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“What a weird city Beijing is.”

The first time when I arrived in my college in Chaoyang District in Beijing, from Shanghai, four years ago, I was murmuring to myself.

Before coming to Beijing in-person, my knowledge toward Beijing was the dignifying Tiananmen Squire and talkative Beijing grandpas with a sense of justice and a honorable accent, most of which came from media image. To my surprise, dirty streets, rugged sidewalk, and mixed flowing population consist of an image around my college, Communication University of China.

As you can see from the image, our college is located in far away from the center of the city.Relatively low living cost (including rent and price of product) attract as many immigrants as possible to settle down, living here together with us college students. 

What was our students’ most unforgettable experience was  hanging out with classmates or boyfriend/girlfriend along the west street after class, usually it was evening. Multiple flavor street food was made by people from different places. They talk to us passionately, asking our preference, who wants more sauce and who prefers less spicy. My favorite was a snake called roast noodles, which was the Northeast characteristic (see picture below). Plenty of smell consist of a pleasant symphony, just as the ballet mentioned by Jacobs in The Death and Life of American Cities.

 

However, inevitable noise ofter break-in. Those vendors along the west street had to confront with city guards. Although they set a we-chat group to share information about when and where city guards would show up, increasingly severe policy left no space for them to survive through making street food. Once one or two city guards appeared, a marathon competition would be put up immediately in the west street. Those who were caught by city guards, their production tools would be certainly confiscated, which, very likely, to be the majority of their properties. What’s worse, around 2000RMB fine, approximately their monthly income, is needed. Being caught by a city guard means a catastrophe to them.

As pre-journalists, we interviewed many of the vendors, trying to help them through our shallow experience and knowledge. However, books and research tell us that, it is impossible to save mobile vendors from the reorganization of cities.(see relevant news release by CUC-Action, which belongs to School of Journalism)

The major concern with street food is certainly, sanitary problem. According to an informal survey, among vendors around our college, nobody could provide his or her health certificate, not to say their food. It really shocked us when somebody claimed that the woman who sold Yunnan Rice was probably suffering from hepatitis B, though not proved to be true, students were not encouraged to buy street food by school official. 

As a result, street food disappeared as well as some small mobile vendors, and the west street became drab and dour since last year. Although street trading was encouraged this year, to relive unemployment problems brought by Covid-19, I don’t think street food will prosper again like it used to be. Time has changed, without consciousness. 

  In the first chapter Spaces of Everyday Diversity, the concept of ABCs, namely art galleries, boutiques, and cafes is brought up by the authors to refer to a kind of transnational sign of gentrification. While reading it, it reminds me of my experience of exploring Beijing Hutongs, where I think the term ABCs is very well applied. 

  Beijing is famous for its Hutong, a kind of architecture that has very long history and is well preserved to the present days. It represents a city look that is unique to Beijing and is culturally meaningful. Until now, it is still the living spaces for many citizens in Beijing. I’ve lived in Beijing for more than 4 years and from my experience, I think Hutongs are definitely not merely places for people to reside, but places that can serve tourism and commerce functions, and places where people can spend a whole day walking along and then having a rest anytime they want.

  In Beijing, different Hutongs attract different groups of people. For instance, the one that is the favorite of tourists is called Nanluoguxiang. In the four years of time when I lived in Beijing, whenever I went there, that place is always full of people coming from all over China. In recent years, it has become a must-go site when someone travels in Beijing. However, this place is just too commercialized partly due to its booming tourism. It is filled with mediocre food stalls and restaurants, boring souvenir shops, clothes shops where tourists are willing to buy some little stuffs for prices that are not low actually. There is no doubt that this place contains huge commercial values and provides those shops with a great opportunity to make money from tourists, but the crowds and shops that lack personality and characters just makes it an ordinary pedestrian area that is frequented by tourists in any other city.

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  Compared to the never-ending noise in Nanluoguxiang, Wudaoying, another Hutong in Beijing seems to be a bit quieter and more comfortable, and much less crowded. This place is a famous site for “Wenyiqingnian”, which refers to young people who love culture and arts. This place has a lot of great coffee shops that serve much better coffee than that someone buy in Starbucks. At Wudaoying, restaurants specialized in cuisines from all over the world can be found, and boutique shops are also another kind of attraction of the place. Although there are also tourists at Wudaoying, it is more liked by local people who spend their weekends and holidays there to hang out with friends, have brunch and enjoy a cup of nice coffee.

