Villa : the local and global in suburban Beijing

Suburban villas are a new form of architecture sprouting up rapidly in and around Beijing. The villas in these suburban developments differ markedly from the type of housing typically found in the city, even those villas that claim inspiration from Chinese historical architecture. If not for their distance from the center of the city, they would look visually out of place in terms of the forms and designs of the individual houses and the layouts of the communities. The villas are also out of place in their demographics and class composition: villa residents differ from the average Beijing resident in their origin, occupation, wealth and even the way they own the house. Initially built to house expatriates, the suburban villas' impact on Beijing is expanding as the new developments target Chinese consumers.

Digitization of this thesis was made possible by a generous grant from the Jefferson Trust, 2015.

Thesis originally deposited on 2016-02-18 in version 1.28 of Libra. This thesis was migrated to Libra2 on 2017-03-23 16:33:51.