中文导读
钱粮胡同是北京最有名的的老胡同之一。从去年开始，钱粮胡同开展了一系列拆除和封堵违章建筑的整顿工程。然而升级改造的真正目的究竟是为了恢复老北京文化风貌，还是排挤外来流动人口？又是否能达到其初衷？这些问题仍有待进一步的探讨和验证。
The wider meaning of change in the capital’s alleyways
SALARY ALLEY runs from the National Art Gallery to Dongsi North Street in downtown Beijing. It is one of the city’s surviving hutong (alleyways) from the pre-Communist period—a lane of single-story houses, grey brick walls and upturned eaves. It is also a microcosm of changes ripping through China’s cities.
Salary Alley is poor. Large houses have been subdivided into warrens. Few have kitchens or bathrooms, so the lane is lined with public bathrooms and restaurants which are cheaper than eating at home. The hutong boasts ten eateries, four public bathrooms, nine grocery or hardware shops, a pet hospital, brothel, barbershop, four-star hotel, pool hall and a community-police headquarters. Jane Jacobs, an American urban theorist who extolled the varied life of mixed-use streets, would have loved it.
About five years ago, Salary Alley started to gentrify. It already had one of the best Vietnamese restaurants in Beijing. Now it acquired a luxury sushi house, a couple of bars, and—sure harbinger of middle-class demand—a dainty coffee-shop. But recently it has suffered something more like degentrification. Gentrification means protecting old buildings and attracting new businesses, often at the expense of old residents who can no longer afford to live there. Salary Alley is seeing new businesses shut down, buildings torn up and new arrivals, not old residents, forced out.
The process began last summer when government-hired builders tore off shop fronts (windows, signs, even roofs), plastered over the gaps and went home, leaving the lane looking as if it was being demolished, rather than renewed. Since then, in the name of returning the hutong to its pre-Communist appearance, windows have been bricked up, glass doors replaced, commercial signs removed and houses refaced with old-style “bricks”—actually tiles made to look like them. Fake bricks are commonly used in Chinese renovations (see picture of a painted-on kind in a recent makeover in Shanghai). A flea market close to Salary Alley was shut and the stallholders—mostly migrants from the central province of Hunan—sent home.
