Chinese Urban-Rural Continuum as framework for the Green City of the Future in East Pearl River Delta

The issues here presented have been produced following a research program outlined by the School of Civil Architecture, Politecnico di Milano, and the Huizhou Municipality Technical Bureau, in the framework of a Cooperation Agreement signed in 2008 and still ongoing between the Italian Government and the Guangdong Province of the People’s Republic of China. The research focuses on problems of conservation and enhancement of Hakka architectural heritage, considered as a key feature of the landscapes concerned in the Huiyang area - District of the Huizhou Municipality, Guangdong Province. Shaped as monumental fortified villages, Hakka rural settlement are a distinguished feature of the Pearl River Delta. This aspect emerges by considering the historical evolution of the network of marketing community and towns of this part of China as described by G. William Skinner in his famous writings on Marketing and Social structure in Rural China. By following the “Christaller model” used by Skinner, we can recognize in Huizhou Prefecture a network of Hakka villages based on the historical network of marketing communities. Here several historical market towns (that later became commune headquarters) are still playing the role of secondary hub in the network of settlements comprised between the most important market city of the area that today are Huizhou, Huiyang and Huidong. Each of these poles is then surrounded quite homogeneously in all directions by a lower level of market towns composed by groups of “weilong type” fortified villages of Hakka families. In our consulting activity for the Huizhou Municipality we proposed a strategy of development of the city of Huiyang based on the integration in the frame of its Official Masterplan of rural “landscape units” containing groups of “weilong type” fortified villages. These “landscape units” should still maintain an appreciable ratio of agricultural land to form part of the “green structure of the future”. In this way, we identify a strategy of development that at a regional scale could provide new opportunities of urban growth alternative to undifferentiated sprawl. This approach could be expressed with the slogan “rebuilding from the countryside within the city of the future” as opposed to “undifferentiated growth of the city at the expense of the countryside. We present in our paper the cases of the two minor market town of Xiang Ling and Weibu in the surroundings of Huiyang.