The hutong urban development model compared with contemporary suburban development in Beijing John Zacharias a, * , Zhe Sun a, b , Luis Chuang c , Fengchen Lee c a College of Architecture and Landscape, China b College of Urban and Environmental Studies, China c Imagen Consultants, China article info Article history: Received 22 November 2014 Received in revised form 11 May 2015 Accepted 29 May 2015 Available online 10 June 2015 Keywords: Beijing Development model Hutong Built form Traditional architecture abstract This paper assesses the traditional hutong street system and siheyuan courtyard house as an urban development model in contemporary Beijing by comparing it with the practiced alternative. Official government standards are used as criteria for measuring the performance of the urban form types. Criteria derived from government documents emphasise the efficiency and low-carbon emission of the transportation system and efficiency in land use, via higher densities. Minimum site areas devoted to green space are also specified. We compared the use of land resources in a sample of 9 hutong areas with those of a sample of 22 newly built communities. We collected traffic data and interviewed residents in these areas. We also examined transportation as a user of urban land, as well as the implications for land resources if the 2002 conservation plan is fully implemented. It was found that the hutong development models underperform with regard to building density depending on form type, but achieve much higher population densities than suburban housing. Motor traffic infrastructure in contemporary development takes up 3 times as much of the development area as the hutong do in their development area. The hutong outperform the rest of the urban fabric with regard to sustainable transport with 0.17 of the car mode proportion for all of Beijing. There is heavy dependency on three-wheeled vehicles for goods transport and high levels of walking. Moving the remaining population of the hutong as planned would require about 1800 ha of new residential land more than 30 km from the city centre. © 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Introduction The dominant discourse in Beijing regarding the hutong as living habitat is that this urban form is outdated and inefficient. Official Beijing municipal policy favours the conservation of 17% of the existing urban area occupied by hutong, and for the rest, following existing practices, demolition, land adjustment and leasehold sale to developers. Although immune from real estate pressures, building conservation and environmental enhancement have attracted commercial investors to the designated conservation areas, intent on the burgeoning leisure and entertainment market. Nanluoguxiang, one of the 25 designated areas, is entirely com- mercialised with pedestrian flow volumes exceeding 5000 persons per hour. In this vision of the future, the hutong is no longer a living habitat. While development pressures are enormous on the centrally located hutong territory, public discourse tends to focus on the poor state of public infrastructure and the sub-standard living conditions of the inhabitants. The hutong are Beijing's traditional streets, planned in the Yuan dynasty (1271e 1368 CE) and laid out in an orthogonal grid between the city's gates. A strict three-level hierarchy included the domi- nant east-west streets, varying in width from 3 to 5 m, with north- south streets 18 m wide at 500e700 m intervals, and wider east- west streets generally 40 m in width, placed between swathes of several hutong. These urban practices were maintained and elab- orated during the Ming dynasty (1368e1644 CE), remaining virtually intact until the Communist era from 1949. The siheyuan refer to the courtyard buildings that made up the urban fabric be- tween the hutong. A gate at the street led indirectly to a large, square open space around which were organized a series of buildings of various dimensions and assigned functions. Inter- spersed in this uniform urban fabric were temple complexes, large residences of court officials and administrative buildings. The hutong term itself, today referring to the whole of the built fabric, * Corresponding author. E-mail address: johnzacharias@pku.edu.cn (J. Zacharias). Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Habitat International journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/habitatint http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.habitatint.2015.05.035 0197-3975/© 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Habitat International 49 (2015) 260e265