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93 5 RESIDENTIAL REVOLUTION Inside the Twenty-first Century Chinese Dream The way to live best is to eat Chinese food, drive an American car, and live in a British house. That’s the ideal life.1 In the over three decades since the beginning of China’s “Opening and Reform,” the Chinese government has instituted a series of policy changes that set into motion a residential revolution that is shaping the face of the “New China.” The scope of centralized planning has been judiciously reduced. Barriers to foreign investment have been lowered and in some instances dismantled. Legislation has been passed that encourages the formation and autonomy of private enterprise. A tremendous effort has gone into expanding the infrastructure and the technology that undergird urban and suburban development. And, not least, laws governing the purchase, sale, and ownership of private property have been fundamentally redrafted to relieve the state of the onus of guaranteeing and providing housing for all citizens. In the midst of these reforms, China’s top-down, “build-it-and-they-willcome ” approach to planning is being energetically challenged in the field of residential development. The family home has emerged as the intimate arena in which socialist centralized planning is colliding with consumer resistance, and the growing success of thematic suburban communities attests to the vigor of the demand for customized lifestyles. Here, the impact of reforms that have empowered consumers to imagine and give shape to their individual identities, aspirations, and preferences is palpable and on display in the décor of the home and the decorum of daily life. The replication of these alien residential communities and the shifts in the social order that they appear to be triggering recall philosopher Michel Foucault’s seminal Chandeliers, leather couches, and silk curtains create an ambiance of luxury at the Forest Manor sales office. Shanghai. Photograph by author. 94 RESIDENTIAL REVOLUTION insight into the ways in which specific types of spaces—or “emplacements”—are amalgamated to produce new arrangements that foster cultural heterogeneity. Foucault calls these kinds of spaces “heterotopias,” literally “different spaces” or “spaces of otherness.” As he explains in his 1967 text “Of Other Spaces,” they are “different” with respect to the dominant space of society, and they are “other” in that their very existence sets up disruptive, destabilizing juxtapositions of incompatible entities within the social order. Spatially isolated, these “other spaces” bring together dissimilar objects, practices, places, and discontinuous times that open up into “heterochronisms.”2 Disorderly by relation to the social body, they themselves propose an order that is incommensurate with that outside itself. These “real, effective places,” Foucault proposes, are “are a sort of counter-emplacements . . . in which the real emplacements, all the other real emplacements that can be found within culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted; a kind of places [sic] that are outside all places, even though they are actually localizable.”3 Foucault sees these places in dynamic terms, as catalysts for change within the larger social framework. “The heterotopia has the power to juxtapose in a single real place several spaces, several emplacements that are in themselves incompatible,” Foucault notes.4 It is by thinking of the themed communities in this sense of the heterotopia as an “other”—an alternative, altered, and alternating space that interrupts the linear continuities of time and space—that their potential to mediate between opposed and opposing power positions, ideologies, and practices comes into sharper relief. These enclaves of civilizational “otherness” rupture the historical and territorial continuity of China’s residential and urban traditions. Within their usually gated confines, the Chinese residents stage notions of European or American or Australian modes of life that are prompted by the architecture; the landscaping; the urban plan; the marketing program; the covenants; and the amenities of shopping, recreation, and celebration. In recreating alien models, the Chinese are introducing alien manners and mores that are inoculating the population with the habit of making lifestyle choices. As such, these residential communities stand among the most subversive forces operating on the quotidian level of Chinese life. Within a social order that severely restricts opportunities for immersion in the alien through travel, the themed architectural landscapes provide the most expansive reference point of other spaces and through them, of non-indigenous cultural “realities.” Put another way, the heterotopic communities represent an escape from a top-down imposition of ideologically viable life plots. They open up a space that permits options— in this instance, residential options—that had not typically...

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