The capital city gets ready for the Olympic Games of 2008 and the streets are changing. Some condemn it as cultural ransack. There is nothing to do about it because the hungry jaws of the euphoric machine swallows the architectural patrimony: that’s “modernization my love" .
Preserved old hutongs can still be seen in these pages, but you won’t find the renewed or constructed in modern style.

I admit to have chosen a very subjective point of view: to show just the ruined, destroyed places, what is left from the hutongs … It ’ s partial, but it ’ s the call of my heart. It hurts to see districts I like pass to razor.
All this destruction, reconstruction, building grounds where we lose our way, where we lose ourselves …

Southward of Tiananmen Square, the inhabitants of the hood of Qianmen watch the partisans, fresh recruited flesh for the hard work, to arrive with their tools. The neighborhood has been evacuated, the buildings quickly emptied, sometimes families pack their belongings up when the roofs of their places have started to fall on them. (Watch the video: the police have strictly forbidden us to film, and have friendly “advised” us to go somewhere else). The workers pick up the tiles of the roof, before bringing down beams, doors and windows. The bulldozers finish the work blowing away metallic structures and walls.

If you want to learn more about history of hutongs, and so on, check out the links of related sites.

“Hu-Tong” is the name of the old and typical alleyways or “neighborhoods” of Beijing (formerly Peking), built on horizontal and extensive architecture, where the families there settled have to share different spaces and services: courtyards, water, showers, toilettes …

Qianmen

In Beijing it gets really cold from November on. People run to warm up. Lakes freeze and the few fishing spots are quickly replaced by a crowd on ice-skates and on “ skating-chairs ” .
The wind blows along the big avenues slapping the faces of the walkers. The narrow roads of the hutongs offer a provisional refuge.

It snowed two times in the 2005-2006 winter.
The white snow powder cleans up the air and cleans up the look of the things that it covers as a fresh quilt.

Ambulant vendor

Once the snow melts, the dirt comes back, the trash reappears here and there.

Some obstinate. People recycle, rerecycle and recover. Shops, drink stands and fruit vendor establish. It ’ s a way to settle again, it ’ s adaptation. Life goes on.

Do people live well in hutongs?

Common toilettes, no drinking water, filled-up tiny rooms, small windows, non-isolated walls, crowed environment … Ranging from discomfort to insalubrities, many of those places were originally built to house a rich family, but they were quickly eaten from inside because of the precarious and unmeasured relocation of proletarian families in the communist times. As years went by, people learned to cohabit and to establish close ties. And because these particular conditions of life in the hutongs, the daily social structure is disappearing for all those people displaced from the inner city, to the 4th or 5th metropolitan ring in the periphery. Destroying the hutongs, it’s not only a unique architecture being vanished, but also the traditional social ground that it’s been eradicated. It’s like burying the distinct way of life of Beijingers.