Saturday 18 November 2023 14:00-18:00
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals. Formal Opening
Andrea Palmioli (Curator), Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Giampaolo Buticchi, Vice Provost for Research and Knowledge Exchange, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Min Rose, Director of the Research and Knowledge Exchange Office, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Wu Deng, Head of Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Filippo Gilardi, Head of the School of International Communication, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Sacha Bachmann, Consul General of Switzerland in Shanghai
Francesco D’Arelli, Director of the Italian Cultural Institute in Shanghai
Antonino Marcianò, Association of Italian Academics in China (AAIIC)
Umi Lyu, Royal Institute of British Architects in Shanghai
Jiwu Wang, National Spatial Planning Society of Zhejiang Province, Zhejiang University
Qiuxiao Chen, School of Spatial Planning and Design, City College of Zhejiang University
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capital
Formal Opening Part 1: Greetings
Paola Viganò (Curator), School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), IUAV University of Venice, Principal of StudioPaolaViganò
Andrea Palmioli (Moderator), Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Keynote Lecture: The Horizontal Metropolis: A Radical Project
Roundtable Discussion and Q&A
Andrew Marton (Discussant), Department of Pacific and Asian Studies, University of Victoria
George C. S. Lin (Discussant), Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Science, The University of Hong Kong
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capital
Formal Opening Part 2:
Keynote Lecture & Discussion
Saturday 25 November 2023 16:00-18:00
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals. Architecture in the fields: Agency and Intermediation for a Common Prosperity
This seminar explores and confronts successful rural interventions through the description of emerging architecture practice in the Yangtze River Delta. Scope of the second international seminar is to underpin how architectural project can achieve policy objectives by successfully intermediating between local governance, inhabitants, and space. A roundtable discussion among practitioners, governmental stakeholders and academics will focuses on outlining operational frameworks for action-oriented interventions and policies implementation of rural future commonwealth.
Eugenio Mangi, Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Guest speakers
Zhoujin Mo, Principal, UAD Architectural Design and Research Institute of Zhejiang
The Fengqiao Experience of Small-town Renewal
Fengqiao Ancient Town not only has a thousand-year-old history and culture, but also has the Fengqiao experience, which is famous for the grassroots social governance thought that Chairman Mao personally instructed and General Secretary Xi Jinping emphasized many times. Inspired by the “Fengqiao Experience”, the design team made full use of practice in the “the Renewal of Fengqiao Ancient Town “, and established a “bottom-up” working mechanism suitable for small town renewal projects in the decision-making process, public participation, multi-subject platform, coordination and communication, etc., so as to ensure the smooth progress of the entire renewal process and help the town move towards common prosperity.
Tao Tang, Principal, Mix Architecture
The Sun Shed of Chun Qin Yuan Ecological Farm Renovation Practice
Mix Architecture was commissioned by Chun Qin Yuan Ecological Farm, the north of the Yizheng City ecological Farm in a sun shed for the renovation design. The main body of the Sun shed is the common concrete foundation, light steel structure and sunlight board in rural farm, which is used to cultivate economic seedling. After field research, we found that the project itself is relatively isolated, the surrounding environment to the development of rural areas, there is no unique natural and cultural landscape, the arrival of the urban population is not very convenient. Therefore, how to break through all kinds of restrictive conditions, as far as possible to excavate the potential of the project itself, and to find a breakthrough to enhance the value of space, the effective stimulation of local rural vitality is the whole design process we need to ponder and solve the problem.
Jiujiang Fan, Principal, Continuation Studio
Reemergence of Landscape
Yule Mountain Resort is located by Taihuyuan Creek. During the renovation, we mainly adopted two strategies, one is the configuration of the circulation, the other one is the penetration of the interface. The formerly ignored landscape reappeared from the outside as well as inside. The boutique blends into the surroundings, becoming a part of the symbiosis with landscape. The prospects are not only being “seen” but also “reconstructed” to some extent.
Dao Ma, Principal, Atelier Lai
Between Ten Pieces: Another “Le poème de l’angle droit”
Situated in the Southern Yangtze area, the project is located in an old street of Qianyuan Town, Deqing City, Zhejiang Province. The site is 10 meters wide and 40 meters long. It was once the foundation of an old house, which has now collapsed, leaving an old wall intact. The site is long and narrow in a north-south direction, with the western side adjacent to the gable of the old residence. A lane about 2 meters wide situates on the eastern side, and the north side is along the old street. The new building needs to be integrated into the figure-ground relationship of the old street, but also embraces a new pictorial expression. It attempts to satisfy the dialogue of old memory, and to meet the new metabolism.
