Page 42 - JCAU-5-4

Journal of Chinese
Architecture and Urbanism Learning from the countryside

Figure 1. Geography of cultural areas of Hakka architecture in Eastern Guangdong. Orange: area of tulou buildings; yellow: area of weiwu buildings; blue:
area of weilong buildings; green: area of mixed fortified building types. Source: Meriggi, 2018, p. 59

By surveying several cases in China (Skinner, 1964-1965), market town, to the most developed and inhomogeneous,
he determined that a marketing community for one market with a network of market towns at different hierarchical
cannot consist of fewer than 6,000 people or exceed 12,000 levels and specialization (Figures 2 and 3).
people. In addition, the distance of the most disadvantaged In addition to this simple assumption, the variation in
village from the marketplace cannot exceed 8 km. He the structure of the urban-rural continuum depends on
provides eight developing models based on hexagonal tiles the geographical location of the marketing community,
that enable us to understand different situations depending ranging from the simplest and isolated communities
on the density of population and number of villages – from in mountain areas to those gradually becoming more
the simplest and most homogeneous, with one standard articulated in continuous hilly and plain areas and finally

Volume 5 Issue 4 (2023) 3 https://doi.org/10.36922/jcau.0981