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Multi-Level Housing Governance in Rural Settlement Lin & Jia

Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism

2022 Volume 4 Issue 2: 1-18 Original Article

Multi-Level Housing Governance in Rural Settlement:
Transformation of Two Vernacular Houses in Zhejiang Province

of China

2
1
Xiaoyu Lin , Beisi Jia
1 Department of Architecture, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong
province, 518055, China
2
Department of Architecture, Faculty of Architecture, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong,
China

Corresponding author: Xiaoyu Lin, G515, Department of Architecture, Harbin Institute of
Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong province, 518055, China. Email: linxiaoyu@hit.edu.cn

Citation: Lin X, Jia B, 2022, Multi-Level Housing Governance in Rural Settlement: Transformation of
Two Vernacular Houses. Journal of Chinese Architecture and Urbanism, 4(2): 174.
http://dx.doi.org/10.36922/jcau.v4i2.174

ABSTRACT

Vernacular houses are a dynamic complex that assemble multi-dimension variables of time, space, and
people. Two governance systems, which are the officials and the people, control the village on different
levels, and the spheres of their influences are distinct during different socio-economy periods. In this
paper, a multi-level analytical framework is used to regroup information. Three agents are engaged in
modeling the issue that each plays a different role in different levels of construction. This paper takes
the two cases, the Old Tang House (OTH) and the Sishuishanzhuang Chen House (SSCH) in the Xiaqiao
Village (under bridge village) in Zhejiang Province of China to study the transformation process of
housing settlement in three building levels. The methods of morphology and typology are used to
illustrate and disintegrate the process of housing transformation. Then, a further reading of space is
conducted to explain how the hidden agents influence and control the transformation. As a result, a
clear hierarchy of governance approaches is proved that the larger the scale of observed space, the
higher the order of governance power. What happens in settlement level are always controlled by formal
governance, meanwhile, in architectural level are controlled by more informal agents from individuals.

Keywords: Levels, governance, agent, rural built environment, vernacular architecture

Copyright: © 2023 Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-Non-Commercial 4.0 International 4.0 (CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits all non-commercial use,
distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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