In the name of progress: China's vanishing villages

Abstract

The pace and severity of China’s current urbanisation is unprecedented. The country’s landscape is going through an extreme transformation. Where once sprawled rice paddies and lush hillsides, now replaced with towering apartment blocks and monolithic shopping blocks. Across the country, bulldozers are levelling villages of traditional communities in the urban fringes, as a result of the rapid outward expansion of China’s cities. Once was the characteristic urban fabric of a Chinese city, with mazes of narrow streets and traditional courtyard houses, now has transformed into sprawling, gridded mega-cities of identical skyscrapers and gated high-rises.

As the city boundaries face a transformation into modernisation, the interface between the expanding city and these villages is blurring along with the cultural essences of China. This thesis explores the notion of redesigning these patches of fragmented areas into performative urban landscapes. Imperative to this is the integration of green infrastructure and (urban) agriculture into the city fabric, which can help to revitalise the deteriorating landscape as a result of urbanisation. More specifically, the outcome of this research is to redefine these urban villages, employing Xian Village to test this, through an ecological design approach that provides a way of urban storm water management to reveal a sense of community and aid in the restoration of the relationship between people and their local environment.