Counter-urbanisation in the context of China’s urbanisation

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本次文章的发表源于《城市中国》杂志与来自宾夕法尼亚大学的城市中国学社（Urban China Collective）的合作。宾大城市中国学社作为一个学生社团，在宾大校园以及美东地区积极搭建以讲座、会议、论坛为方式的平台，促进学者与学生在城市话题上跨领域的交流。这次与《城市中国》杂志合作发表的文章，是作为宾大城市中国学社即将在2020年2月7日举办的第二次年度会议的前期研究，作为会议议题的背景信息补充。本文翻译自《城市中国》079期《美丽乡村演化：跨越时空修复的城乡观察》“逆城市化式城市化”一文，并在原文的基础上有所补充与修改。

Last few decades massive amounts of people migrated from rural areas to China’s cities and metropolises, to find economic prosperity and new opportunities. This resulted in an increased development gap between rural and urban. This wave of urbanization has had major effects on all aspects of the society, and especially also on rural China. It’s hard to believe nowadays that when Mao was still in power, the Chinese countryside was the basis of the national economy. 

However, currently there seems a countermovement by niche groups that “rediscover” the countryside, supported by new policies such as “beautiful village” movement and the 特色小镇 movement. 

Counter-urbanisation happened before also in “the West”, however in a very different speed and context. Moreover, “the West” is not one uniform identity but has many different faces. Counter-urbanisation has much complexity in itself, with consequences for the economy, infrastructure, real estate prices, and environmental effects. This article will focus on the spatial and also some socio-cultural aspects. This article will describe some similarities and essential differences, illustrated with some cases, and give some conclusion and recommendations from a foreign perspective.

Accessibility accelerates counter-urbanisation

First of all, there is no universal definition of counter-urbanisation, but in general it always involves de-concentration, an exploration of alternatives to living in the city. Secondly “the West” is not one uniform territory. There are countless local variations within the West; same as there are many variations within China, but in the west obviously even more because it involves multiple nations spread out over different continents.

In human geography, counter-urbanization is the demographic and social-economical movement opposed to urbanization. This goes beyond suburbanization. Suburbanization is mainly a reaction on either high-living costs or congestion problems in downtown areas and still related to an urban lifestyle. But counter-urbanization is in essence anti-urban and more connected to the rural and village lifestyles. However, there are many different definitions and spatial appearances of this movement, depending on the local context. In the context of North American cities this resulted mainly in endless sprawling cities in extreme low density, car-based and neither urban nor rural.

In fact, the existence of counter-urbanisation is as old as there are cities. Suburbanisation and ex-urbanisation are related processes that go parallel with economic prosperity, when more people are able to “escape” from the problems in the city. The US is probably the most suburbanized nation on earth, where suburbia became synonymous for a set of lifestyles. Since the millennium more than half the American population lives in suburban areas. In North America suburbanization and urban sprawl accelerated after World War II, simultaneously with the increase of car-ownership and lower oil-prices. A main cause – and also a result, because especially people who couldn’t afford a car didn’t leave – is that downtown areas became congested and decayed rapidly, with downtown Detroit as extreme sample. New York, Boston, Washington and some other cities are exemptions of this, though also these metropolises face excessive sprawl and departure of the middle class and better-off to suburbs and even further to “exurbs”, for example on Long Island. Since the 1980s, a “rediscovery” of the city started, with revitalization of old docklands and brownfields in downtown areas, though in some American cities it worked out differently. Very interesting socio-spatial studies have been made by the “Chicago School”, a group of social scientists who studied on social process in different zones around the city. 

A suburban land use pattern in the US. (Source: Wikipedia)

In Europe, a counter-urbanisation movement started a bit later and less extreme, since most cores of European cities have been very attractive and characteristic living environments, except for some deteriorated neighbourhoods usually in a cone just beyond the central city, the so-called early post-war neighbourhoods. Also in Europe, a revitalization process started late last century to make living in the city more attractive by revitalizing docklands and refurbishing deteriorated neighbourhoods. Opposed to this, especially in Eastern Europe, the counter-urbanisation resulted sometimes in shrinking cities. In Netherlands, the spatial planning used to be strictly controlled resulting in “de-concentrated concentration” or new towns, with clear “red lines” without sprawl. In Belgium, however more linear settlements appeared, along the main infrastructures. In Germany and Southern Europe, the topography seems more leading though also their cities started sprawling excessively. In short, in every country or context the spatial appearance of counter-urbanisation is different. The common factor in most Western countries is that the movement is fed by the use of automobiles and the ability to live on a certain distance from the city, but also not too far. This phenomenon is called “exurbia”. 

