tile facades in different colors, while slits remaining between its constituent pieces have been emphasized by opening them up a bit more and a new village of forms rises on the top.

In the plaza in front of it, the brick pavement rises into stage sheltering a gallery below it, then curls up into a wall and a bench where I found someone taking their afternoon siesta.

Across the way, an apartment block has been stripped of its façade and covered with mesh, while inside a vertical slot connects the eight floors of a boutique hotel.

A former factory is now a bare concrete frame that acts as an Idea Factory filled with different creative hubs.

A bamboo pavilion marks one end of Nantou, and a preserved (though mostly recreated) set of historic structures forms the other end. Everywhere you look, Nantou is alive with stores, restaurants, renovated apartments, small ateliers and offices, and architecture.

One of the remarkable aspects of Shenzhen, a city that has exploded from a small fishing village during the post-Mao era into a metropolis with over 13 million people, is not the generally high, if generic, quality of infrastructure, green space, and even the architecture of the corporate high-rises, but also the extent to which it has preserved, recuperated, and activated the heritage of the area. That is not so strange as it might sound for an “instacity:” the area that now makes up what we call Shenzhen consisted of many villages, towns, and settlements, some of which were historically quite significant. Moreover, so much was built so quickly in the 1980s that there is a large building stock that can count as at least semi-historic. Nantou, which has roots going back to the Jin Dynasty (226-440 CE, by our reckoning) was one of the most important of the sites over which Shenzhen steamrollered. By the second decade of this century, it had turned into a dense and slightly dilapidated –but therefore also affordable—neighborhood.

The engine for its revitalization was the Shenzhen-Hong Kong Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism, which has roamed around town for more than twenty years now, renovating neighborhoods and buildings as its sites and then leaving the improvements behind as its legacy (I co-curated the 2015 edition, though our site, a factory in the Shekou district, is about to be torn down). The first of these was OCT (Overseas Chinese Town), a cluster of factories that is now a highly fashionable shopping and working district. The masterplan for its redevelopment in 2003 was penned by local firm Urbanus, under the leadership of Meng Yan, and, when they were asked to curate the 2017 Biennale, they turned to Nantou, where they had already been working, to do something similar.

Urbanus has grown up with Shenzhen, creating buildings and plans of every scale and type for the city as it has expanded and turned back on itself to improve or merely upscale itself. Their planning mode is to do a three-dimensional analysis of an area, mapping and drawing not just the structures, but the activities in a given neighborhood, and then showing ways in which life and buildings both could be intensified and extended.

In Nantou, they concentrated on creating a network of activated alleys, small plazas, and gathering spots that open the density of the project area. Most of them were existing spaces that they renovated and made more useful through small gestures such as benches, plantings, or the placement of artworks. They then worked with an international network of architects to both renovate existing buildings and add new ones. The hotel described above was designed by Shanghai-based Neri & Hu, the Idea Factory by the Dutch firm MVRDV, and the bamboo pavilion by the master of that material in architecture, the Vietnamese architect Võ Trọng Nghĩa. There is another building covered by metal mesh by NADAA, and a brick pavilion and apartment block, both designed by Beijing’s godfather of contemporary Chinese architecture, Yung Ho Chang.

Urbanus also designed several of the renovations and additions themselves, most notably the “Hybrid Building” next to the square. The result of several apartment blocks becoming so close that they reached beyond handshakes to melding, it was a dense warren of spaces. The architects cut through it, opening slits that bring light and air into its heart. They placed a new apartment and office block over the three buildings that made up the original complex. Curved, angled, and distended, this penthouse acts as a spatial band aid for the whole. They stripped parts of the building back down to concrete or brick and added tile of contrasting colors to parts of the base. The result is indeed a hybrid that drinks in, abstracts, and enlivens the area around its contours.

The problem with all this work, of course, is that it has led to gentrification. Just as OCT is now one of the trendiest neighborhoods in Shenzhen (though, after two decades it is losing its luster and audience), so Nantou is rapidly becoming the place to go for the international coterie of creatives who are turning Shenzhen from a manufacturing hub into a much more sophisticated and expensive city. When I visited recently, former students who were also in town and their local friends went there first for entertainment, without even realizing that it was an architecture pilgrimage point on my list of things to see during my own stay.

That is the paradox not just of what is happening in Shenzhen, but in major cities around the world. Architects have become much more sensitive about how they approach historic areas in need of revitalization. Instead of a bulldozer, architects such as Urbanus prefer a Sawzall, and instead of abstractions posing as public space they turn what places they find into groves, stages, oases, and small respites. The results are both instantly more livable and attractive from the standpoint of architecture. But the new inhabitants and users are inevitably well-paid professionals who quickly crowd out the local population. No matter how much the architects try to work with those locals, as Urbanus did, the reality of capitalism, even in its Chinese version, is that any investment in our physical environment demands a return, and that means gentrification.

Should one therefore not engage in efforts such as the Nantou revitalization? Or should one hope that some of the original inhabitants will hang on and will benefit from all that new money? Or that, once gentrification has peaked, the improvements will serve a wider and more diverse audience once the hot money moves on to the next trendy spot? Or, what makes more sense to me, do we see such efforts as a way in which architects are honing their skills at tactical urbanism in the, perhaps vain, hope that someday soon our social system, partially through our actions as citizens, will change to one that is more just and open?

The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine.