During this time there has been an equally drastic transformation happening in the villages of rural China. Mass migration, the rise of the middle class and the collapse of rural livelihoods have begun to breakdown the balance between the rural and the urban. The drive to urbanize to create new economic growth areas converting 400 million rural citizens into urban dwellers by 2030 is further press
urizing the availability and productivity of agricultural land. China’s economic rise is producing an increasingly polarized society, instrumentalised through the Hukou registration policy whereby every citizen is either registered as a rural or urban resident depending on where they were born. This policy distinguishes between land development rights, health care, and access to education, regulating and enforcing the division between the city and the countryside. The inter-relation between urban processes and rural processes has produced a diverse landscape of blurred, ambiguous territories as land is being transformed. These zones play out the contestation between policies, land ownership, development rights and individual land speculation; between farmers, developers, local government, factory owners, or foreign investors. They represent a critical juncture in China’s ongoing economic revival they bring to light unresolved regulations or loopholes in the system, black-market economies and discrepancies between individual and collective action, between individual profit and compensation. They describe in-between states: half finished, partially abandoned, or half demolished. To this extent they are dynamic: exemplifying the struggle between local and large scale forces of global economic development. This research context is the framework for our projects. The research work investigates these processes and extracts design tools for architectural projects. Each project encapsulates China’s relentless transformation and with it the inherent tensions underlying such growth. The intention is to understand this context, act within it and speculate on how China can consolidate economic growth with agricultural sustainability.
