Why Agricultural Development Needs Urban Recognition of the Countryside
To the countryside, to the countryside! As if low incantations were rising from deep within the fields, more and more Chinese architects are being awakened from the bustle of the city. Carrying their various aspirations and ambitions, they head to rural areas to begin a new round of the “go to the mountains and countryside” movement. Looking ahead, it can be predicted that before China's great wave of “city polishing” has even subsided, a new upsurge of “village polishing” will rise.
But wait! Over these years, was it not precisely this group of architects who, before they had figured out the basic problems of the city, polished Chinese cities to the point where there was almost nothing left to polish? Now, as they turn their gaze with great enthusiasm toward the countryside, before they have thought through the many problems of rural China, can we expect them to perform any better in polishing villages than they did when polishing cities?
If China's contemporary urbanization process could at least draw on a number of imported blueprints for reference, then China's contemporary rural construction, because of its complexity and particularity, has absolutely no unified model to follow. In fact, China's contemporary rural construction issue is an exam paper with no standard answers, and only time is the final examiner who gives each candidate their grade.
On this rural construction exam paper, there are three major basic questions that must be examined. Architects of the “new educated youth” who plan to go to the mountains and countryside, get ready. Please listen to the questions:
I · Urban-rural duality · The unity of agriculture, rural areas, and farmers · Why go?
Rural areas were once the basic spatial form of China's traditional agrarian civilization; agriculture was once the basic production form and organizational form of Chinese civilization; and farmers were once the default identity of almost every Chinese person. Like a fish in water, the “three rural issues” would simply not have become a “problem” within the ecosystem of traditional Chinese civilization.
The “problem” arose because the habitat of civilization underwent a tremendous “catastrophe”——with the invasion, in the mid-19th century, of the modern Western civilizational entity characterized by industrial civilization, China's traditional agrarian civilization was rapidly disintegrated and had to passively begin the modernization process of “civilizational reconstruction” from agrarian civilization to industrial civilization. For a century and a half, China's modernization process has been so difficult and tortuous that even today it has still not been fully completed.
The rapid transformation of Chinese civilization inevitably tore apart the original structure of traditional agrarian civilization. The so-called “urbanization” is precisely the external reflection of this transformation process——the industrial shift from primary industry to secondary industry, the transformation and migration from agricultural population to industrial population, and the spatial reconstruction and social reorganization from countryside to city. Under conditions of extreme scarcity of overall resources, it was possible only through the urban-rural dual price scissors to exploit rural resources and cheaply supply the modernization needs of the cities. China's originally integrated urban-rural civilizational organization thus split into a pattern of dual opposition. Under the action of the shifting forces of urban-rural fission, beginning in the late Qing Dynasty, China's rural areas entered a downward channel of decline, and by the 1990s, as the pace of urban modernization accelerated, the extraction of rural resources increased explosively, finally breaking through the critical point of the existing agrarian ecosystem and causing systemic imbalance, thereby bringing the “three rural issues” into broad prominence.
Observed from the perspective of civilizational ecology, the decline of contemporary Chinese rural areas is merely a spatial appearance. Behind it lies a series of severe social problems unavoidable in the period of civilizational transformation: excessively low prices for agricultural products, the collapse of the collectivized agricultural production system, the loss of young and middle-aged agricultural population, the disintegration of rural grassroots social organizations, and the loss of traditional agrarian culture and rural techniques. Faced with the complexity and contradictory nature of China's contemporary rural construction field, the modes of thinking and design tools habitually used by urban-style architects are undoubtedly ineffective.
To solve the difficult problems of China's contemporary rural construction, it is necessary to consider the “three rural issues” as one integrated whole. If agriculture and farmers are left aside, empty talk about rural construction is harmful and useless. The key to the “three rural issues” is “agriculture” (also broadly referring to all industries that can be sustainably developed in rural areas). Only with industry will there be people; only with satisfying work will people settle down; only after settling down will people care about the environmental quality of rural areas. Therefore, rural construction is first of all industrial construction, secondly social construction, and only finally environmental construction. If the rural architecture designed by architects has only a striking material shell and one cannot see where the people are or where the industry is behind it, then it is nothing more than a formal game that treats the countryside as a backdrop.
