Collective Forms in China: People’s Commune and Danwei

Collective forms are simultaneously governmental forms, social forms, organisational forms, and spatial forms, but can also incorporate economic forms or political forms. From this perspective, urban and rural areas in socialist China were predominantly planned and managed as semi-autonomous collective forms. People’s Commune and Danwei are two exemplary cases among others. The research reviews their conception as social projects and the social realities they produced, while examining their often overlooked legacies for discourses in architecture and urban design. Through discussing the research methodology, cases of collective forms in the West, the historical context of China’s People’s Commune and Danwei, and two built cases in Wuhan, this paper argues that collective forms are not simply related to a historical period of collectivisation, but to past, present, and future forms shaped by collective subjectivities and the important underlying shared norms and demands to achieve common goals and benefits.