Population policy and urban housing in China

Abstract

This thesis will focus on how urban housing design reflects the new one-child family population policy in the traditional urban context in Beijing, China. The population policy has changed the size and structure of traditional family, and further affected children's growing up environment. Children, used to grow up in a joint family of three generations in a traditional courtyard house, now have isolated by apartment box. The traditional social and spatial relationships among children, families, and neighbors have been extremely weakened. My intention is to restore the lost relationships for lonely children in a high density residential complex. This complex, transformed from the traditional single story courtyard house, becomes one big house, where all neighbors live under one roof as one big family. As a consequence, children in a one child family still have the same feeling of multi generations living together as their old generations had before.