Share of cities in the region growing/declining in population between 2000 and 2010. (Source: worldbank.org)

In China, these process is completely different, in a very different timeframe and economical context. This will be explained by zooming in on two recent policies, the “beautiful village” policy and the “feature towns” policy.

Source: Beijing City Lab

Innovative or traditional urbanisation

Tè Sè Xiǎo Zhèn (特色小镇) which translates as “feature town”, or “characteristic small town” is currently the new buzzword in urban planning and real estate development. Since 2015 it became a new policy from the central government to stimulate the development of feature towns, aimed to stimulating the local economic development, mainly in rural areas, with as promise to narrow the gap between rural and urban and to improve local living standards.

Late 2015 China’s Ministry of Housing launched this remarkable initiative which calls provinces to submit development plans for selected towns to receive state funding in return, targeted to upgrade existing and new small towns with specialized industries, and also to commercialize local cultural heritage and natural resources. 

A feature town is in principle a concept to promote industrial innovation and to increase the attractiveness of existing or new small towns, to enable them to compete with the dominance of China’s booming metropolises. 

The plan is to realize approximately 1000 of these distinctive feature towns before the year 2020. A bunch of them is already completed.

The spatial distribution of the first (orange) and second (blue) batches of feature towns. (Source: CityDAst) 

Feature towns are based on a so-called "one town - one industry" idea, which means a specialisation of the town into one specific core business. According to Dean Shen Chi from the National Development and Reform Commission, their main purpose is to create conditions for small town to be able to compete. The policy is supposed to increase economic vitality and to create new jobs to make people stay in small towns. So, it is part of the “new normal” to restructure and upgrade the economy. 

So what are the features? Various online sources mention a range of keywords such as beautiful, charming, distinctive, diversity, dynamic, harmonious, liveable, vibrant and vital. A feature town needs to become competitive via “industrial upgrading” and “creating a new platform for innovation” to develop a new. Besides a specialization in new industries also education, and science & technology are targeted. 

The feature towns in Zhejiang Province. (Mapping: Min ZHAO)

Simultaneously this measure is supposed to boost traditional culture and leisure & tourism. According to the policy call the feature towns need to “respect local topography” and “protect the natural ecological environment”.

Some remarkable samples so far are for example Yue City rice wine town (in Shaoxing), Luqiao Volvo town, Pingyang pet town, Wuxing makeup & cosmetics town (in Huzhou), and Qingyuan mushroom town. In short, the variety is rather broad. Although most feature towns are located in suburban or rural areas they can sometimes also be located inside an existing city, as a city inside a city or “urban village”. The main aim of all these cases is to attract investors by creating a strong image, a brand. 

Wuxing Makeup & Cosmetics Town. (Source: zjol.com)

In fact, the specialisation of a township into one specific field is nothing new. The "one town, one industry" concept of feature towns is at least as old as the former danwei system, which was based on the connection between a neighbourhood or community with one specific profession or field of expertise. The countryside of Zhejiang and Jiangsu are already characterised for decades by countless villages, small towns and larger towns each one with its own industries.

According to the official media, the ideal feature town needs to be small in size with a small-scale pedestrian friendly environment and no high-rise, scenic spots and in harmony with existing local landscape and ecology. This sounds very much like the anti-urban "new urbanism" movement from the 1980s in the US with prominent architects such as Andrés Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk, and Peter Calthorpe. The main difference is that the focus of the feature town movement seems to focus on economic functionality and not on their architectural expression or urban qualities of living. Although a first inventarisation of on-going project showcase an almost picturesque ideal, a kind of perfect life, but mainly aimed for the happy few and for tourists.

“Pet Town” of Pingyang, Wenzhou. (Source: wzrb.com)

The samples I found so far show a preference for historicizing an architectural idiom, which has not much relation with existing architectural history and urban morphology but rather expresses the desire to attract as much tourists as possible without considering much about the existing local landscape, spatial and socio-economical values. It seems indeed more about functional and economic characteristics than about spatial and architectural characteristics. At least that is my first impression. One of my colleagues compared feature towns with shopping malls or outlets, which are also like UFO’s lost in time and space.

Same as other buzzwords – such as eco-city and smart city – also a feature town sounds good but can be explained or interpreted in various ways. Observing the various on-going plans, it seems the term is mainly used to brand new developments and attract investment, which is of course a legal goal, but doesn’t help to bridge the gap between urban and rural, neither it enhances the landscape values or ecological values.

So far it seems also that the feature towns mainly aim on a small group of economically well of who can afford to live in a lush green environment, surrounded with convenience and still on driving distance from urban cores. The questions are also weather the development of small towns can really release the pressure on China’s congested cities where the cost of living and quality of life is increasingly under pressure. So far “feature towns” rather seem to be a tool to expand the urbanization towards the rural areas instead of enhancing the local values and resources.