  It is true that places like coffee shops, boutique shops, and fancy restaurants can also be found anywhere else in a city, but when they are all gathered in a place where historical atmosphere is as strong as it is in a Beijing Hutong, I think this gives a very different feeling that one can enjoy modern pleasures in a comparatively old surrounding and environment represented by architectures. This is the unique charm that ABCs have in Beijing Hutong.

 

In The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs offered an interesting insight on how different streets and communities provide people with different degrees of safety and comfort. I strongly agree with the point that it is not the density of population that decides how safe a street could be. Take my own experience for example. When I studied in NYU New York, I chose to live in Jersey City instead of NYC, because I felt my own safety could be more guaranteed in Jersey City. I have visited my friend’s apartment in midtown Manhattan (near K-town), and her apartment was surrounded by a lot of restaurants, bars and shopping malls. I concede that place was so busy and alive, but it didn’t provide me any sense of safety. To me, all the pedestrians are potential threats and could suddenly start an attack. In Jersey city, however, the street I lived was with more living facilities, such as grocery stores, markets, and parks. There were less people on the street at night, but when I passed them, I felt they were community members just like me and would be willing to lend a hand to others who got in trouble. I could smell a rich flavor of life from them, which comforted me a lot. It is hard to give explicit standards on classifying the safety level of different streets, but there are always dynamics among people on the street that convey their emotional states and their identities in relation to the street.

In Global Cities, Local Street, Zukin talked about how local culture and global trends converge in local shopping streets, and how the shift of the shopping street reflects the social changes happened in the local area. As the author states: “the aesthetic of the shopping street is a collective projection of social class and cultural capital”. I agree that the aesthetic preference expressed by a shopping street is designed to attract people from certain social group. and in turn shapes the local culture and educates the inhabitants. However, sometimes I also feel that some shopping streets only have exhibitionary value but are not able to provide people with any sense of belonging. One example I could think of is the Nanluoguxiang（South Luogu Lane) in Beijing. Nanluoguxiang is popular among young people because pf all kinds of snacks and small shops. Many stores are with delicate designs and ideal for taking pictures. What I feel strange about that street is that it doesn’t provide any kind of cultural sense but only consumerism. When a shopping street becomes famous, we always try to label it with a certain tag to account for its popularity. For example, Tianzifang is famous for its artistic atmosphere, whereas Houhai(a street in Beijing) is famous as a bar street and well-known for its rock culture. However, in Nanluoguxiang, some stores sell traditional Chinese street food, some sell western fast food, some sell originally designed clothes, whereas others sell chain brand products. It is hard to imagine those different kinds of products coexist on one shopping street, but they are sold there in a strange but harmonious way. Those stores are opened on that street not to built a space for certain social group to inhabit or to contribute to certain cultural atmosphere. Stores in Nanluoguxiang are just built to invite people to consume. Every day after 11:00 pm, after both shop owners and tourists leave the street, Nanluoguxiang becomes an empty hole in the middle of the city. To some extent, Nanluoguxiang is a great example of the integration trend of global culture, but on the other hand, it also reveals the nihility and rootlessness behind it.

Here you can see the appearance of Nanluoguxiang.

https://youtu.be/VhiR_Prq57A

For Jacobs, to guarantee streets in cities safe is the surveillance not from police but the residents along it so that “these public street spaces have eyes on them as continuously as possible” (p. 36). This requires “a substantial quantity of stores and other public spaces along the sidewalks in a district…enterprises and public spaces that are used by evening and night” (p. 36). While bars, night clubs and cinemas play the role of guard in many cities in other countries, in China, restaurants, street stalls and 24-hour convenience stores shoulder this kind of responsibility unconsciously.

 

This relates to one part of Chinese food culture: the culture of midnight snack. Whether “Daipaidang” (a kind of sidewalk food booth often holding a larger area than usual food stalls) or Chinese BBQ, whether night markets (often set just on the street) or food street, from the evening until early morning, searching a midnight snack is a social and cultural lifestyle. People sitting on the “cheap” plastic chairs along or on the streets, eating, drinking, talking and laughing, that is so-called Chinese character. The noise and the smoke are the best protectors of the streets lasting nearly all over the night. There is a series of documentaries called “The Story Of Chuaner” (人生一串 in Chinese, link is here), which records Chinese BBQ stalls all over China and the stories between owners and customers, revealing such life attitude. In addition, Japanese-style 24h convenience stores such as 7-11 and Lawson set all over the big cities like Shanghai or Hangzhou also increase the safety of streets.

