Planning June 2017
Reinventing the Chinese Countryside
What American planners can learn from Old Wuyan Village.
By Guiqing Yang, Richard Legates, and Xin Kai
Set in the mountains in Zhejiang Province, about 400 miles from Shanghai — with clean air, a nearby stream, rich and varied agriculture (including organic farming), and historically significant vernacular architecture — Old Wuyan Village illustrates the enormous changes occurring in rural China. And, as the folk saying suggests, from this one village, planners can learn much about best practices in rural China.
In the last three decades, the largest rural-urban migration in human history has emptied out villages in China's countryside. Young people have left to work in cities, and that is breaking down the country's millennium-long traditional subsistence farming system and rural kinship culture. Many rural communities have declined dramatically. But some have adapted or reinvented themselves. Wuyan Village is one place that is successfully transitioning to meet the needs of a changing Chinese way of life.
Produced through a community collaboration that is sensitive to the local context, respectful of history, and heavily reliant on adaptive reuse, the Wuyan Village approach is one that's appropriate for 21st century rural China. It has lessons for other rural places in China — as well as the U. S. and other parts of the world.
Resurrection of Chinese villages
China's astonishing economic success has drawn tens of millions of rural residents to urban areas — particularly China's megacity regions such as Shanghai, Beijing, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. China's official urban population is now 793 million, compared to 191 million in 1980, and just 62 million in 1950. Still, most arable land in China is worked by households farming less than half an acre using traditional methods.
When the Chinese Communist Party came to power in 1949, 90 percent of China's population lived in the countryside, mostly clustered in small villages related by kinship. In the early 1980s "reform and opening" and relaxation of restrictions on migration in China's household registration (hukou) system created a robust urban export-oriented industrial economy and fueled an enormous migration from rural areas into China's cities.
Four main factors are changing rural China.
First, transportation and communications infrastructure — airports, bullet trains, highways, paved rural roads, and the internet — have connected remote villages with urban areas like never before. And for young members of China's large middle class, such rural places are becoming attractive places to live — even if they work in the global economy.
Second, traditional multigenerational kinship structures have been replaced by a variety of household types: nuclear husband-wife-child households, singles, and households unrelated by blood or marriage. Villages where most of the population were permanent residents all related to one another now have an "amphibious" population living sometimes in the village but often working elsewhere for most of the year.
Third, social change has made the physical form of villages obsolete. Large multigenerational houses, ancestral halls, village opera stages, and drum and bell towers no longer serve their traditional functions. Nor is leadership the same, with local entrepreneurs increasingly replacing the roles of village elders and China's 900,000 administrative villages tied more closely politically to their larger city-regions.
Finally, hundreds of millions of young, able-bodied rural residents have migrated to the big cities, leaving "hollow core" villages. Interesting built environments in beautiful settings in China need to be repurposed into agritourism, ecotourism, and historic tourism sites and for workers in the information age.
Old Wuyan Village
First settled in 768 during the Tang Dynasty, Wuyan village has been continuously occupied entirely by members of one family — the Chens. Most of the village's historically significant buildings were built in the late Qing and Republican period between about 1840 and 1949. In 1997 most residents of Old Wuyan Village moved to a newly constructed New Wuyan Village about a 15-minute walk away. Only three elderly households remained in the old village, and its historic buildings, like the village millet house, were abandoned and badly deteriorated.
Village, province, and other governmental leaders, along with Tongji University faculty and students, began work on a plan for Old Wuyan Village's adaptive reuse in February 2013, after Zhejiang province had identified it as a key historical and cultural village worthy of inclusion in its new preservation and reuse program.
The plan was finished in 2014, and implementation began that year. Guiqing Yang, a Tongji- and Harvard-educated professor of urban planning and current chair of Tongji's Department of Urban Planning — and the lead author of this article — led the effort, referred to as the Tongji-Wuyan Model.
The Old Wuyan Village plan is context sensitive. It calls for restoration of all salvageable buildings to the way they were during the village's most prosperous period 70 to 90 years ago. Some of the ruined buildings will be demolished and replaced with structures consistent with village character. Structures are in the process of being converted for historic, cultural, or tourist use.
The village owns key features such as meeting spaces, an art studio, and a hotel, which will be used to generate revenue and attract tourists who can help build the village's public and private economy. e province brings infrastructure funding to the table, and the plan calls for more tourist facilities to be built with private funding or as public-private partnerships.
When the project began in 2013, few people outside of the immediate area knew about Old Wuyan Village. It was difficult to reach from the biggest nearby cities of Shanghai, 400 miles away, and Hangzhou, nearly 300 miles away. Because of its abandoned structures and lack of lodging or activities, no tourists visited the village. But a new bullet train station just 40 minutes from the village by taxi has reduced the trip to just three hours from Shanghai and two from Hangzhou. The internet and China's universally used WeCHAT phone app now make it simple to find and book a hotel or private room there, and American and Thai-based travel search sites are adding rural Chinese village destinations like this one.
Tongji Wuyan Old Village Plan (2014)
To demonstrate their plan, the design team launched a pilot anchor project: renovating the village millet house. The new meeting space was to be used by the team and stakeholders during construction, then converted into a study center for the village. More anchor projects soon followed, supported by government funding and local laborers.
The Tongji-Wuyan Model
Devising and implementing great plans requires an imaginative vision; understanding of the local geographical, economic, and social context; and conflict resolution skills.
The Tongji-Wuyan Model Vision
Vision planning needs both a new physical form for a place (expressed in words, maps, and images), a story of why the alternative future makes sense, a reasonable budget, and credible implementation ideas.
