In the summer of 2011, four Columbia GSAPP students traveled to Chengdu and Xi'an to gather documentation of industrial restructuring and urban redevelopment, in collaboration with teams from Southwest Jiaotong University and the Xi'an University of Architecture and Technology.

How is a community constructed, in China's urban context of large-scale enterprise and housing transformations? What is lost, and what is gained, for the citizens affected by factory relocations and subsequent market housing development?

The Tumen area of Xi'an is still a stronghold of central-government-owned industries, whose large land parcels fragment the slowly-upgrading urban systems around them. In contrast, the Tiaodenghe area, which includes the Chengdu Industrial Culture Museum, was home to province and city-level industries that could more easily be relocated to nearby development zones in the northeast and southeast. In the past 5 years, this last remaining inner-city industrial area was cleared for the completion of the large-scale residential development ring around eastern Chengdu.