Exploring China’s Rural Landscapes Up Close

Half a century ago, less than a fifth of China’s population lived in cities. Today, the portion is more than two thirds. Urbanization has occurred so rapidly that hundreds of China’s ancient rural villages have been substantially depopulated in the course of a few generations, and are facing big questions about their future viability.

And it’s a challenge that’s not unique to China or East Asia. Rural communities in the United States are facing similar questions and can learn much from China. “Historically, these places have been under-served by the design professions,” says Fritz Steiner, dean and Paley Professor at Weitzman. “That needs to change.”

This summer, Weitzman partnered with Southeast University in Nanjing, China, for an immersive exchange program and symposium on the theme of “Innovative Rural-scape.” For two weeks, a cohort of 60 students from Penn, SEU, and two local universities—Anhui Jianzhu University and Hefei University of Technology—traveled between the Chinese cities of Nanjing, Shanghai, Huizhou and Hangzhou, along with a string of thousand-year-old villages in the surrounding rural areas. Their aim was to learn from each other, from Chinese and American scholars, and from village leaders who have inherited generations of knowledge about rural landscapes and ecology. At the end of their trip, students presented original research and design projects looking at the future of rural villages and their relationships to the cities.

“This is the topic that the entire nation is paying attention to,” says Yadan Luo, a landscape architect and lecturer in the Department of Landscape Architecture at Weitzman who is originally from the Jiangxi province of China.

Luo taught and coordinated the symposium alongside Associate Professor of Architecture Franca Trubiano, Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture Christopher Marcinkoski, Associate Professor of Practice in Landscape Architecture Ellen Neises, and Architecture Lecturer Daniel Garcia. The symposium builds on a program the two universities hosted last summer culminating in a Nanjing exhibition of Design With Nature Now, an initiative from the McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology.

Students were encouraged to see the built environment of China’s rural villages as the accumulation of generations of cultural, ecological, and economic knowledge and wisdom. They also engaged with a series of recent and contemporary national policies related to urbanization and rural revitalization to understand the challenges rural communities face. Working in groups of six, they considered future prospects for rural villages.

Their presentations approached the question of innovative “rural-scapes” from a wide variety of angles, befitting a group of budding architects, landscape architects, planners, preservationists, and artists, Luo says. Some groups focused on ways to provide services to existing rural residents, including seniors, who make up much of the population remaining in those communities. Others explored the potential for promoting tourism through a network of villages. Another group tapped into local knowledge about river systems to map waterways and suggest small design interventions to make the systems more visible.

One group developed a greenway and blueway network that weaved through a series of villages while highlighting cultural material practices. The project incorporated a group of pavilions inviting people traveling along the network to participate in certain practices, like silk production and honey production and food preparation, says Mel Bleecker, a first-year Weitzman student pursuing a dual master’s degree in landscape architecture and fine arts. Bleecker led the project along with fellow Weitzman students Jichu Zhang (MLA’26) and Margaret Claire Balich (MArch’27); Xinnan Wang from Anhui Jianzhu University; and Rui Lu and Yuxuan Wu from Southeast University. Using historical maps and images and contemporary GIS technology, the network was overlaid on ancient trade routes.

“Now that these [routes] have atrophied, we were thinking through how to inject these same networks with movements of people,” Bleecker says. “So thinking through the balance between the urban center and the rural space as a way to continue cycling and engaging with these ancient traditions and techniques and ways of cultivating and producing.”

Pearl Brosterman, a Master of Architecture student from Long Island, has studied Chinese languages and hopes to practice in Asia after graduation. She has visited China before, but never the rural areas that were the focus of the symposium. Her project explored ways of cycling economic activity from the cities back into rural areas through seasonal farming programs.