If you don’t know where you’ve come from, you don’t know where you’re going. The word “Lai” has two meanings, one is “being” and the other is “future”. The architectural practice of Atelier LAI takes the original meanings of “Lai”, looking back at the past, and exploring the path of contemporary local architectural art creation from the future.
Fanhao Meng, Co-Founder & Chief Architect, line+studio
Shaping Changes
In the age of the Internet, the social dimension of the architect’s identity continues to strengthen. Architects are shifting from passive, single-focused, and unidirectional problem solvers to becoming more proactive, multifaceted, and multidirectional organizers. By sharing recent design practices in heritage preservation, rural revitalization, and urban renewal, we aim to explore coexistence of the old and the new within the context of sustainable development. We will discuss how “shaping changes” becomes the core strategy to construct valuable spatial environments specific to particular contexts, allowing architecture to continually iterate and unleash its value across various domains, including society, economy, and culture.
Juntian Zhang, Principal, Sens Architecture Office
Reconstruction and Life of Countryside
Qili Village is one of the most ordinary and typical villages of contemporary rural areas in Jiangsu and Zhejiang. A microcosm of all the rural areas in Jiangsu and Zhejiang can be seen here—flat terrain, vast rice fields, scattered street shops and new rural settlements. There are some old neighborhoods near by the river which are not large in scale and have left traces of development and change in the times with the construction of new rural areas.
Roundtable Discussion and Q&A
Chair Panel
Harry den Hartog, College of Architecture and Urban Planning (CAUP), Tongji University
Nasrine Seraji, School of Architecture and Environmental Policy, University College Dublin, Michael Graves College of Architectuere and Design, Wenzhou Kean University (WKU)
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals. Architecture in the fields: Agency and Intermediation for a Common Prosperity
Saturday 02 December 2023 15:00-18:00
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals. Beyond Urbanization, between Horizontalism and Entanglisation: Exploratory Paths
This international seminar is aimed at redefining the ongoing attempt in academic and institutional fields to provide an operational framework for tackling rural and urban integration. By challenging the notion of urbanization and its relevance to capture undergoing social and spatial transitions in rural China, this fourth international seminar will advance the notions of Horizontal Metropolis and Multidimensional Entanglization, comparing international visions through the lens of environmental sustainability.
Andrea Palmioli, Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Yangtze River Delta Extended Metropolis: From Ground Ecologies to Grassroot Entrepreneurial Communalism
This research investigates the existence of new forms of emerging rurality in the metropolitan basin of the Yangtze Delta. In opposition to the growing gap between infrastructural heritage and society, the priority of the territory is reaffirmed as a theoretical tool and environmental paradigm. The research hypothesis is that the spread of small and medium-sized enterprises in rural areas represents a form of capitalization of the spatial reorganization occurred in the Commune’s period. The preliminary factor which originated the process of rural industrialization is based on the restructuring of two strategic territorial resources: the soil structure and the water network. These transformations have led to the formation of numerous hybrid spaces and clusters of small and micro enterprises dispersed over the countryside. As a result, this mode of production has, in turn, reshaped the relationship between the local economy, communities and natural environment giving rise to forms of urban development without fractures, where the relationship between the built space and the agricultural areas is no longer of an opposite nature. What emerges is a network of “milieu” where the resulting socio-spatial organization shows a pattern of capillary urbanization in these conventionally defined “non-urban” areas. The notion of urbanity is therefore restructured from the perspective of landscape rationalities, allowing to analyze, intersect and integrate the diversified territorial layers.
