The "Beautiful Village" Planning Project Of Zhang Jiatong

The practice and research of this thesis is set up in the background of “BeautyVillage”, as a trying respond to the topic that how to develop and renewal the traditionalvillages in the contemporary rural areas in China. In the process of the urbanization andmodernization, the right position in the development should be retrieved by ourtraditional villages by preserving the original characters and developing in a sustainableway.Traditional villages acting as a load of traditional culture, life style and socialideology based on the specific economic and social structure, are the pervious fortunefor our civilization. Though more and more attention have been paid to the protectionand renovation of traditional villages, there exists kinds of deficiencies. First, the focuspoint still concentrates in the outstanding villages which have plenty of the cultural andhistorical heritages, as well as the high value of development. For the majority of otherrural areas without exceptional values, they still have their specific characteristics ofvillage life, which is meaningful to the specific region they locate in. The renovation ofthese villages should be paid more attention to. Second, the existing way to preserveand renewal our villages is too banal and idealistic with the up-to-bottom planning andpractice. In some places, people take the imitation action to rebuild the traditionalvillage. To some extent, it doesn’t meet the requirement of the development of villages.We can’t hold the static point of view to treat our traditional villages. We have to takeaccount of the current situation and possibilities of the villages, preserving the prototypeand spatial scale of villages. Finally, now the rural projects done by some of thearchitects and artists do have a good feedback. However what they have done are farmore than general, which is really hard to promote. We need to learn from theirattitudes towards the site and the genius loci.The renewal project of Zhangjiatong is a kind of exploration towards the currentdevelopment of traditional villages. It is neither the return to the traditional village itself,nor the rough imitation of the suburban area. We pursue for searching a reasonable wayto develop traditional villages.Based on the sufficient data of the field research in Zhangjiatong, we introduce“subtle intervention”, as a main strategy to renovate the village. The renovation of the main street in Zhangjiatong which the author attends in will be the key case in thisthesis. The author discusses about how to analysis the demand of the site and thespecialty of the space, how to intervene into the village in a proper way. The authorhopes to be able to abstract some of key words, providing a new methodology for therenewal of traditional villages, as well as some of experience for the architects and theirrural practice.