Do you have a chair outside your house?

Data viz
Storytelling

During the last 40 years, China has been through a rapid urbanization period, lots cities grow, expand, and update at an incredible rate. Urban design becomes a relatively important issue emerging both in public and academic views. Rong Zhou, an architecture professor at Tsinghua University, recently wrote an article Will the world's best cities "Make IN CHINA"?, he says “For the sake of the modern city's promise of ‘efficiency’, everyone is forced to bear the pressure and squeeze of the space machine on his life.” He asked about a crucial problem in urban planning about humanity. The city is not only a giant machine to make people produce and consume the material meaning but also a place for people to live and be active on their spiritual level. But what is the humanity of a city, and how to estimate the activity and visualize it?

We consider that a city is constituted of two main parts, hardware and software, hardware represents the infrastructure like buildings and roads, and software means the systems like the medical system and some data-driven management tools. However, there is another missing part often ignored by urban designers in China which we might call “Wetware” where people could take a breath, talk to friends, sit and play poker or just talk some gossip. Through this concept of wetware, we could find a way to learn about the conflicts between city modernization and community cultural construction.

Above the increasing development of the city, how to open up somewhere to initiate community communication, how to build a habitable community and how to activate the energy of the neighborhood become a topic for many designers to practice a lot.

While citizens themselves find a mutual method to start their social life, bringing a chair outside their houses to useless areas beyond those function areas, and create their wetware in the community. Imagine when we see a city corner, how do we estimate the degree of openness of the community? My answer is the chair.

I start the work with finding proper communities, for more comprehensive results, I choose to take three communities established in different years and in variable economic conditions. Then I choose Anshan New Workers Village Community, Hesheng International Apartment, and Penghu Square as my examples. I decide to start my field research in Anshan Community, it is located near Tongji University which is the nearest one for me. But the weather is not good for doing research, it was raining, while chairs were mostly covered by plastic sheeting or something, it took me a bit of effort to find them, also because they were usually too normal to be noticed. I took photos of every chair and recorded their locations with longitude and altitude. What is interesting is the types of different chairs, like some are made by the government, some belong to the private, they are with diverse colors, shapes, materials, size, degrees, some are put together, some are alone. I have collected almost 400 chairs as my database.

I choose to use figurative photos as points on the map to build authenticity and reliable truth of the map. And I will arrange the chairs in different parameters to indicate the relationship between each chair and between the useless area and the invading parts.

I find that chairs seem like have different identities and emotions which indicates people’s lifestyles and communication mode with their neighbors. Another fact I found in Anshan Community is the problems of parking and rubbish area. Two reasons, one is people have more and more electronic bicycles, they have no place to park them instead of where in front of their buildings. The other one is that this community is old and much construction rubbish is produced in order to renew the building. These reasons lead that more public areas, or still call it the useless area, being invaded. At the same time, some communities behave better because they have more reasonable parking and the rubbish area divided from the living area. By now I just finished the data collection and have not got an accurate proportion of the invading part, but I could make a rough estimate that about 50% area is reducing.