Interesting article! I’m curious to hear more about Chinese xiaoqu sprawl repair and replacement of the urban villages. The Xiaoqu repair from the China Straights article reminded me a bit of what some Russian-language urbanists, and others from the Soviet school of mikrorayon thought, are arguing for. You have low-scale German examples (archdaily.com/870720/br… or youtu.be/q7v6qo5ouJc), which seem to be focused on updating concrete buildings to European standards of insulation, making rooms bigger, and overall increasing quality of life.

The Russian speaking world has more grandiose examples: Here (masshousing.strelka-kb.…) is an excellent interactive diagram on retrofitting Soviet panel housing (which remind me a lot of the danwei style housing, but the 80s style tall blocks are reminiscent of the xiaoqu), and here (behance.net/gallery/832…) is a project proposal from Ukraine. Outside of formal planning, informally since the 80s you have seen first floors of perimeter buildings be turned into informal food or service establishments (interior courtyard facing units tend to stay as residential units). In all the cases, you notice a trend: making units larger, adding more private space (either via balconies or via splitting up garden/courtyard space among the first floor units), and adding more private commercial space. Very rarely do you see any infill, and even less so do you see infill of public transit (although this too is sorely needed, and I would argue whose lack is a major force behind automobile usage rates in the former Soviet countries). Honestly, if anything these older buildings have a better chance of being “rehabilitated,” because they were built to better standards and follow urbanist principles. The newer apartments are far away from transit, extremely monotone, and bad quality, and I think it would be a struggle to rehabilitate them in a similar manner.

To me, it seems like the major differences between Chinese xiaoqu repair and post-Soviet mikrorayon repair is that Chinese developments have less of these open-expanse parks, and they’re better maintained (maybe because people use them more). Another difference is the retail space - in the former Soviet countries they’re very readily converted into service industries and it’s very common for people to be running various services and shops (such as daycares, tutoring services, nail services, etc) even informally, whereas it appears that in China such commercialization has to be more top down. Finally, it appears that there doesn’t seem to be much internal change to the units in China, but this may be because the xiaoqu units are already much bigger than their posf-Soviet counterparts. The external elebatpr however is very cool and I would love to see it spread more here.

Finally, both countries seem to not do as much transportation infill, but this may be because of budget - the capital/major cities have the budget to open new stations and put in new bike lanes/transit, whereas regional towns may lack the knowledge. I assume it’s the same in China.