After the Communist Revolution in China, Mao's government was left with cities that had lost their former imperial glory. Once-sufficient streets had become inadequate, residential areas had deteriorated into slums, and once imposing monuments were crumbling. Mao's government took this opportunity to rebuild Chinese cities as models of socialist ideology and organization.

One of the strategies of the new planning was to decentralise urban areas by dividing them into self-sufficient communities based around places of employment. These work units were encouraged to provide health care, food distribution, and social services in addition to the required employment and housing. Ideally, this type of city would eliminate the need for specialized districts, and workers would rarely need to leave their communities. Thus, the Maoist city became structured around these low-rise work-unit compounds that were generally undifferentiated by function. This ultimately resulted in mixed-land-use, sprawling, decentralized cities composed of the accretion of individual, independent compounds.