Why “go to the mountains and countryside”? This is the first question every architect preparing to devote themselves to rural construction must ask themselves. At a time when the process of civilizational transformation is only halfway through, the tide of urbanization is irreversible, and there is still no good solution to the “three rural issues,” the same action of “design going to the countryside” may reflect many different value orientations——relieving nostalgia, cultural responsibility, avant-garde posture, public welfare sentiment, borrowing scenery, longing for freedom, artistic pursuit, lifestyle interest, social ideals, ecological experimentation……or, entering the village on behalf of capital as “a vanguard for the king”?
The direct driving force behind the current wave of rural construction comes from the widespread expectation of rural land appreciation brought about by the policy of liberalizing rural land circulation after the 18th National Congress. This is true whether at the government level in strengthening rural land planning or at the individual level in various agriculture-related projects. Therefore, the role most architects play in this round of rural construction fever is merely that of scouts sent ahead by the great army of capital eager to cross the river into the countryside. It can be predicted that in the future process of urban capital reformatting rural China, Chinese rural areas will inevitably release an enormous space of opportunity and a great many spatial opportunities. For architects, this may be another gluttonous feast no less significant than the opportunity of urbanization construction. So before attending the banquet, do architects need to summarize the experiences and lessons of the previous feast and rethink the positioning of their relationship with the force of capital——is it to aid the wicked? Or to dance with the wolf? Or to forge another path and mend the fold after the sheep are lost?
It should be seen that the vast expanse, deep history, diverse environments, and rich products of China's rural areas, as well as the currently relatively relaxed management system and the relatively low land property rights before urban capital has entered on a large scale, all provide Chinese architects with a grand stage on which imagination can run wild. The sudden leap of China's modernization process from industrial civilization to internet civilization and ecological civilization has also fundamentally changed the traditional rules for allocating urban and rural resources, enabling rural space in the internet age to regain the potential to compete with cities in certain fields, which urgently needs to be activated and presented through creative design.
As mentioned above, the core of the “three rural issues” is “industry,” the core of “industry” is resources, and the core of the resource issue is exchange——exchange with the city. The premise of exchange is the city's recognition of the countryside, and this recognition is both physical and psychological, both intuitive and transmitted. The creation of spaces of urban-rural recognition gives architects leaving the city for the countryside the opportunity to show their talents. In some cases, carefully designed distinctive spaces can become “environmental catalysts” that convert rural resources into urban consumer goods. Beigou Village in Huairou, Beijing, and Haotang Village in Xinyang, Henan, are two successful cases: American amateur architect Jim Spears carefully transformed the glazed tile factory at the entrance of Beigou Village into a design hotel and also renovated an abandoned farmhouse into a specialty noodle shop, attracting a large number of international tourists, including Bill · Gates, to come here to spend and invest, significantly changing the appearance of Beigou Village within a few years; Chinese artist Sun Jun and rural construction expert Li Changping and others, through village house renovation and the linkage of endogenous mutual-aid finance, built Haotang Village as a whole into one of China's most beautiful villages, making this village, which originally had no special landscape resources, leap into a widely known tourism hotspot, thereby selling ordinary agricultural products at the price of tourist souvenirs and greatly increasing farmers' incomes.
All of this proves that rural construction design can, through environmental intervention, have a positive impact on the industrial ecology and social ecology of rural areas. Overall, as long as one grasps the key issue of industry and resources in the “three rural issues,” China's rural areas still have vast possibilities for architects' creative design to unfold freely, and can “use four ounces to move a thousand catties” against urban capital lurking with predatory intent.