Residents make handicrafts, tell stories, and sing operas at Jingshan Street Community Center, Dongcheng District, Beijing. Photo: CFP

It has been three decades since China embarked on its journey towards urbanization. Following a period of rapid urban renewal, questions emerged regarding reestablishment of bonds between longtime residents and their community life, with newcomers, and with new forms of business, as well as how do we organically recreate a complex and orderly urban life? Taking the “Lodestone Yard” in Dongcheng District in Beijing as an example, this paper studies the triple mechanism of spatial activation, cultural regeneration, and local governance. Today, this mechanism blurs the invisible boundaries of daily life in traditional urban residential communities, reducing spatial boundaries, demographic, and institutional barriers, and rebuilds an internal-external circulation system filled with a mixture of new and old elements.

Finding public support

If we hope to activate urban renewal using cultural elements, transforming underused government facilities into public cultural spaces might be the best option. However, in practice, these reinvented spaces often fall back to being “empty shells” or “dead space.” The biggest obstacle is often public participation in these endeavors. Therefore, newly renovated spaces remain unused, because without public interaction, it is nearly impossible to reactivate these spaces.

The “Lodestone Yard” is a recently vacated space that has been transformed into a community public cultural space, and a creative team was invited to operate it, as a third party organization. This team did not get off to a good start. Rather, they were rejected by residents during the initial stage of their operation, shedding light on the multiple invisible boundaries uncovered in the process of the revitalization of the government facility. There was doubt over the public’s right to use the space, due to questions regarding property rights, distrust in organizational modes, and the involuntary emotional alienation that come from it being an “official space.”

Against this backdrop, and with the support of community workers, the operation team adopted a more gradual strategy, with several stages designed to earn public support. On the basis of diluting boundaries between public and private space, the team added a “human touch” by inviting residents to plan events, with the aim of building a truly shared space. This redefined community culture, expanding it into identity construction, resource aggregation, and group integration. In short, the team pivoted toward emotion and interest to construct a humanistic space in the Lodestone Yard.

This soft approach is clearly different from previous facilities upgrades. The key is that, in addition to an internal “public space” bounded by property rights and administrative jurisdiction, serving the local community, another external “shared space” is created, connecting individual interests, and facilitating interactions and a cultural display of daily life in this historic neighborhood. 

In fact, by introducing the idea of a shared space, we expand the traditional Chinese concept of “official,” so that the boundary surrounding the government facility space is erased, and the community is connected with a living and urban public space. The construction of a dual function space not only improves usage of the yard, but with time and increased interaction, the two spaces overlap, whereas they were initially parallel. When old and new groups of people meet here, they jointly inspire creativity and inspiration, which fuels the transformation of public culture in the community.

Daily aesthetics

The operation team has sound knowledge of creative cultural markets, which is an external resource that is not available within the community. After brainstorming, the team proposed adding lifestyle aesthetics into the community, thus breaking the boundaries between the logic of market purchases and administrative provision and expanding the possible forms of community public culture. 

Since 2016, the team has been subtly promoting the aesthetic penetration of daily life practices. For example, they organized traditional community activities, such as tea ceremonies, flower arranging, traditional pattern painting, grass and wood dyeing, handmade papermaking, and other new content. They have also organized activities inspired by outside audiences, such as the Guizhou music festival, French cultural festival, Indian dance, Japanese sake, and African traditional markets, which broadens residents’ imagination of a community public culture and their acceptance of new activities and new groups of people. 

If the introduction of lifestyle aesthetics horizontally expands the community’s public culture, then the professional enhancement of existing art and arts associations reflects the team’s facilitation of community, street, and district level administrative resources — a vertical expansion of community public culture.

Quality of life has improved since the “community participatory public art” increased the accessibility of art, and this public effort also changes art’s production mechanism. Here, the idea of community art is open to individuals and is now a part of daily life in classic urban residential areas. It captures local life, paints a vivid picture of hutong life, and shows diversity among the elderly groups. With wider public participation, it also creates an intergenerational discourse that finds narrative value among all residents and visitors. Also, through rebuilding communication scenarios, such a space helps to respond to governance dilemmas.