Guest speakers
Cristian Nolf, Department of Environmental Sciences, Wageningen University
Jiangnan Park: A Regional Landscape Vision for the YRD Megacity Region
(authors: Christian Nolf and Yuting Xie)
The Yangtze River Delta (YRD), renowned for its high population density, is undergoing profound transformations that tend to polarize the region. Visible changes involve urban densification and modernization around hyper-connected nodes within the megacity, while less apparent changes encompass the rapid and radical rationalization of the so-called rural areas in-between. This rationalization, driven by policies targeting agricultural modernization, ecosystem reconstruction, and the concentration of the population into ‘super-villages,’ often disregards the distinctive cultural value of the ancestral productive landscape. In response, our proposed Jiangnan Park envisions the polder area between Suzhou, Shanghai, and Hangzhou as a pivotal region within the YRD. Developed over five years through research, design studios, and co-production workshops with local stakeholders, our vision for Jiangnan Park emphasizes highlighting the diversity of characteristic landscapes, ecologies, and heritage to create a more balanced, complementary, and inclusive future for the entire YRD region.
Tommaso Pietropolli, School of Architecture Civil And Environmental Engineering (ENAC), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL)
Between Spaces and Theories: Horizontality as a Design Research Tool
The contribution considers the relevance of a concept, or rather a figure—horizontality—for understanding contemporary forms of urbanization, their paradoxes, and ambiguities. It explores “horizontality” in its relation to space, its design, the European city-territory, and its construction. It thus questions predominant design paradigms, pervasively rooted in the tradition of Western urbanism, based on vertical hierarchy.
Looking on the one hand at the conceptual dimension of the figure and on the other hand at its spatial dimension, it will delve into a horizontal approach to the design of contemporary urbanized territories, exploring their specific forms of non-hierarchical order and their potentialities. In doing so, it will investigate the position and role of urbanism and design in the broader context of the relations between society, forms of power, and space.
Qinyi Zhang, Studio Paola Vigano’, Brussels
The Elemental Metropolis: The Past and Future of the Extended Urbanity in the Yangtze River Delta, China
The urbanization in Yangtze River Delta is looking for a new interpretation and paradigm. This region is not just a collection of city cores; it encompasses a vast, dispersed urbanization where agricultural and non-agricultural activities and spaces coalesce—a desakota in McGee’s terms. Before proposing a new interpretation, this presentation scrutinizes the physical elements defining the desakota in the Yangtze River Delta: water, trees, houses, road, industry, facilities, etc. The fundamental question addressed is: What constitutes the essence of the Yangtze River Delta’s desakota throughout its extensive history? This exploration aims to envision potential qualities of life in a society where the urban-rural divide dissolves through transformative changes to these elements.
Yuting Xie, Institute of Landscape Architecture, Zhejiang University, China
Landscape Narrative and Adaptation in the Yangtze River Delta Metropolitan Region
The Yangtze River Delta has a long tradition of land reclamation, poldering, and intensive agriculture, which have consistently shaped its delta landscape. Recent decades of accelerated industrialization and urbanization have triggered drastic landscape transformation and adaptation to emerging new urban forms within the metropolitan region. This lecture will start with a narrative of the delta landscape and illustrate with pilot projects for agriculture intensification, new housing, infrastructures, and blue-green open space. Finally, how spatial planning, urban design, and landscape architecture may contribute to more integrative and adaptive developments in metropolitan delta regions will be reflected.
Andrea Palmioli, Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Roundtable Discussion and Q&A
Chair Panel
Anke Hagemann, School VI Planning Building Environment, Department of Architecture, Technische Universität Berlin
Liu Cui, College of Civil Engineering and Architecture, Zhejiang University
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals. Beyond Urbanization, Between Horizontalism and Entanglisation: Exploratory Paths
Saturday 09 December 2023 18:00-20:00
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals. Idealizing Rural: Media Multi-Narratives Between Metro-Fitting and Retroactive Pastoralism
The international seminar foregrounds current and emerging media narratives voicing rural contents creators, constructing, and idealizing a citizen-oriented image of the countryside. The third international seminar will question the spectacularizing of rural space, pastoral and idyllic narratives, and potential risks of widening rural-urban divide.
Andrea Palmioli, Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Guest speakers
Han Li, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures, Rohdes College, (Memphis, TN, USA)
Rediscovering the Chinese Countryside in the Age of Social Media
Rural micro-celebrities and short videos featuring rural content have taken the Chinese internet by storm in recent years. These digital productions, spanning a wide spectrum of quality, all claim to depicting an “authentic” and “organic” Chinese countryside. Some rural content creators present their everyday lives through low budget, “down-to-earth” videos, while others captivate audiences with a blend of pastoral idyll and gentrified aesthetics. This talk will investigate the rediscovery and repackaging of the rural lifescape by Chinese micro-celebrities on social media and examines the sociocultural dynamics behind the production, circulation, and consumption of these videos.
