Producing public rental housing towers in Chongqing: how regulations and cost discipline standardize height, type and Façade
Weijie Hu, Yiwei HuangPurpose
This paper explains why Chongqing’s public rental housing towers converge in height, plan type and facade treatment. It examines how a national fire-safety height threshold, municipal daylight-spacing rules and cost-disciplined delivery narrow design choices into a repeatable tower platform. The purpose is to specify the building-scale mechanism through which regulation, approval practice and maintenance budgets shape high-rise public housing in a non-market program.
Design/methodology/approach
The study uses a multi-site qualitative case design. Evidence comes from 5 first-batch estates, 32 production-side expert interviews, a resident interview archive, standard-floor and estate plans, policy documents and site photographs. Typological plan reading, node and assembly analysis, and regulation-cost interpretation trace links among height limits, spacing checks, core-unit layouts, facade specifications and maintenance routines.
Findings
The 100-m fire-safety threshold concentrates towers below the super-high-rise category, mainly at 32–33 stories. Spacing checks tied to height and facade width favor slim point towers and repeated clearances of about 30 m. A compact-core butterfly standard floor works as a portable delivery platform. Painted concrete skins, modular openings, regular AC platforms and batch repainting stabilize a common facade grammar, while estate-level variation remains in slab placement, repainting condition and resident experience.
Originality/value
The paper moves beyond the general claim that regulations affect housing form by identifying a testable selection chain of height thresholds, table-based spacing, standard-floor platforms and maintenance-oriented specifications. It contributes an institutional-morphological account of public housing standardization and clarifies low-cost design discretion inside the sub-100-m regime, including core refinement, facade modules, AC screening and durability-oriented detailing.