A research and design collaborative based at The University of Hong Kong, working in long-term collaborations with villages to develop interventions for rural development
Context
Historically, the urban and rural have been treated as separate categories. The rural is concerned with the manipulation and appropriation of nature (while presenting an illusion of nature as found), and the urban is conceived as a concentration of humanity. However, in many parts of the world, the distinction between urban and rural zones is far less clear than it once was, as cities and urban regions expand to subsume villages and agricultural land. As the pressures of urbanisation expand into rural areas, social and economic structures overlap in ways which can be both productive of new formations but also destructive or rural livelihoods. In the context of climate breakdown, the separation of urban and rural creates a false distinction, in that both conditions are extractavist in terms of planetary resources and boundaries.
Practice
Rural Urban Framework (RUF) is a non-profit organisation within the University of Hong Kong established by Joshua Bolchover and John Lin—both professors in the Faculty of Architecture—as the basis for collaborations with charities and government organisations working in the context of rural urbanisation in China. RUF was established as the result of a journey taken in 2006 across landscapes caught between their historic status as rural land, and the expansion of urban settlements that Bolchover and Lin describe as being “in a state of incompleteness and transition”. They cite the Mao-era Hukou registration policy, “whereby every citizen is registered either as a rural or urban resident depending on where they were born” as a kind of fragile and creaking mechanism trying to maintain the distinction between city and countryside, but in fact producing a new set of hybridised conditions.
Designed interventions in these locations both address and reflect issues relating to rural urbanisation: how villages might become different types of settlements as an interface with urban expansion. These interfaces are always place-specific and related to the needs of a particular community. Projects are led by low-tech methods and a spirit of resourcefulness, responding to the remote conditions and minimal budgets. RUF try to deliver buildings that go beyond standardised briefs and provide additional resources to villages, but at the same time create hybrid conditions that are good for testing new climate responsive spatial conditions—in that they are neither overwhelmed by urban complexities/densities, nor nostalgic for rural pasts.
In Tongjian Village in Jiangxi Province, a new primary school explores strategies for recycling secondary material—in this case crushed concrete and used traditional bricks—into new buildings. A development of twenty-two houses in Jintai Village in Sichuan Province, intended to provide an alternative model for earthquake reconstruction, utilises local materials and is planned around the “modern rural livelihood” with space for animals as well as common water treatment, green roofs, and rainwater collection. And in Qinmo Village, a remote village in Guangdong Province, an old school building was converted into a “hybrid community center and demonstration eco-farm” as part of efforts by the Green Hope Foundation to “encourage environmental and economic self-sustainability”.
All of these projects are the result of various long-term collaborations, and are means to both better understand contemporary village contexts and to experiment within their transformation. RUF articulates a form of spatial practice that is transitional and contingent, which anticipates a future condition, but also sees the root of that future in the present particulars of a place between research and speculation. Design’s role in this equation is to strengthen those particulars through interventions which also anticipate and allow for change. By combining research-led propositions that engage the particular conditions of a place with an appreciation for contingency and future change, RUF provides one model for climate-oriented spatial practice.