Why go to a place like Wuyan? Urban workers in the middle class now have disposable income and value escapes from the air pollution and bustle of the big cities. Still others settle there permanently (or nearly so) and telecommute.
The core of the Tongji-Wuyan model is to create totally new places — economically, socially, and physically — in their historical spatial context. It envisions the economic function of places like Wuyan Village changing from subsistence agriculture, skipping industrialization altogether, and building an economy based on a mixture of agritourism, ecotourism, historic tourism, and global economy telework.
The new physical space requires modern infrastructure — high-speed internet access as well as electricity, water, sewer, and roads. Old and deteriorated, dark multiroom buildings need to retain historic facades and interesting interior design features, but also incorporate modern architecture and good design.
A collaborative process
The first project the plan proposed was renovating an abandoned village millet house where the Tongji planning and urban design team could work and meet with local stakeholders. According to the plan, that studio would later be replaced by a larger meeting space. The idea was to win trust by quickly producing a convincing demonstration project and then turning it over to the village as a community study center for children, which the villagers wanted badly.
The key components of the project were designed to help overcome fear of change and distrust of outsiders. It required an excellent design and proof that local labor — and traditional building methods — could be used, as well as carefully led, amicable decision making by stakeholders. The provincial government paid for that pilot project, basic infrastructure, and other anchor projects. Providing jobs and recognizing local craftsmanship was essential to support for the project.
Good design turned the dark, abandoned millet house shell into a stylish, elegant, light-filled space. When it was turned over to the village two years later, the studio moved into a second, larger renovated space to complete its work. That space also will be given to the village at the project's end.
Project designers reengineered and restored a historic stone bridge next to the studio. In the process, workers found a historical marker stone listing contributors to the original construction of the bridge in 1895, as well as the names of the benefactors when it was rebuilt around 1910, when most residents — all members of the Chen family — had contributed one silver yuan or less. The marker stone was repositioned near the bridge, a lovely gateway to the village, the Children's Study Center, and the Private Folk Museum.
Good design, attention to detail
Even the best vision will never be implemented without careful attention to detail. Professor Yang has kept a careful watch on village reconstruction, visiting Old Wuyan Village nearly every two weeks for the last five years, teaching studio courses there, Children making clay objects in the village art studio. And bringing professors and graduate students from Tongji University and the Technical University of Berlin to help with planning and to learn from the model firsthand. He involved locals in planning decisions, respecting the wisdom of vernacular construction. Hundreds of design decisions fuse Yang's formal design training and local knowledge with governmental regulations.
Historic structures and artifacts were retained wherever possible. In renovating the abandoned village millet house into a planning studio, the historic stone walls and timber truss were preserved as the support structure. Historic interior furniture, such as a tea table, were also kept, and even a new steel interior folding screen mimics a traditional vernacular wood window decoration pattern.
New construction used traditional materials, methods, and design, but with modern improvements when necessary. For the second planning studio, wood and stone helped it to fit the village character, but steel was used for beams that span large distances, to waterproof interiors and prevent corrosion. Concrete replaces stone in some places because it retains heat better and makes the studio space comfortable all year. Unobtrusive skylights lightened interiors.
Placemaking and design practice drew on the work of Westerners like Kevin Lynch, Jan Gehl, William Whyte, and the Project for Public Spaces, as well as Chinese Feng Shui principles and local vernacular knowledge. A distinctive window pattern that once graced the village millet house is not only replicated in other windows, but serves as a unifying design element echoed throughout the village.
Today, much of the village infrastructure, village center, rural planning studio, children's clay sculpture studio, and village-owned bed and breakfast have been completed. The largest house in the village — originally built to shelter multiple families — has been renovated and is open as a private folk museum.
Much of the public space in the village has been renovated, and a new entryway welcomes residents and visitors alike. Traditionally, exterior spaces were well connected to accommodate large families and various activities. Their renovation builds on that, providing opportunities for art, tourism, and mingling — among villagers and tourists — in lively public spaces.
And people are coming. Private owners are rehabilitating houses for their own use or as private hotels and homestays. Chens from the nearby new village are moving back into their ancestral homes. A handful of people with no historical connection to the village are now commuting or relocating there.
Work to rehabilitate the remaining salvageable structures and demolish derelict buildings is well under way, and more new uses are planned — including an academy to teach traditional Chinese culture.
Learning from Wuyan Village
In China, policy change is often driven by pilot projects. Government sets goals and designates one or more demonstration efforts. If a project fails, it will be changed or abandoned. If it succeeds, others will replicate and adapt it.
The Tongji-Wuyan model can be adapted to work for a variety of China's rural villages, but those places must have the trappings of modern life — namely, internet connectivity and physical accessibility — as well as the unique characteristics that make them special: ideally some combination of an attractive environmental site, historic buildings, notable local agriculture, and distinct local cuisine.
Transformation of the Chinese countryside is inevitable. In one generation China's rural-urban migration will be over and a new type of countryside will exist.
Thoughtful planning can make a great contribution to settlements reflecting the best Chinese and Western ideas: economically viable, sustainable, resilient, zero- or negative-carbon places with good Feng Shui, vernacular and contemporary Chinese design that is livable, and attractive tourist and live-work destinations.
Guiqing Yang is a professor and department chair, Richard LeGates a Summit Professor, and Xin Kai a master's degree candidate at the Department of Urban Planning in Tongji University's College of Architecture and Urban Planning in Shanghai.
Resources
International Association for China Planning: chinaplanning.org/alpha.
Urban China Planning Research Network: mumford.albany.edu/chinanet.