Study on the Evolution of the Relationship between Urban Housing Space and Topography in Chongqing’s Mountainous Old-town Riverfront in China’s Reform Era: An Environmental History’s Perspective

Abstract

Before China’s post-1978 reform era, the riverfront slopes of mountainous cities in Chongqing accommodated vernacular housing landscape intertwined with mountain-water topography. During the reform, such relationship between housing and topography changed drastically. This research investigates the changing relationship between housing space and topography in Chongqing in the reform era. Environmental history investigates the history of human-nature interactions, applying social division analysis to study how different groups developed their relations when occupying natural resources, and cultural construction analysis to study how humans developed their understandings about nature. This research applies environmental history’s research framework. In the 1980s, notwithstanding the introduction of modern high-rise housing to Chongqing, the city’s riverfront housing form and local residents’ daily life adapted to topography sensitively, which was similar to the pre-1978 period. In the 1990s, intense riverfront high-rise housing development flattened riverfront slopes and seduced wealthy groups to replace local residents to live in riverfront housing with river view, interpreted by the mass as Chongqing’s loss of its mountain-water urban feature. After the late 1990s, Chongqing government started preserving the remaining riverfront vernacular housing, but driven by commercial motives, such preservation produced commercial areas themed with “traditional mountain-water cityscape” and relocated local residents, detaching topography from local residents’ daily life. The changing relationship between housing and topography signified that Chongqing’s riverfront mountainous cityscape making shifted from the mass-oriented to the elite-oriented, from serving the mass’ daily needs to serving the elite’s interests/visions, due to the fact that the urban elites were not fully aware of the significance of the housing landscape in which the mass’ daily dwelling intertwined with topography for Chongqing city’s long-term development, and that there was a lack of a mechanism supporting the preservation of such housing landscape during urban renewal.