In recent years, China has implemented a series of policies on rural development. In 2012, Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development of the People’s Republic of China (MOHURD) began the evaluation and selection of the “Chinese Traditional Villages”, leading to massive conservation planning work for traditional villages. However, the villages that have obtained practical results in infrastructure, architecture, landscape and the improvement of villagers' livelihood are numbered. How to achieve village revival through proper design, to meet villagers’ production and living demand on the premise of heritage conservation, is still a subject requiring continuous practices for designers.
The project seeks an alternative way of village revival based on sharing economy and co-working. A shared strategy is proposed in which the abandoned dwelling houses at Xihe village are transformed into different types of co-working spaces along with co-living and co-farming programs, and the farming industry is revived with the help of the online platform, called “voho system”(voho=village office/home office). Following the strategy, a detailed design of voho at Xihe Village is delineated specifically to better illustrate the idea.
THU Fall 2016 Option Studio | Xihe Village Renewal Instructor | Maoyan Xu
