Beijing start-up turning bomb shelters into community centres

A Chinese start-up, Digua Shequ, is turning a former nuclear bomb shelter in Beijing into a community centre, with co-working spaces, a 3-D printing station, a cinema, a hair salon, cafe and gym. While their usage is controversial, its founder hopes to replicate the model in other neighbourhoods, creating a new sense of community. More than 10k concrete bunkers, built as part of Mao's Cold War defence strategy, have been transformed into shops, offices and homes; rented out to migrant or low-paid workers at rents that are a third less than for homes above ground. While the government has declared the residential spaces will become illegal by 2017, given estimates of between 150k to 1m residents with no provision for re-location, some believe the policy may be quietly dropped.

One pressing question facing the city is what to do with the people who still live in the bunkers. Estimates of their numbers range from 150,000 to a million. Nearly every apartment building in the Digua Shequ center’s neighborhood has a former shelter or a basement. Most of the residential units in them are rented out for 500 to 900 renminbi a month, or roughly $77 to $138 — about one-third of what it would cost to live aboveground.

“Workers’ wages aren’t rising as fast as the cost of living,” said Xu Tong, who both rents out and lives in an underground space in eastern Beijing. “If you get rid of these basement units, where will the migrants live?”

Government data shows that migrant workers’ wages increased about 14 percent in 2014 from a year earlier, compared with a nearly 22 percent increase in their cost of living. Mr. Xu’s lease illustrates the uncertainty about how serious the government’s ban on underground dwellings is: Although the new rule takes effect in 2017, his contract does not expire until 2019.

Migrant workers’ use of the former bomb shelters remains a delicate topic. After The New York Times submitted an interview request to the neighborhood committee, Mr. Zhou said, an official there who supports the project called him and recommended that he not mention the “floating population” or “northern drifters” — two euphemisms for migrant workers.

So far, Digua Shequ’s work remains an exceptional case for having legally repurposed the spaces under the new rules. Currently, the Civil Air Defense Department of Beijing grants one-year leases on former bomb shelters to individuals and companies.