CONSTRUCTION WORKER HOUSING IN SHANGHAI INVESTIGATIONS OF URBAN MOBILITY – PART 2

Urban mobility in China, is intrinsically linked to prefabricated housing, and speaks to the constant need for inexpensive and practical housing for its floating population. As elucidated in Part One, the cultural and economic conditions that characterize the migrant worker in China are dynamic, complex and intrinsic.  Symptomatic of China’s ongoing modernization process, prefabricated housing for the migrant worker is concerned less with settlement, housing shortages, recycling and adaptation, cultural identity or a host of other issues that typify other contexts.  Rather, prefabricated construction standardized design and material palette purportedly satisfies the basic social needs of hygiene, safety and security for an economic subset that is fragmentary and ephemeral. 

While prefabrication permeates all facets of the building industry, prefabricated housing design outside of China has been characterized by a history of prototyping and conceptual development with often limited production and appeal.  Application is reflected with lifestyle design in developed countries to relief and social design in impoverished contexts.  Concepts from pioneers like Moshe Safdie, Buckminster Fuller and Jean Prouvé remain provocative, while contemporary experiments run the gamut from Kieran Timberlake’s Cellophane House to Teddy Cruz’s Maquiladora structural system. Sandy Hirshen, an architect with Henriquez Partners characterizes the renewed interest in prefabricated housing in three distinct sectors: “housing the poor well; co-housing [a group of individuals buy land and build to suit their collective needs]; and housing the super rich who want a house in a hurry in some ski area.”

Recent didactics attempting to requalify the significance of this prefab-is-once-again-fab industry appear to have focused on new technologies, formal properties and user branding; highlighting the avant-garde conceit of a generalized solution that will unlikely solve problems across disparate economic, social and environmental contexts.  Serving educated, moneyed consumers, architecture practice in the USA, Europe and Japan, has met “good intention” head on with design creativity and environmental sustainability.  More noteworthy examples include lifestyle branding around a modern aesthetic, SIP (structural insulated panel) design, straw bale construction,  reinvention of suburban row houses, and the quintessential recycled shipping container.  For reasons perhaps different to the space conscious prefabrication culture in Japan, prefabricated design has spawned lifestyle changes with groups and designers elsewhere that advocate different ideological interpretations of essential living design ranging from the PACO cube, to the Tiny House, Micro House, MC-H and Small House Society.  Targeting more mainstream culture, Japan’s version of IKEA called Muji now offers a line of prefabricated homes as a retroactive spatial organizer of their extensive minimalist home décor product line, while Toyota has tentatively begun to explore the prefab housing market as a line extension. Promoting the international car maker as “more than cars”, the Toyota’s automotive strategy of a “skeleton and infill” is used to segment their offerings into three price and style classes.  As Karrie Jacobs points out, architects are traditionally trained to think of each building as a one-off. Prefab architects have arguably evolved in this sense to embrace production as a means to transform the culture of architecture.

In contrast, China’s development of this market appears largely limited to industrial prefabrication from firms like CCHP with quips like “create an ideal living space”, Prefab Houses, and Beijing CHT which produces the stylized suburban American Steel Villa  product line.   Perhaps because architects are conspicuously absent in this market segment, the product is neither chic in appearance nor glamorous sounding like Flatpak or Kithaus.  As China’s self-professed leading supplier of prefabricated homes, Yaoda’s motto of “One Day, One Home” seems strangely incongruous and something of an understatement.  Pragmatism rather than idealism dictates that these prefabricated modular designs serve as part of the support infrastructure for the Concrete Dragon, an apt neologism describing China’s prodigious urban development.  Our field analysis primarily around the 2010 World Exposition site has identified prefabricated construction worker housing and ad-hoc variants for migrant laborers.

The ad hoc housing we observed was constructed primarily of rolled corrugated metal sheeting serving both walls and roof, and supported with steel construction scaffolding lashed together in a manner not unlike the more traditional bamboo scaffolding.  One example, located on the site of the soon to be main entrance to the Exposition, took advantage of a perimeter wall for structural support and a degree of privacy.  The corrugated sheets were not structurally insulated and as a result have poor thermal properties.  The sheeting was tied together with wire at the joints to resist wind lift. No windows were evident, but light an air came in through gaps at joints. Electricity to power a small television, kettle and 2 exposed light bulbs were supplied by a generator outside.  The entrance was not secured, although the structure was visible to a large radius and was occupied at the time of our observation. Migrant workers are typically allocated five square meters in a dormitory and, in extreme cases, only two square meters.  In this instance, two units, each approximately 6 x 3m, accommodated two makeshift double bunk beds and a single bed using dedicated commercial bed framing and engineered wood partition panels to support the mattress.  No toilet facilities were evident, suggesting these workers had to use communal facilities across the street or unused portions of the construction site.  Workers washed themselves in their quarters. Living in the cheapest and most crowded accommodation, the workers subsist on basic meals of vegetables and noodles for as little as 5.00 RMB a bowl. Statistically migrant workers occupy on average of fewer than seven square meters per person which is half of the size of local workers’ accommodation. According to the China Labor bulletin, migrant workers subsist on a minimum so as to provide money to family back home.

The 2010 World Exposition site from which most of our analysis was derived, organized the prefabricated housing units and related utility structures on main arterials and at the perimeter of subdivided zones.  Within a color coding system of the roofs, worker housing was blue.  Of the areas observed, worker housing was typically the first structure to be assembled once the space was cleared of debris and leveled.  Assembly of a standard unit was done by 3 unskilled workers at a rate of about sixty square meters per day. The deck which rises about 10cm above grade forms a monolithic base to which vertical I-channels and a horizontal track are secured.  The vertical channels are continuous for a double storey structure much like balloon framing in wood light-frame construction.  A steel space frame supports the upper floor and is short-spanned between the two exterior walls to which it connects via an integrated ledger shoe on the vertical channel.  The suspended floor comprises an engineered wood board attached to a corrugated SIP (Structural Insulated Panel) presumably for acoustic and thermal insulation, which sits atop another engineered board connected to shallow beams that span across the space frame system.  Wall panels are also structural insulated panels comprising a two metal tension layers acting and a thick EPS insulation core.   The wall assemblies are outfitted with operable modular double-pane windows every alternate section for ventilation and light.  The corrugated roof panels were supplied color coded in widths that correspond with the wall assembly.  The entire structure was made rigid and wind-resistant up to 100 Km /hr with steel tension cables tying the vertical channels laterally. The typical larger prefabricated housing unit on the Exposition site was approximately 24 x 6m and two stories high with either a single or dual-pitch roof.  Transport of the flat-pack assembly is typically done in shipping containers.  China’s leading construction housing suppliers market their designs as recyclable with a 20 year lifespan and up to 10 reuses.

Given the high profile nature of the Exposition, the shanty housing structures described earlier would seem substandard, drawing unwanted attention from the international watchdogs.  Research suggests that this kind of practice is not uncommon, if not broadcasted in China.  Even with presumably the best intentions of a developer, the hiring and management of workers is outsourced which may introduce compromises for the sake of profit and convenience.  Reasons for the observed disparity in housing standard might include the need for makeshift housing for newly added workers, temporary structure for rest between shifts and workers unable to challenge the status quo.