Villages in the cities (VICs) exhibit all the contradictions of contemporary Chinese urbanisation. These historic settlements attracted large floating populations during the booming urban economy, which redefined their morphological assets. Moreover, their urban persistence reflects the social and cultural modifications occurring within metropolises. Municipal governments’ attention was drawn to the extraordinary densification process, triggering negotiation regarding urban upgrades and social engagement alongside the overall transformation of VICs. Despite the broad scientific literature on VIC redevelopment, especially from urban and social studies perspectives, little attention has been paid to the spatial and monetary compensation awarded for forced or planned demolitions. The transition from informal agglomerations to residential compounds implies the action of local authorities cooperating with real estate developers to make existing house ownership the basis of compensation for measurable spaces in new typological configurations defined by radical social shifts. Lijiao village in Guangzhou was selected as a case study to observe how its urban renewal programme affected the evaluation of historic building preservation versus large selective demolition. Cultural heritage and spatial compensation have become the cornerstones for reconfiguring the village’s morphology and the everyday life experiences framed by interested local groups’ mediation.
In 2019 the young Shanghai studio Atelier Tao+C builds in the village of Qinlongwu, in the heart of the Zhejiang Province rural area, a building with a complicated and alien functional program: a library capable of hosting a “capsule hotel” to differentiate the rural accommodation offer to the young and emerging middle class. This project has been anticipated a few kilometres away by the more expert designer Zheng Lei, who designed in 2015 a community library for the ShanShe ethnic minority in DaiJiaShan village. Both are coming from cultural investments they aim to reinforce territorial ties, dealing with transcalar processes, political understanding and planning action. They fall within more significant investments, involving local institutions intent on reviving depressed areas through cultural operations and on the other metropolitan investors open to experimenting new markets. This process has to be observed in the logic of Chinese national policies, which is turning its five-year development plans towards its countryside. However, the projects do not translate those political leaps forward with personal authorship, but instead establishing refinements of something that the landscape already suggests. This attitude measures the intimate spatial instances through which the new generation of Chinese architects contours their own identity: avoiding self-representation and disciplinary sovereignty, it insists in dilated observation times, multi-perspectives and the desire to verify in the long term the tenacity of possible territorial links.
Spazio/società: un inesauribile tema di confrontoRigenerare sistemi agricoli locali. Una rilettura del lavoro di Gianni ScudoIndagare le new townsIndagare le new towns cinesi per comprendere i processi di urbanizzazione contemporanei cinesi per comprendere i processi di urbanizzazione contemporaneiInterpretare la mobilità, al plurale, come strumento socio-spaziale operativo
The Shaxi Rehabilitation Project is a comprehensive conservation project in a remote rural area of the Yunnan Province, China. A once important stopover in the mountain area on the ancient Tea and Horse Caravan Trail, Shaxi still has plenty of built heritage. The architect Huang Yinwu, who studied at the Southeast University of Nanjing, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zürich (ETH) and at the Hong Kong University, worked as a leading project architect in Shaxi for more than 17 years, from 2003. The main topics raised by the case study deal with the local characters and topographical identity in the natural environment, the traditional craftsmanship and the intervention of modern constructions, the design, expressed by identifying and enhancing the value of Shaxi’s cultural heritage and the conservation of cultural legacies into the framework of social and economic development. Shaxi has a strong construction tradition, but it is also very fragile. Unlike the urban area, the traditional rural construction type is a system of experience gradually broadened after ongoing trials and mistakes. This is the reason why it is challenging to have new creations and developments; the same goes for new materials and technologies. For architects like Huang Yinwu, it is necessary to transform the empirical system into a theoretical one, and then provide a reliable construction model that is suitable for local conditions and technologies. In another sense, the key is working with and training local artisans so that they may understand new materials and structures and develop their skills.
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