Rethinking Shanghai's urban housing

Abstract

Since the 1980s, Shanghai saw the massive growth of residential development in the city core, with the imminent erasure of the historical urban fabric, especially of the form of urban housing known as the lilong. As new developments take on limited typologies of towers and slab blocks, it becomes important to ask whether there are sustainable alternatives to urban housing in such a historically rich city. The paper discusses a design studio experiment at the Department of Architecture at the National University of Singapore, to see whether urban housing can take into account the urban transformation of the surrounding urban fabric and propose alternatives to the mega-superblocks favoured in the residential development of Shanghai.