Market-driven Capitalist urbanization is no longer a viable option forChina as it has produced increasingly monotonous and segregated citiesthat deny culture, history, ecology, and human connection. Culturalefficiencies generated from the interconnection and proximity of distinctentities found in traditional and Socialist-Era Chinese urbanisms havebeen overlooked in favor of market-oriented efficiencies from Westernurbanization patterns. The thesis argues that China needs to develop apost-Capitalist Socialist urbanism in which efficiency is based on a shift inorientation from formulaic compositional systems to open-ended layeredsystems that encompass the dialectical complexity of the city. Socialist-Era Danwei Urbanism is revisited for its potential to facilitate efficienciesfrom the sharing of resources between various parts of daily life existingin the same urban block. The danwei (work unit) is a walled communitycontaining the workplace, subsidized employee housing, and socialamenities within an urban block. Many danwei, however, have movedsome housing and amenities into areas far from the workplace ratherthan densifying the existing site. A New Danwei Urbanism builds densityin a process of disintegration and formation, gives presence to absentecologies, and establishes collectivity with a network of covered spaceswhile respecting autonomy at the local level. It embraces a dialecticalreading of the city as a unity of contradictory yet interdependent systems.These layers present an alternative approach in which the danwei facilitatesinformal social and intellectual exchanges in the urban block.
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