The Built Environment, Spatial Will, and Heritage of the Third Front Movement in China

The paper studies how the Third Front Movement created some of the most characteristic urban and rural forms and settlements in China during the three decades after the founding of the People’s Republic of China, and analyses their basic architectural elements. The Third Front Movement was a large-scale industrial and infrastructural planning project to enhance national productivity in the northwest and southwest of China, and left a vast and important industrial heritage behind. It created collective forms clearly affected by the administrative will of its time and was built according to egalitarian principles and strict planning rules typical of the traditional socialist period. The paper discusses the built environment and spaces, and their physical, political, economic, and social properties. It focuses on how the Third Front Movement established a spatial paradigm of collective life, developed a modern and national architectural style and explored the implications of its “socialist content”.