Scenario:              

Economic disparity between rural areas and the cities has created a significant migration of rural people to the city in search of a ‘better life’.  This has not always been the case families are split when one or both parents go to the city to make money leaving children behind with their extended family in the rural village or children are left at home on their own in the city when the parents go to work with no extended family to keep an eye on them.  The question economic opportunity and social impact had the government pondering, how they could support people staying in rural areas a positive choice for families?  This was the scenario for the first sustainable urbanism studio. 

 

Economic forces were the driver for this project and that is where the studio started.  The food delivery chain has three basic steps, growing the food, processing the food and distributing the food.  Between each step energy is used to take the product from the farm to the factory to the table.  The majority to the capital is made in the final two steps leaving the rural areas with the least value in the supply chain.  Agriculture, in terms of land use, is a dispersed economy whereas the other two step concentrate value.  The proposition of the project was to shift the factory, or food processing, to the rural area.  This would save on energy usage in the food supply chain and would also create a concentrated value location within the rural zone.  The challenge was to find ways to stitch together the scattered village structure of the Chinese landscape into a unified collective.  At the same time the student team explored ways the new development could have an ecologically positive impact in conjunction with the economic impact.

 

The strategy employed by the student team was to weave two linear elements through the existing villages, one natural (river) and one human made (road), so that they gave the collective villages focus and connectivity.  The intersections of these two lines became the focal points for new community facilities (school, health care clinic, cultural center, and recreational facility) desperately needed in the rural areas.  The existing river was expanded with an eco-stream system designed to biologically improve the quality of the water flowing through the site.  The goal was for it to be cleaner when it left the eco village than it was when it entered.  New housing and commercial areas intended to accommodate the new residents working in the food processing industry would infill between farming villages creating a more continuous urban landscape.

 

The project also called for the reassignment of the fields from the incremental allotment they currently had to a collective organizational pattern that would allow the agricultural operation to scale up.  In addition, to allow the individual farmers to continue to have year round high value crop opportunity, a greenhouse growing zone was established with a high density growing system developed by one of the students.  Energy needs were addressed by a perimeter wind farm and waste treated locally and used to support the agriculture operation.