Reading Chinese urban villages with typo-morphological analysis: the case of Shixia Village in Shenzhen

When the Chinese ‘Opening Up Reform’ of 1979 founded the city of Shenzhen, previously- occupied rural lands that fell within newly-established urban borders were densely built up to bear the housing pressure created by the rising city. The resulting settlements were known as ‘Urban Villages’, informal clusters of concrete buildings that today house 12 million people, half of the local population, distributed in 300 villages within the planned city. As an alternative to the tabula rasa demolitions that most villages face for typological substitution today, this paper proposes a typo-morphological analysis based on the remote study of built types and the drawing of a typological map, as a valuable approach for assessing the spatial capital of these areas. Presented as a case study of Shixia, an urban village under high redevelopment pressure, the drawing of the map is possible through an online survey of satellite images, eye-level street views, recent tour footage, and a study of the settlement’s urban development. The study highlights the physical proximity between historical artifacts and informal apartment buildings, a morphological characteristic underpinning the concluding discussion on the renovation project for Shixia, carried out via the demolition of the informal urban fabric.