Society
Heritage bulldozed as history levelled
By Zhang Yuchen (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-21 08:18
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Local community
The redevelopment project shares its name with the Chinese Baroque architecture style, which features two or three stories, a Baroque architectural facade and a backyard resembling Beijing courtyard houses. What was once China's largest group of buildings in that style was concentrated in the commercial center of Harbin in the early 1900s, when one of the first railways was built across the city.
One neighbor of that area lives at the end of Nanxun street in Daowai district, and she is staying put in her longtime home. The woman, who is in her 80s, would not let her name be used because she doesn't want to be singled out, even though all her neighbors were relocated last year.
"They are happy about the money paid by the government and eager to move into a new house, but I am not," she said. "I am old and my whole life has been spent around this neighborhood. Living in the suburb is out of the question."
Resettlement
"The Planning Bureau is helping the municipal government to improve the residents' living quality and to increase the city's development level," Ma, of the protection department, said.
The municipal government spent more than 1.3 billion yuan ($200.8 million) in the two phases of the Chinese Baroque program to relocate the residents whose homes would be razed. The city expects to have demolished all dilapidated buildings in the old commercial districts by near year, according to the Heilongjiang Daily.
It has saved some buildings. For example, Tian Feng Yuan department store, built in 1915, has revamped courtyards that flank the street and has been restored into looking new: neat, clean, larger. Zeng did take issue with the enlargement, however, because of limitations under historical protection rules.
This year, the municipal government intends to evacuate several old communities taking up about 3.6 million square meters, equivalent to half of Beijing's center city, to carry out other development programs. About 26,000 residents will be moved to the suburbs.
"What we are concerned about at present is how to get back the money" spent so far on redevelopment, Ma said. So far, fewer than five businesses have moved into the Baroque program business areas.
The second phase of Chinese Baroque, which began in October, is intended to create 10 zones earmarked for special use, including tourism and moviemaking.
"How can anyone expect those fake antiques to bring in real commercial business?" said Liu Songfu, a professor in the architecture school at Harbin Institute of Technology. "A city appears attractive because of its own unique features and characteristics. You can't cast all these old things behind, catering to the world."
'Business card'
The pace of change is so rapid, said the heritage bureau's Liu Yuncai, that cultural experts and researchers made neither proposals nor plans to protect the area.
Zeng Yizhi, the retired editor, said she was stunned by the speed of losing the architecture she loves and the city as she has known it. In 1997, Zeng was moved from the Russian-style house she had lived in since her family moved from Beijing to Harbin 50 years ago. The house had once been the Soviet consulate. Now it stands next to a nightclub.
The "business card" of Harbin can no longer proclaim the city as a treasury of architectural variety, according to Liu Songfu, the professor.
Every early summer, when the dense fragrance of lilacs fills the air, Yang Kun remembers her time in Harbin in the late 1950s. Yang, 79, has lived in Beijing for many years, but she misses the old Western-style buildings and their "wooden floors varnished with red or white paint. When I stepped on the staircase, it crunched. It felt like a cozy house.
"Businesses in the lanes and streets where I lived all prospered," Yang said. "I once walked from one district to another - the city's structure was so friendly to people who lived there."
The city is banking on prosperous commerce in the future. A program that is now under review by heritage experts would gentrify a four-block area in Nangang district, another community that dates back 100 years. Experts were told the area will become a luxury shopping zone, and a developer is awaiting plan approval.