Agricultural development requires urban identification with rural areas

Go to the countryside, go to the countryside! As if a low curse sounded from the depths of the field, more and more Chinese architects were awakened from the vanity of the city. With different aspirations, they went to the countryside to start a new round of "going to the mountains and going to the countryside" movement. Looking to the future, it can be expected that the spring tide of "brushing the city" in China has not yet subsided, and the heat wave of "brushing the village" will rise again.

But wait a minute! Over the years, haven't these architects made Chinese cities almost unbrushable before they can figure out the basic problems of the city? Now that they are looking excitedly to the countryside, can they be expected to do better in brushing the village than they did when they first brushed the city before they figured out many problems in rural China?

If we say that there are at least some imported blueprints for reference in the process of urbanization in contemporary China, then there is absolutely no unified model for China's contemporary rural construction because of its complexity and particularity. Even, the question of rural construction in contemporary China is an examination paper with no standard answer, and only time is the examiner who will finally score for every candidate.

On this examination paper for rural construction, there are three basic questions that must be examined. For the "new educated youth" architects who plan to go to the mountains and countryside, get ready, please listen to the questions:

Why is the integration of agriculture, rural areas and farmers in urban and rural areas?

Rural areas were once the basic spatial form of Chinese traditional farming civilization; agriculture was once the basic production form and organizational form of Chinese civilization; farmers were once the default identity of almost every Chinese. Like fish in water, "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" will not become a "problem" in the ecology of Chinese traditional civilization at all.

The "problem" lies in the great "catastrophe" in the civilized habitat-with the invasion of the western modern civilization characterized by industrial civilization in the middle of the 19th century, the Chinese traditional civilization characterized by agricultural civilization disintegrated rapidly. We have to passively start the modernization process of the transformation from agricultural civilization to industrial civilization. Over the past century and a half, China's modernization process has been so difficult and tortuous that it has not yet achieved full success.

The rapid transformation of Chinese civilization is bound to tear apart the original structure of traditional farming civilization. The so-called "urbanization" is the external reflection of this transformation process-industrial transfer from primary to secondary production, transformation and migration from agricultural population to industrial population, spatial reconstruction and social reorganization from rural to urban areas. In the case of extreme shortage of overall resources, we can only exploit the cheap supply of rural resources to the modern needs of cities through the dual scissors difference between urban and rural areas. from then on, the civilized organization of the integration of urban and rural areas in China has been divided into a pattern of binary opposition. Under the influence of the fission forces in urban and rural areas, since the late Qing Dynasty, China's rural areas entered the downward channel of decline, and in the 1990s, due to the acceleration of the process of urban modernization, the extraction of rural resources was accelerated explosively. Finally, breaking through the critical point of the existing farming ecosystem led to system imbalance, thus highlighting the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers on a large scale.

From the perspective of civilized ecology, the depressed picture of contemporary China's rural areas is only a spatial representation, behind which are the low prices of agricultural products, the collapse of the collectivized agricultural production system, the loss of young and middle-aged agricultural population, and the collapse of grass-roots social organizations in rural areas. a series of inevitable serious social problems in the period of civilization transition, such as the loss of traditional farming culture and local technology. In the face of the complexity and contradiction in the field of rural construction in contemporary China, the mode of thinking and design tools commonly used by urban architects are undoubtedly ineffective.

In order to solve the difficult problem of rural construction in contemporary China, the issues of agriculture, rural areas and farmers must be considered as a whole. If we leave agriculture and farmers, empty talk about rural construction will do more harm than good. The key to the issue of "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" is "agriculture" (which generally refers to all industries that can be developed sustainably in rural areas). Only when there are jobs, there will be people, only when they work happily can they live comfortably, and only when they live comfortably can they take into account the environmental quality of rural areas. Therefore, rural construction, the first is industrial construction, the second is social construction, and the last is environmental construction. If the rural architecture designed by the architect only has an eye-catching material body and cannot see where the person behind it is and where the industry is, then it is nothing more than a formal game in which the countryside is used as a set.

Why "go to the mountains and go to the countryside"? This is the first question that every architect who is ready to devote himself to the work of rural construction should ask himself. At a time when the transformation of civilization is halfway, the trend of urbanization is irreversible, and there is no solution to the problems of agriculture, rural areas and farmers, the same action of "designing to go to the countryside" may reflect a variety of different value orientations-nostalgia, cultural responsibility, avant-garde posture, public welfare, scenery, free yearning, artistic pursuit, life interest, social ideal, ecological experiment. Or, for capital to enter the village "to be the king's pioneer"?

At present, the direct cause of this round of rural construction boom comes from the general expectation of rural land appreciation brought about by the liberalization of rural land transfer policy after the 18th CPC National Congress, whether it is strengthening rural land planning at the government level or various agriculture-related projects at the individual level. No exception. As a result, the role of most architects in this rural construction boom is nothing more than an outpost of the capital army eager to cross the river and go to the countryside. It can be expected that in the future process of urban capital reformatting rural China, China's rural areas will release great opportunities and many spatial opportunities, which may be another gluttonous feast no less than the opportunity of urbanization for architects. So before going to dinner, do architects need to sum up the lessons of the last feast and rethink their relationship with capital power? Or dance with wolves? Or do you want to find another way to fix it?

It should be noted that the vast territory, profound history, diverse environment and rich products in China's rural areas, as well as the current relatively loose management system and the relatively low land property rights before the large-scale entry of urban capital, all provide a grand stage for Chinese architects to gallop freely in their imagination. The sudden transition of China's modernization process from industrial civilization to Internet civilization and ecological civilization has also fundamentally changed the traditional allocation rules of urban and rural resources, so that the local space has the potential to compete with cities in some areas in the network era, and it is urgent to stimulate and present it through creative design.

As mentioned above, the core of the issue of "agriculture, rural areas and farmers" is "industry", while the core of "industry" is resources, and the core of the problem of resources is exchange-- exchange with cities. The premise of exchange is the city's identity to the countryside, which is physical, psychological, intuitive and communicative. The creation of urban and rural identity space gives architects from the city to the countryside the opportunity to give full play to their skills. In some cases, the well-designed characteristic space can become an "environmental catalyst" to turn rural resources into urban consumer goods. Beigou Village in Huairou, Beijing, and Haotang Village in Xinyang, Henan Province are two successful cases: American amateur architect Jim Spears carefully transformed the glazed tile factory at the entrance of Beigou Village into a designed hotel, and reinstalled an abandoned farmhouse into a characteristic noodle shop, attracting a large number of international tourists, including Bill Gates, to spend and invest here, which significantly changed the appearance of Beigou Village in a few years. Chinese artist Sun Jun and rural construction expert Li Changping and others have built Haotang Village as a whole into the most beautiful village in China through the transformation of cottages and the linkage of endogenous mutual finance. This village, which has no special landscape resources, has become a famous tourist hot spot, thus selling ordinary agricultural products at the price of tourist souvenirs and greatly increasing farmers' income.

All these have proved that rural construction design can have a positive impact on rural industrial ecology and social ecology through environmental intervention. Generally speaking, as long as we hold the bull's nose of the "three rural" issues of industry and resources, there are still vast possibilities for architects' creative design to spread freely in rural China, and "four or two pounds" of urban capital waiting for opportunity.