Learning from the countryside: Designing in Chinese rural-urban areas

Abstract

The current transformation of the countryside in the rural hinterland of Chinese city regions faces challenges in conserving an extensive architectural and landscape heritage. The villages situated in these regions represent the historical core of metropolitan areas. By examining the hinterland territories, we can readily recognize the features of the Chinese urban-rural continuum that G. W. Skinners has defined in his studies spanning from the 1940s to the 1970s on rural marketing networks, cities, and the hierarchy of the local system. These local systems present a morphology that continually adapts to geographical and cultural contexts, offering rich architectural and rural urbanism solutions that seamlessly harmonize the urban and rural functions. Today, this part of the settlement is extremely vulnerable to the pressure of urban expansion as towns evolve into cities and cities transform into metropolitan regions. The conventional top-down planning practice in these areas lacks innovative tools capable of integrating both “urban” and “rural” features simultaneously. Scholars such as M. Davis and G. Guldin have recognized the Chinese hybrid rural-urban settlement as a potentially “new form of settlement for humanity” (Guldin, 1997). In this article, we present a holistic design approach aimed at shaping this hybrid settlement into a “green city,” applying the model we first used in 2010 – 2013 in Huiyang in the Pearl River Delta, a region characterized by Hakka villages territorial system, to two other cases in city regions: Pidu in the Chengdu metropolitan area and Kandun in the Ningbo metropolitan area. These regions are characterized by their respective Lin Pan and Seawalls territorial systems, which we have more recently studied. The aim of the paper is to illustrate how drawing inspiration from local countryside architecture and rural urbanism enables the development of individual planning solutions as an alternative to the current planning practice in peri-urban rural areas, which tends to homogenize countryside landscapes to urban blocks.