CAO Wujuan has been living in Shanghai's oldest shikumen building in the Huangpu District for over half a century since birth. She's about to be forced out in the name of urban development progress.

The 12-square-meter apartment she shares with her husband and son was built in the 1920s in an architectural style unique to Shanghai. Shikumen melds the traditional Chinese courtyard structure with Western building techniques. The style first appeared in the mid-1800s when Europeans in foreign concessions built homes for Chinese fleeing various uprisings against the Qing Dynasty (1636-1912).

Shikumen quarters are cramped and often shoddy, but they have retained a certain charm and communal lifestyle. They are fast disappearing from the Shanghai landscape.

Cao cooks in a common kitchen shared by six families living in the same three-story stone-gated building in the Mianyang Community. She washes clothes in the courtyard and hangs them to dry on the flat roof. Meals are often eaten with neighbors on a large table in the courtyard.

"Though our living space is quite small, we still feel comfortable here and have neighbors who are almost like family members,"Cao said.

The community in the Dongjiadu area along the Huangpu River where Cao and her family live is reminiscent of a bygone era of Shanghai history. Wandering through the area, one can see elderly people getting haircuts outdoors while children play with makeshift toys. Peddlers ply the lanes, crying out their knife-sharpening services or offering flowers for sale. Neighbors congregate to drink tea and gossip on the doorstep. Old women fan themselves in the summer heat.

"I had a happy childhood here and I never felt our living conditions were poor,"Cao said.

However, she and other shikumen residents in the area will soon be relocated to newly built high-rises on the outskirts of Shanghai. The shikumen buildings will be razed to make way for commercial and residential developments in what is a lucrative downtown zone.

Shanghai's rapid urban development the past few decades has steamrollered over the city's quaint past. In the last five years alone, some 30 percent of its distinctive shikumen residential communities have disappeared. Those remaining are located in prized property locations, dooming their future.

West Siwenli Lane, one of the city's earliest shikumen areas, located on the south bank of Suzhou Creek, has been demolished. East Siwenli Lane will be the next to go.

In their heyday, there were more than 9,000 shikumen lanes with 200,000 buildings in the city. Now, only 1,900 lanes and about 50,000 buildings are left, according to the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference Shanghai Committee, the city's top political advisory body.
Some 2 million residents like Cao are still living in buildings that once housed more than 60 percent of Shanghai's population.

Preservationists are calling for something to be done to try to save what remains of this cultural heritage. The Shanghai municipal government said it will apply for some of the unique architecture to be listed as UNESCO World Heritage sites.

"Successful or not, the application process will at least provoke public awareness about the need to protect the city's unique cultural heritage,"said Feng Xiaomin, a senior official with the committee, who spearheaded a study on shikumen buildings as part of the UNESCO application.

Shikumen were originally built as two-story attached structures, drawing on Jiangnan-style courtyards as well as other traditional Chinese architectural designs.

"The early shikumen buildings were small because of the limited space available in the foreign concessions,"said Wu Jiang, a renowned architect and deputy dean at Tongji University.

The gates in these communities were built with stone to provide soundproofing, while the buildings were constructed with traditional timbers.

"Many of the shikumen were initially built for wealthy local families who owned a whole building where several generations lived together,"said Zhao Lihong, a local historian who has written many books about traditional Shanghai lifestyle.

As Western influences expanded in Shanghai, the shikumen built after 1910 took on a more modern look, Wu said. Stone gates were adorned with baroque designs or arches. Stone tablets appeared above door frames, carved with auspicious sayings.

The living conditions of the shikumen buildings worsened from the 1970s on, when many households were crammed into single buildings. The facilities lacked indoor toilets and noxious coal gas was used for cooking.

Even now, more than 90,000 residents living in the shikumen buildings are still using chamber pots, according to the committee investigation.

"There is a dichotomy between preserving the shikumen buildings and improving people's lives,"said Gu Jun, a socialist with Shanghai University. "Nobody living in modern high rises is willing to move into the small shikumen apartments, and most relocated shikumen residents are happy to leave."

Attempts to renovate shikumen to preserve their livability haven't met with much success. The Cite Bourgogne community on Shaanxi Road, for instance, was upgraded to save the buildings, but many residents complained afterward that their living conditions were hardly improved.

"Relocation remains best our hope,"said Wan Yongli, an elderly resident in the Cite Bourgogne, who said his upgraded residence still suffers from leaks and cramped living quarters.

In a sense, the very nature of shikumen buildings sows the seeds of their demise, according to the investigation.

The buildings' bricks and wood are prone to weather damage. High-density living also damages the structures. Paltry public financing is available for maintenance since shikumen apartments are public housing and can be leased only for low rents.

"It would be too expensive for the government to relocate residents without the aid of real estate development,"said the committee's Feng, noting that relocation costs something like 200,000 yuan (US$31,520) per square meter.

That poses a hurdle for a UNESCO listing. According to the UN guidelines, the living conditions in heritage buildings must be improved and population density lowered.
The city government should set up a single designated agency to protect the shikumen buildings instead of spreading that responsibility over six separate government bodies, Feng said.

One preservation method seems to be working. When shikumen buildings in Xintiandi and Tianzifang were renovated, boutique shops and restaurants were included in the planning, bringing some prosperity to the areas.

"It is a life-or-death moment for the city's shikumen heritage,"said Zhang Xuemin, a director with the Shanghai Shikumen Cultural Research Center. "If we don't act now, it will all disappear within a decade."