“Beautiful Liveable Village”-policy

All over the world, young people are leaving the villages they grew up in to pursue the better training, career opportunities and leisure opportunities offered by big cities. In China, the phenomenon is even more widespread than elsewhere owing to the breath-taking inequality in wealth between urban and rural areas. In the majority of Chinese villages, the population is aging rapidly and the buildings are in bad need of repair. 

Because of the sharp focus on urbanization, the Chinese countryside has suffered considerable neglect in many respects. These days, however, this seems to be gradually changing. In 2012, the government in Beijing launched its “Beautiful Liveable Village”-policy aimed at the restoration of 4,000 Chinese villages. No less than 1,000 of these villages, have jointly been designated as a pilot project. Most of the pilot villages have been assigned a thematic approach, including some quite extreme ones such as an unmanned aerial vehicle village (where you can learn to fly drones), a chocolate village (where you can learn to make chocolate as well as have some), and even a cosmetics village. The plan is to attract tourists and investments and create jobs, which will automatically bring back the young people, or so it is hoped. 

A scene of Qizhuang, Xiang Village, Zhouzhuang Town, Kunshan, Jiangsu. (Source: Xinhua.net)

An interesting case is Wencun, well-situated in accordance with Chinese Feng Shui principles at the interface between the lowlands of the Fuchun River and the foot of Wenbi Mountain. Consisting of some 80 households, the village straddles a small, distant branch of the Fuchun River. Wencun is part of the municipality of Fuyang, which is in turn an administrative part of the metropolis of Hangzhou, the city that is also home to the famous China Art Academy designed by Wang Shu. Shortly after Wang won the Pritzker Prize in 2012, the municipality of Fuyang commissioned him to create a local cultural centre.  Amateur Architecture Studio, the office Wang Shu set up with his wife Lu Wenyu (who, say critics, should have been acknowledged as co-winner of the Pritzker Prize he won in 2012), has conducted many studies of rural China, often together with students of the China Art Academy, where both teach.

An interesting anecdote is it that Wang visited the village and saw a building from the Ming Dynasty being torn down. He asked the demolition team to stop doing what they were doing at once. Local authorities asked Wang if he had any better ideas, since what they had in mind was to flatten a large part of the village in the nearby future. Impressed with the status of the international award Wang had recently received, the authorities subsequently gave Amateur Architecture Studio carte blanche to develop a plan in collaboration with the local authorities, a local investor and the China Academy of Art. Approximately half the village consists of buildings going back to the Ming and Qing dynasties. However, most properties are in a deplorable state construction-wise and some have already been replaced by hideous, three-storey, ceramic-tiled “rural villas”. The proposed programme, completed by now, comprises 14 new buildings for a total of 24 households clustered along a street, a waterfront path with a new bridge, several pavilions and a number of renovated properties scattered across the old part of the village. To provide the settlement with a more organic appearance, in harmony with traditional landscaping ideals, ten of the abovementioned renovated rural villas that local farmers had already built over the last two decades were stripped of their glazed tiles and refinished with compressed clay, an ancient tradition no longer in use because clay is considered a poor man’s material and nearly no-one remembers how to process it anymore. The 14 new buildings completed in late 2015 come in eight different types, most with small, 10-m2 courtyards. The ground floor level is designed to be used as a workshop, as is customary in the region. Thanks to the used materials and particularly the scale and the way the new buildings fit into the existing urban structure, the addition looks like an organically grown continuation of the village. However, rather than crafted the traditional way, the concrete support structures were cast on site. The support structure of the historical buildings in the village consists of a mix of timber frame construction and masonry supporting walls. 

A scene of Wencun. (Source: dfdaily)

The work of Amateur Architecture Studio is characterized by the reuse of building materials taken from demolished properties, as a response to passionate demolishing and, according to Wang, “soulless new buildings”, but also to create a poetic link to the past. The architect says that he wants “to echo or respond to reality”. He thinks demolished and recycled materials have memory, a soul. Wang’s design processes start with the material. In Wencun, however, he hardly reused any materials at all. The work is mainly executed using locally available materials such as compressed clay for the non-supporting walls in the new buildings and the plastered walls of the rural villas. Rather than exterior walls comprising the recycled black roof tile and brick that are characteristic of the work of Amateur Architecture Studio, brand-new grey limestone from a nearby quarry was used here. In China, many ancient crafts and techniques that were in use until well into the last century are now forgotten. With regard to the compressed clay, two French specialists – Marc Auzet and Juliette Goudy, both associated with the China Art Academy – were invited to train local construction workers. They tested different mixtures including earth-sand-gravel in combination with rice husk or straw and improved ways to apply the plaster on the existing concrete walls. Wang considers the compressed clay technique, improved in terms of its technical performance, a “path to the natural way”. Wang calls the urban construction culture in China “hopeless”. That is why his office mainly focuses on rural projects now, because “they are the only projects architects can make something of”. Following artists such as Ai Weiwei and Ou Ning, who already turned their backs on the city earlier, architecture firms increasingly invest in the countryside, realizing small renovations and new construction projects. To Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu, Wencun represented an excellent opportunity to realize their vision for the countryside and create a model project for rural development and construction techniques. The project includes many details that also featured in earlier work by this office, for example the form and position of doors and windows as well as the floor plans. Wang and his wife claim to have put a lot of time in consulting with the villagers: “The biggest challenge of this project was and is to change the farmers’ perception.” 

