Around the world, hundreds of millions of people have migrated from villages to cities during the past five decades. In Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, and North America, the process has fed the rapid growth of hyper-dense metropolitan regions and left rural areas bereft of people and resources. While most attention has focused on the issues raised by mega-cities such as Sao Paulo, Lagos, Bangkok, London, and New York, a growing number of people are now looking at what can be done to rethink the countryside and bring it into the 21st century. An international conference, organized by the Aedes Architecture Forum & Network Campus Berlin and hosted by the government of a rural county in eastern China, examined strategies employed by that county government to bring people and economic activity back to its villages.
Part of a larger initiative by Aedes called “Regions on the Rise,” the conference brought together architects, government officials, scholars, and sociologists in the second week of November to discuss the topic of rural development and some of the specific efforts being done in SongYang, a county in Zhejiang Province about 285 miles southwest of Shanghai. It followed an exhibition this past spring at the Aedes Gallery in Berlin that focused on a series of small building projects by architect Xu Tiantian in SongYang and picked up on the positive response to the China Pavilion at this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale, which looked at “Building a Future Countryside.”
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