UCLA

After its economic reform in 1978, China started housing commodification and gradually abolished the socialist welfare housing distribution system in response to its severe urban housing shortage. In four decades, China created enormous residential property values and increasingly unaffordable housing. China’s state-intervened socialist market economy determined a fundamental contradiction between the commodification of housing and the state ownership of urban land, which has stabilized the collective housing typology, exacerbated socio-spatial segregation, and brought an ideological crisis of family life and individuality. This dissertation investigates “housing as real estate” as an architectural question. It examines how the power of the state, the market, and the individual—architects and consumers—plays out, intertwines, and clashes in post-socialist housing productions and speculations to identify, if any, political engagements of architecture that can reorder our living environment. Through the intensive history of housing commodification in Shanghai, this research unfolds housing transformations in China from socialist welfare to commodity under state capitalism. Shanghai, as a representative city at the frontier of China’s economic reform with its colonial and metropolitan localities, offers a comprehensive sample for examining the tension between homogenization and individualization in housing practices. Based on the theoretical framework of the new formalist method to connect form to the political, this research investigates the commodity housing forms—spatially and socio-culturally constructed—in Shanghai from the 1980s to the early 2010s based on producer types: building codes and advertising as institutional production, architects’ imaginations and artistic reflections as critical meta-production, and public discourses among social media as subjective production. This dissertation provides empirical support to a rich body of scholarship that has called for the de-commodification of for-profit housing to democratize the right to housing. Within the boundaries of residential property ownership, we find individuals’ conscious spatial practices unsettling the deep structural forces at play in post-socialist China. Domestic interiors in urban China epitomize the conflicts and reconciliations between the Party-state’s will, market manipulations, and the awakening of individual desires, enabling a comparative framework for critical housing studies that overcome the geopolitical divides and contribute to contemporary political theory.