Red Vienna, Old Beijing and Socialist Modernism

the housing project and the edge of Utopia

In the 1980s when I was teaching English at Peking University, the city was shrouded in coal smoke. The tinkling of millions of bicycle bells filled the streets. There was one privately owned restaurant, run by the former chef of the Chinese Embassy in Moscow from him courtyard home. We cycled there to eat Chicken Kiev, his speciality. He made his own mayonnaise. After no Western food for months and lots of salted pork and cabbage stir fry in the university canteen, this was a delicacy worth the trek. There were a few famous state run Peking duck restaurants in the heart of town. You had to get special tickets to eat there. The grey brick walls of the hutongs, or narrow alleyways behind which old Beijingers lived dominated large swathes of the city. I was invited to a Professor’s house for dinner. His many roomed courtyard house had been divided into various apartments. He was an old school scholar type who had survived the Cultural Revolution. Down the alley way from his house were public toilets, latrines that served hundreds of people. It was a cloacal nightmare to have to go pee at the end of a great meal, but this was old Beijing.

In this article, Danwei (work unit) housing is also being revisited as an important part of the history of Chinese urbanization and central planning. Work unit housing connected workers to factories: low slung apartment built in the modernist, no nonsense Frankfurt social housing style provided modern amenities for workers in Beijing Number Two Factory, an immense complex putting workers close to the sites of production. The rents were nominal, but the apartments were centrally heated and had running water. There were communal kitchens where you could get cheap food like mantou or huajuan, the steamed breads famous in Northern China. The apartments had rudimentary kitchens and spartan but large communal bathhouses, hospitals, schools and basic recreational facilities. The factories were not ‘efficient’ by capitalist measure and the central planning system and housing allocations led to abuses of privileges and corruption, but it’s good to see scholars revisiting this moment of Chinese urban history.

Hutongs are being preserved by young Chinese designers, architects, urban professionals who see the value in these old structures.

Today, China’s real estate market comprises almost 30% of China’s economic activity, but the market is going bust and this is effecting every aspect of the economy. Economist Noah Smith calls the real estate China's Achilles' Heel.

The article I really wanted to comment on was the New York Times piece on the Renter's Utopia that is Viennese social housing. The article is incredibly detailed about the way in which these large urban housing projects sustain themselves financially, while also offering a history of how these complexes came to be built during the period of Red Vienna,1923-1934, when the Social Democratic government built 64,000 units of housing. Apartments were rented to workers at 3.5% of their incomes.

After World War II, the government continued to invest in public housing.

In the United States, social housing was also built after the war. Within two decades of the completion of the Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis, they were declared unlivable. Marred by crime and neglected by the local government, the large apartment buildings were seen as a monument to the failure of Utopian thinking in the housing sector. The Pruitt Igoe Myth is a documentary about the destruction of the projects in 1972, an event hailed by post-modernists as the beginning of a new era of architectural innovation.

I talk in more detail about Pruit Igoe on Jacobin TV in an interview recorded during the pandemic.

The Viennese projects represent the lasting legacy of social housing: the Viennese didn’t blow up the projects to create spaces for market driven urban renewal. What I learned from the New York Times article is that the 30 year mortgage and mortgage deductions were New Deal innovations to encourage homeownership during the Depression. These policies created greater segregation in urban development, (redlining) and made housing a speculative and a debt instrument capable of disciplining workers become homebuyers.

I will stop here on the topic for today. Lots more to say here, but the day job calls.

I just watched Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette and I will not be writing an essay or anything substantial about “It’s Pablo-matic.”