The historical garden suburbs in China: A cross-cultural perspective on residential forms

Abstract

The introduction of garden suburbs has been one of the greatest changes in the physical forms of the Western city since the Middle Ages. This most obvious manifestation of this change was predominantly detached or semi-detached, single-family houses standing back in, rather than at the head of, their plots. As a concept of residential form, the garden suburbs were first adopted by developers in the United Kingdom during the second half of the19th century and became the predominant forms of urban growth in the English-speaking world, including North America, Australia, and other former British colonies. Recent research shows garden suburbs also emerged in China from the mid-19th century and were built in numerous Chinese cities during the inter-war period. Research on historical garden suburbs in China has attracted growing attention in the past 2 to 3 decades. This was influenced by the increasing interest in historical cultural landscapes, urban conservation and the development of low-density residential forms in China. Since the mid-19th century, the changes in the political system and awareness of modernisation have strongly influenced the social environment and urban development in China. As an imported concept from Western countries, garden suburbs had been introduced in the processes of increasing conflicts and communications with the outside world. This residential idea was first applied in treaty port cities in Qingdao and Dalian in north-eastern China, Nanjing and Shanghai in the Yangtze River region, and Guangzhou in the Pearl River Region, and spread to inland cities in later times. As a new type of residential development in China, garden suburbs, an advanced idea at the time, represented modernisation and progressive social ideology. Their obvious difference in physical pattern and form and development mode from the traditional Chinese residential form (e.g., courtyard houses) attracted great public interest. As a result, accompanied by rapid urban development in the republican period (1912-1948), garden suburbs were built extensively and became a new residential type showing both Western and local traditional building characteristics. Although garden suburbs offer valuable opportunities for research into phenomena such as idealistic movements, community development and notions of amenity, research on the morphology and the spread of the garden suburb idea to China has until recently been largely absent from this scholarly debate. Most research on Chinese garden suburbs focuses on the description of individual garden suburbs as a particular case study. There is a lack of systematic and more organised investigation and syntheses of the development of Chinese garden suburbs. The language barrier withWestern countries also explains the absence of international communication. Therefore, to review and analyse existing extensive research sources has become important as an initial step to holistically understand and conceptualise the history of Chinese garden suburbs. This study is to classify and analyse these existing publications which is expected to form a basis for future study. This research will use urban morphology as a conceptual framework to provide a systematic and cohesive understanding of the creation and changes of Chinese garden suburbs. The study areas which show representative characteristics of Chinese garden suburbs are located in a range of cities in the three geographical-cultural regions. They include Qingdao, Nanjing and Guangzhou. The existing literature being reviewed covers a range of disciplines, including architecture, planning and sociology. This study not only extends the use of urban morphology in the investigation of garden suburbs in China, but also advances the theoretical understanding of the seemingly imported historical urban landscape in Chinese cities.