 

Besides, many small restaurants or other types of food stores in China are located along the neighborhoods. Though there is a trend that many trendy and “high-status” restaurants — many of them are chain stores — are located in plaza or shopping malls, often the lowest and highest floors for them, those individual or family-owned restaurants or street malls are still vital in Chinese cities. Zukin, Kasinitz and Chen wrote in their book that “shopping streets in low-income and working-class neighborhoods rarely appear in online blogs and travel guides, and are certainly not depicted as hip, cool, or trendy” (p. 20), yet it is not the case in terms of food part of Chinese streets. These old, small and “untidy” eateries are still very attractive for Chinese, because they are seen as the representation of “true Chinese food”. In fact, searching old eateries is becoming the trend in China, “The Story Of Chuaner” which gained a huge public attention as an example. This prevents the disappearance of these “eyes” all over the streets, which leads to a certain level of safety in streets.

 

The food delivery apps can also be functional at some level, even though it pushes people from streets back to home. Because of the midnight snack culture, Chinese like ordering food on Apps in the midnight. In this way, thousands of delivery boys go across big or small streets at night, in other words, they become “the mobile eyes”. In order to be faster, delivery boys will choose those shorter pathways that sometimes cover those tiny streets, which is better for protection.  

local shopping streets are not only the visible face of a neighborhood; they are vital elements of the city’s soul.

In the article Global Cities, Local Streets: Everyday Diversity from New York to Shanghai, the author Zukin and others gave a high evaluation of the local shopping streets. Anyone who has strolled in the shopping street should have experienced it: it is the shop’s sign and its exterior decoration to make us to stay and even walk into the store. Zukin and others also wrote that local shops can reflect the living conditions of the local people, and even allow people to have a better understanding of the local social class and economic conditions. I very much agree with this statement, because I believe that the shopping street is a display of external strength, and his signature can also reveal the personality of the store and even the shopper, thus shaping a unique city.

However, what I regret is that in China, this “signature culture” is being constantly undermined by the intensifying “consistency and standardization”. Until now, many times we cannot see the local characteristics from the signboards and the sidewalks of the shopping street.

In 2018, Xishan District, Kunming City, Yunnan Province, China, to improve the streetscape, stipulated that the signboards of many street businesses in the area must be unified, either “black text on a gray background” or “white text on a black background”, and even the font should be consistent. After the sign was replaced, some residents complained that the black background with white characters is a bit like a funeral, not very attractive.

After this, several districts have successively started the same “renovation of streetscape” activities, and “renovation” is actually the implementation of a uniform streetscape, requiring the same font, color, and size of signboards. The signs of “black and white”, “yellow and green” and “red and green” are frequently released.

Even in some ancient towns (old streets)  that need to highlight the unique culture and history of China, the signboards have become a unified style under the request of the government.

Behind these signs, the souls of cities are disappearing, and we can attribute these to a kind of “formalism” peculiar to China.

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The government’s reason for replacing these lights is to win a place in the “National Civilized Cities” selection. The selection indicators of civilized cities include the following aspects: city appearance, citizen morality, traffic awareness, etc. The first one is the rigid requirements for the appearance of the city. Therefore, “unity” has become the simplest and most practical unified aesthetic.

The underlying reason for this over-respect of uniformity is precise that the decision-makers ignored the characteristics of each store behind the lights and signs, and cut off the cultural genes of the shopping street. We can use the commercial street scenery of some other places in the world as a comparison.

Japan

In the streets of small cities in Japan, the traditional design of light boards, signboards, and advertising flags are still preserved. Although these advertising signs are scattered everywhere, they are not messy. Moreover, it has relatively spacious sidewalks and clean ground, making the street appear delicate.

At the same time, in the bustling urban area of Tokyo, the design of Japanese commercial street billboards is world-renowned for its scientific and technological lighting effects, reflecting a futuristic cyberpunk style. It can be seen that the street design and light signs in Japan reflect the local cultural characteristics.

Hong Kong, Macau & Taiwan

The billboards in Hong Kong and Macau are characterized by neon lights and bright colors, adding to the sense of life and human touch of the shopping street. Local signboards have also been the subject of film scenes many times and have become the city’s business card.

United Kingdom

UK rarely use outwardly extending designs. Due to the architecture, the signboard of the merchandise store is not very conspicuous as in Japan or HK. But one characteristic is that many will set up a colorful sloping shed to emphasize their image, thereby attracting and retaining customers to taste the food.

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Eliel Saarinen once said: “Let people see your city, and they can tell you what the residents pursue in culture.” So, what kind of culture are we pursuing? The design of billboards and store exterior is not only reflecting the economy but also reflecting the unique culture. The store is not just a store, but a business card of the city. While it affects outsiders’ perception of residents, it also affects residents subtly—a dim, soulless, and ruled street will not allow people to fully display and preserve their unique soul.