Jian Lin, School of Journalism and Communication, The Chinese University of Hong Kong
Wanghong, Creator Culture and the Rural China
The wide penetration of Internet infrastructure and the reduced subscription cost have enabled a maximum incorporation of the Chinese population and of spaces into the platform and wanghong economy. The “sinking market” (下沉市场), a term frequently used by Chinese media and business organizations in the past five years to refer to the small-town and rural markets, has become a new competitive field of investment among Chinese platform companies (People’s Daily, 2019). In the past decade, we have witnessed a number of rural-based Chinese creators such as Zhang Tongxue, Dianxi Xiaoge, and Li Ziqi, going viral on social media. Their stories testify to a crucial distinction between the Chinese wanghong industry (Craig, Lin and Cunningham, 2021) and the influencer economy or social media entertainment industry (Cunningham and Craig, 2019) in the global context. The well-established Internet infrastructure across China and its immense consumer market make the networked wanghong economy even more inclusive regarding demography and geolocation.
Building on existing scholarship on Chinese wanghong economy and culture, in this talk I will delineate the evolution and specificities of creator economy in the Chinese rural. What does the vast popularity of the rural-based creator economy mean for Chinese rural society, and say about wanghong culture in general? How do wanghong production and work bring to the identity of Chinese rural residents? If, as promised by platform companies, the wanghong economy offers alluring potentials for boosting employment and the rural economy, how are these opportunities actually exploited by rural internet users, and how do they transform the existing power relations in rural communities? I will address these questions by locating social media entertainment in rural China and exploring the boundary and future of the wanghong economy and wanghong studies.
Yi Wang, Department of Entrepreneurship, Marketing and Management Systems, Nottingham University Business School China
Cultural gentrification and sense of place in rural areas
Gentrified rural areas become more and more popular as they provide a different explanation to the new rural. It attracts visitors for pursuing nature and tranquility with popular and modern discourses. These gentrified spaces become the medium for build up the “mutual gaze” between tourists and locals (Maoz, 2006). The mutual gaze emphasizes on both sides’ power in manipulate their agencies in tourism development at those gentrified spaces and then contribute to the overall place-making. The tourists and the locals might not meet each other in the destination, but view, engage and understand each other in the mutual gaze. This presentation discusses how tourists and locals shape their sense of place through their activities at the gentrified rural areas.
Francesca Valsecci, College of Design and Innovation, Tongji University
Ecological Entanglement in Urban-Rural Relationship
The presentation shares reflections about urban-rural innovation theories and practice, in light of environmental concerns and looking at integrating ecology and sustainability in the rural revitalization process. The “peri-urban” or of the “sub-urban” space defines a transition between the city boundaries and different forms of urban lifestyle; in design terms, it is a liminal space for the exploration of forms of urbanism which conceive the city not as an artificial or human-centered entities, but considering its bioregional features and ecological entanglement.
Roundtable Discussion and Q&A
Chair Panel
Filippo Gilardi, School of International Communication, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
David Kiwuwa, School of International Studies, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals. Idealizing Rural: Media Multi-Narratives Between Metro-Fitting and Retroactive Pastoralism
Saturday 10 December 2023 18:55-20:00
Horizontal Metropolis Yangtze River Delta: Entangling Capitals. Official Closure of the International Seminar Series and Exhibition
Student and public contributions on sharing their definition of the countryside. This last seminar will outline research findings and paths emerged in the previous sessions and it will follow up the debate on interpretations of countryside collected from students and the public audience.
The ultimate goal of the international seminar series is to develop new theoretical and operational frameworks able to capture and emphasize the multifaceted nature of rural transformations, actors, and people involved, with the intention to overcome widening disparities among urban and rural contexts.
Andrea Palmioli, Department of Architecture and Built Environment, Faculty of Science and Engineering, University of Nottingham Ningbo China
Roundtable Discussion Q&A (second session)
Paola Viganò (Curator), School of Architecture, Civil and Environmental Engineering (ENAC), Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), IUAV University of Venice, Principal of StudioPaolaViganò
Charles Whaldeim, Office for Urbanization, Harvard Graduate School of Design
George C. S. Lin, Department of Geography, Faculty of Social Science, The University of Hong Kong