Designing the Danceable City

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Kevin Lynch envisions the city as a place that supports health, survival, social contact, and vitality. Urban dance is how many Beijing (China) residents achieve these goals. Urban dance has become a popular activity for an estimated 100 million Chinese residents. I ask 4 research questions: 1) Why are people dancing in Beijing? 2) Where does urban dance happen? 3) Why does dance happen in some places but not in others? and 4) Why may urban dance be relevant to American planning? I used open-ended interviews and 2 surveys to evaluate these issues, finding that urban dancers are mostly older women who dance to keep healthy, to enhance positive emotions, and to cultivate a sense of community. Urban dance in Beijing happens primarily in parks and spaces in the transportation infrastructure, although dancers prefer parks because of the clean air and natural environment. Dance groups are forced to move multiple times; they often move to transportation infrastructure, where it is noisy and polluted. Complaints and conflicting demands for open space have led the central and municipal governments to attempt to ban or restrict urban dance. Urban dance continues to persist, however, bringing health, community, and vitality to Beijing’s open spaces and offering an attractive vision to American planners and urban designers. Limitations of this study include the age of the data, which were collected in 2004 through 2006 and in 2007.

Takeaway for practice: Urban dance presents challenges to those designing and planning cities, despite providing health benefits to participants. Dance groups must move often because their activities are noisy, and they compete with other users for limited space.

Keywords:

• healthy aging
• parks
• seniors
• transportation
• urban design

Note

Acknowledgments

Thanks are due to Dihua Li and Kongjian Yu for hosting me in Beijing. I would also like to thank their students, particularly Yafei Han and Yunke Xiang, for excellent fieldwork assistance. I am grateful to three anonymous reviewers for providing extensive and challenging comments that shaped the manuscript into what it is now. Finally, I wish to thank Michael Southworth for encouraging me to return to the danceable city and to share it with others.

Research Support

This research was supported by the U.S. Fulbright Program, the Beatrix Farrand Fund, and the Society of Women Geographers.

Notes

1. Yangge is pronounced “yung-guh” or “yung-ger” in the Beijing dialect. It is the name of a category of folk dances, performances, and songs that literally translates to “rice-planting song” in English.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Caroline Chen

Caroline Chen ([email protected]) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, San Diego.