Participation in “community-driven public art” eases communication and dialogue between different groups of people, and creates new relationship networks or mechanisms. When elite culture and mass culture connect, the reconstruction of relationships between the new and old groups, and the creation of multiple identities for local residents occur. This transforms local residents from the recipients of traditional public cultural services to participants and even the producers of a new public culture. As a result, cultural divisions between different groups gradually dissolve.

The operation team of the Lodestone Yard played a versatile and flexible role in this process as event planners, the middlemen providing resources, and the facilitators of community work, constantly looking for possibilities to connect the existing local life with the renewed outside world. 

Here, two competencies were key. One was resource matching. A project often begins with informal resources, and upon receiving strong initial results, organizations will channel the perceived success into formal resources. The other was using public cultural activities as the implementation mechanism and “relational aesthetics” as the principle, to encourage communication between different groups of people along original social structures. In the meantime, the team searched for multiple possibilities to connect old and new values and reshape inter-group relations through intentional “collisions,” so that the hutong’s daily life culture was renewed by the dynamic interactions.

Institutional flexibility

This cultural renewal, which brings back the communal aspects of daily life for residents of the old city, while also connecting with a new middle-class lifestyle, is carried out as a new public cultural service under the leadership of the local government. The reconstruction of daily life practices, from shared spaces and sentiments, to the community institution, essentially rebuilds a connection and transformation mechanism outside the original bureaucratic system. By blurring the boundary of authority, we encourage the internal and external circulation of resources, which not only creates a more friendly government image, but also enables the sustainable reproduction of public culture.

On the residential street level, “playing down the involvement of authority” is directly reflected in the cultural branding of “people” and “daily life” in local governance. For example, Xiangyang Street, where the Lodestone Yard is located, has participated in the Beijing International Design Week for 8 consecutive years. This year, the theme was “Design for the People.” Under the concept of a “people-oriented design for daily life,” the event has deepened the exploration and display of local daily life.

The “dilution of authority” is also seen in the more flexible communication mechanisms, which are outside the bureaucratic system. This helps attract high-quality external resources and achieve an internal and external flow of resources. This mechanism is called the “cultural layout methodology,” where several cultural sites, such as the Lodestone Yard, form a bloc under the leadership of residential streets, so they can share resources.

The “dilution of authority” at the community level has two main features: culture and institution. Upon following the two strategies of dissecting grand themes and expanding resource elasticity, new public cultural production connects daily life with political life.

Summary

In the end, this social experiment was a cultural reinvigoration of local life with the presence of the government, the help of professional teams, and the introduction of market operation methods. It was different from past initiatives because the local government’s brand construction focused on local autonomy and participation. This project put people in the center. Also, the unique “cultural layout methodology” blurs the original boundary constructed by authority in two ways.

First, the public space and its institutional flexibility created a fertile environment for the third party to take root, which now acts as an intermediary connecting residents, the government, and society.

Second, the cultural reconstruction of daily life enriches the underlying meaning and expression of public culture, making the relatively rigid ideological work more lively, and to a certain extent, building flexible emotional bonds for wider public interactions. 

Therefore, its significance is multipronged. On the one hand, it promotes the “new public cultural construction” as it enters mainstream discourse and gains long-term and stable institutional support. On the other hand, brand building for a local governance culture featuring “people” and “everyday life” has created a more inclusive and open government image and a more attractive business environment for creative businesses, which is closely related to the larger goal of urban renewal.

In the context of national governance, reconstruction of daily life with the goal of reactivating the old urban residential communities through human interaction reflects broader social change and transformation. It is difficult to say whether this regenerates the traditional culture of old Beijing, or if it is a continuation of folk daily life. It represents a mixture of the new middle class with the old residents, of cultural services and cultural consumption, and of daily life and governance, reflecting the efforts of multiple actors to re-weave social relations and adjust interactive habits in the transformation. This is part of the reason the discussion of social production in the cultural sector has become extremely complicated.

In the face of diverse governance tools and hidden logic, how such a resilient, subtle relationship was rebuilt from the community level and how multi-party coordination promoted the reconstruction of complex and organic daily interactions, deserves further study.

Shi Yunqing is from the Institute of Sociology at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences.

Edited by YANG XUE