XINHUA: "Urban villages" - Beijing City's building management's chronic illness

This one's long so i'm doing it in pieces. Songyuan City has these villages - at least before we left it did, it's quite possible they're all gone now. There's a post, quite a good post by this "blog"s standards, and two photo albums full of up-close photos of these places in their day of reckoning (the second one has more).

"URBAN VILLAGES" - BEIJING CITY BUILDING MANAGEMENT'S CHRONIC ILLNESS - Xinhua Net - Beijing Channel - Masterminds: Su Huizhi & Li Xu - Reporter: Li Puquan - Editor/producer: Wang Jing

[continued from last time]

A foul stench assails the nose as you enter Majiabao Sanqi's number 37 compound, a dozen or so rows of cheaply constructed brick-and-tile houses arranged in rows that wander like a lost child. The reporter observed row 5, number 23 - dark and damp with flies buzzing around the kitchen tabletop and a strange smell coming from the kitchen. Inside a room less than 30 square metres were 6 bunk beds and 5 single beds, covered in piles of bedding and clothes just lying about. On the ground lay building materials and assorted personal possessions. 3 preschool-age kids were playing in the room while several adults reclined on the beds. A resident said 13 people lived in the room, all of them Sichuanese migrant workers. "What's it like to live here?" the reporter asked. "I came here to go to work - nothing else matters."

At Majiabao Road South, number 65 compound there is a self-made 2-storey building, with 20 rooms - upstairs are the owners, downstairs the renters. A landlady introduced the place to the reporter, describing it as half-industrial, half-rural. She said she never planned to add the second storey, but when she saw all her neighbours clamouring to build one, she couldn't help but do it. She receives 2,000 yuan per month from rentals and she's absolutely not satisfied with her living environment. She hopes the government will come and take control ASAP, although she's worried that if the government takes over she'll lose her rental income and be left with no life-source. Below the landlady's house is a common area of about 10 square metres where 9 gas hotplates are set up. The reporter asked an old man who was cooking at the time, "Is it safe to live here?". The old man replied, "It's not safe, but what can we do about it?"

According to Majiabao Neighbourhood Office head Zhou Qingfu, Majiabao Sanqi currently has 541 households, 1780 people, the vast majority of whom are "Former farmer residents". 12 years ago a Beijing developer commandeered 100,000 square metres of land in the Majiabao area for a project to build a complete Majiabao apartment complex. But after the first and second stages of planning were completed, and attention turned to auxilliary facilities at the third stage, it didn't get the large investment it needed and wasn't built. The "former farmer residents" who were living there at the time in single-storey dwellings slated for demolition are still there now. As they don't have any income, and the population has been growing rapidly, these households have needed to build extra storeys. Now the number of poorly constructed, self-made buildings has reached 1,115 - none having passed safety inspections, and all this has brought about safety, hygeine and public order problems.

Majiabao Sanqi currently has only 2 public toilets and 2 open-air rubbish-dumping places, and rubbish is often dumped in small mountains around the place. The cleaners can only use small carts to clean it up. The existing "storied buildings" are unreinforced, and could easily collapse, and with the space between the buildings so small, a fire or a flood could easily cause them to fall down like dominoes with mass casualties. Despite numerous attempts by the Neighbourhood Offfice to get their superiors in higher departments to address the issue, it remains unresolved. Zhou Qingfu says with feeling, "When i took office 8 years ago, 'Urban Villages' was the biggest headache. Now it's become a long-term illness."

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There's more but it's getting on a bit so i'm leaving it there until someone requests the rest (haha)


Caption: In the west side of Seapearl District, Xikau Village, Gate 1, is a self-kill butchering pit. Sewage from nearby houses all comes here. Whenever the sun shines for a second, the sewage emits a horrific smell that makes one vomit - it even blocks out the smell of the butchering pit.

Original link: “城中村”：北京城市建设管理的“痼疾”