Fall 2010 | Baoding, China
Sustainable Agricultural Village Continued
China has seen monumental shifts in its population and economy since the early days of the People’s Republic of China. At that time in 1949, China’s population was 563 million compared with 1.3 billion it was in 2008. Its economy was based on agriculture, near the level of a third world country. China’s economy has now shifted toward manufacturing and service, just passing Japan in 2009 as the leading GDP economy in Asia. These shifts in demographics and income have put pressure on many aspects of Chinese society. One of the shifts has been the massive migration from rural areas into the large urban areas. This phenomenon has now been recognized by the Central Planning Committee as an unsustainable pattern with employment reaching a saturation point in the cities. The need for labor in rural areas, to service agriculture is becoming a problem, as rural youth seek to improve their lot in life by moving to the cities. This situation has sparked consideration of alternative development strategies that will build wealth in rural areas, making it a positive choice for the country’s youth. The project, begun last year in the China Studio, offers one strategy to address this problem. The studio pursued the definition of a new urban form called the ‘Ag Ecozhaung’, a sustainable agriculture village. This new form of urbanism proposes the integration of food processing industry and high density agriculture into the existing agricultural landscape as a means of increasing economic density in the rural area.