Fuyang Museum in Wencun. (Source: ArchDaily)

The designs were submitted to the villagers several times and adapted to their housing needs, varying from the width of the road to the size of the kitchen and the toilet. But after completion, it turned out that only seven of the 24 housing units had villagers moving into them. People said the houses were far too small and did not have enough bedrooms – in rural China, it is customary to have a couple of extra rooms to accommodate relatives during major holidays. The project has received considerable media attention in China because of Wang Shu’s involvement and it seems that more than 300 provincial leaders and experts have visited the village to get inspiration. Moreover, it draws an increasing number of day trippers. The idea is to release the properties no-one has moved into so far for bed & breakfast purposes. Also, an agricultural research lab has shown an interest in opening an office here. The question is what this will mean to the traditional lifestyle of villagers that still hand-wash their clothes in the river. For the time being, the seemingly organically grown village has been preserved, but rural traditions and lifestyles are likely to disappear here, too, despite the fairly remote and inaccessible location.

Invisible urban sprawl

One of the main problems in china is perhaps the difference in rural landscape appreciation. “Rural” has long time been seen as either backwards and underdeveloped or “the idyllic rural life”. This resulted in an adaptation of rural areas by well-off citizens who flee from the city and buy old farms and refurbish them into living estates. Push factors are for example congestion and pollution, and pull factors are open spaces, authenticity, and living closer to natural landscapes. Also, for recreational purposes, the rural became a prime destination for cycling tours and all kind of sportive activities. In the case of the Netherlands, this added so much pressure on the rural landscapes that policies have been introduced to limit the development of new housing and activities in rural areas. In most of Western Europe, rural areas are increasingly attractive for well-off and “footloose” people. New technologies made living on a remote distance from the city also more feasible.

Worldwide, although framers/peasants are essential for the society and economy, as we can read for example in Professor Jan Douwe Van der Ploeg’s book “The New Peasantries: Struggles for Autonomy and Sustainability in an Era of Empire and Globalization” or in William Cronon’s book “Nature’s Metropolis”, they are often regarded in a negative way.

In the case of China, this discrepancy is made more extreme due to the hukou policy—the distinction between urban hukou and rural hukou. Nevertheless, an abrupt ending of this policy would cause other problems, but it seems there are some gradual changes in this policy since recently.  

Additional new policies such as the “beautiful village” policy and the “feature towns” policy might help to re-appreciate the life in rural areas and small towns. These last two policies seem to be a kind of controlled counter-urbanisation. However, these policies also put a new pressure on spatial, socio-cultural and ecological qualities. To protect existing rural qualities, more tailor-made solutions are needed, in collaboration with local people, and with a new evaluation of what these existing qualities mean for their spatial, ecological, and socoi-cultural context.

A scene of Jinhua Village, Zhangpu Town, Kunshan, Jiangsu. (Source: Xinhua.net)

Meanwhile there is also a large share of the population that prefers to live in urban areas, where you can meet more people, choose from various social and cultural activities, have more career opportunities and perhaps live a more varied life. After a period of extreme urban expansion that has not ended yet, the need to re-evaluate urban-rural relations and identities and to create a new balance is pressing

The question is whether the counter-urban tendencies in China are really a counterbalance of the metropolis, or are they more a tool to bring the metropolis into “the fields”? The building of new towns and new villages like rural or agricultural theme parks with second homes or weekend retreats for citizens usually doesn’t seem to match with local lifestyles and identities but rather exploits them. It’s also a matter of scale and speed. To create a more sustainable rural development, more tailor-made approaches, evaluation, and research are needed. The same counts for a sustainable urban development of course.

Producer/Gehry [UCRC]+ Yijing ZHANG [UPenn]

Text/ Harry den Hartog

Translation/Zuqi FU [UPenn]

Proofread/Yijing ZHANG [UPenn]

Edit/Min ZHAO+Ye PAN[UCRC]

策划/崔国+张祎婧

文/ Harry den Hartog

翻译/傅祖琪

校对/张祎婧

编辑/赵忞+潘晔

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