Linli — jingwenzeng

Linli

2023

Tube houses (“筒子楼”) are often perceived as low-end or obsolete due to their spatial constraints—remain unique urban forms that concentrate social proximity, shared circulation, and layered domestic practices. Choosing Shanghai’s Longchang Apartments as a testing ground, this project explore urban community strategies can reactivate their inherent density and collective adjacency as a resource for contemporary urban living.

Field Studies

The field study combined spatial observation with informal interviews to understand how tube houses operate beyond their architectural layout. Rather than documenting deficiencies, the research focused on everyday adaptations—how residents negotiate space, extend domestic life outward, and collectively inhabit compressed environments.

Community Platform

The platform functions as a shared coordination layer for the neighborhood. Residents can initiate activities, circulate announcements, and negotiate the collective use of space through a common interface. A shared mobility system enables localized transportation through coordinated scheduling, reducing duplication and encouraging cooperative use of resources

Speculative Visualization

By abstracting spatial detail and foregrounding patterns of collective life, the video challenges the dominant narrative that equates density with deprivation. It proposes an alternative imagination: that proximity can become infrastructure, and that shared circulation can support new forms of community.
Through speculative visualization, it invites residents, policymakers, and designers to reconsider tube houses not as relics of the past, but as platforms for future collective living.