Page 40 - JCAU-5-4

Journal of Chinese

Architecture and Urbanism

ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Learning from the countryside: Designing in

Chinese rural-urban areas

1
3
Maurizio Meriggi *, Mao Lin , Xiao Chu ,and Kan Chen 4
2
1 Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DAStU), Politecnico di Milano, Milano, Italy
2 Department of Environmental Design, School of Design, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu,
Sichuan, China
3 Department of Architecture, The University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan
4 Hangzhou Landscape Architecture Design Institute Co., Ltd., Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
(This article belongs to the Special Issue: Reshaping Rural China)

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
*Corresponding author: present a morphology that continually adapts to geographical and cultural
Maurizio Meriggi
(maurizio.meriggi@polimi.it) contexts, offering rich architectural and rural urbanism solutions that seamlessly
harmonize the urban and rural functions. Today, this part of the settlement is
Citation: Meriggi, M., Lin, M.,
Chu, X., & Chen, K. (2023). extremely vulnerable to the pressure of urban expansion as towns evolve into
Learning from the countryside: cities and cities transform into metropolitan regions. The conventional top-down
Designing in Chinese rural- planning practice in these areas lacks innovative tools capable of integrating
urban areas. Journal of Chinese both “urban” and “rural” features simultaneously. Scholars such as M. Davis
Architecture and Urbanism,
5(4): 0981. and G. Guldin have recognized the Chinese hybrid rural-urban settlement as a
https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.0981 potentially “new form of settlement for humanity” (Guldin, 1997). In this article,
Received: May 23, 2023 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
Accepted: September 20, 2023
the Pearl River Delta, a region characterized by Hakka villages territorial system,
Published Online: November 10, 2023 to two other cases in city regions: Pidu in the Chengdu metropolitan area and
Copyright: © 2023 Author(s). Kandun in the Ningbo metropolitan area. These regions are characterized by
This is an open-access article their respective Lin Pan and Seawalls territorial systems, which we have more
distributed under the terms of the recently studied. The aim of the paper is to illustrate how drawing inspiration
Creative Commons Attribution-
Non-Commercial 4.0 International from local countryside architecture and rural urbanism enables the development
(CC BY-NC 4.0), which permits all of individual planning solutions as an alternative to the current planning practice
non-commercial use, distribution, in peri-urban rural areas, which tends to homogenize countryside landscapes to
and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original work is urban blocks.
properly cited.
Publisher’s Note: AccScience Keywords: Urban-rural continuum; Hybrid landscape; Holistic design approach; Hakka
Publishing remains neutral with
regard to jurisdictional claims in villages architecture; Linpan architecture; Seawalls territory architecture
published maps and institutional
affiliations.

Volume 5 Issue 4 (2023) 1 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.0981