Spaces of Mass Speculation: Urban Mutations and Controversies in Chinese Suburban Villages

As urban villages came to embody China's rapid urbanization, there has been much documentation of remnants of the former rural conditions in the new urban fabric [5] but, given their ephemeral status, their suburban counterparts have yet to be analyzed. This term suburban village (城郊村) doesn’t describe planned communities mimicking Western models designed for the middle class, but urban fringes where urbanization overlaps with agrarian landscapes [6]. It results an intermediary type of landscape where two territorial logics overlap with, on the one hand, rural settlements and agriculture lands connected by a water networks and, on the other hand, high-rise clusters and plot-based land use served by a new road network [7]. To the sprawl of detached housing usually associated with suburbia in Europe and in North America, Chinese rural fringes offers clustered islands, a form of endogenous territorial archipelago in which suburban villages stand alongside contemporary apartment blocks known as Xiao Qu (小区). [8].

Until recently, rural development and urbanization in China have been mainly in line with the traditional modernist paradigm [9] but the strong cultural shift putting rural development at the center of territorial planning leads to debates concerning landscape preservation, Heritage-led Urban Regeneration [10], and new urbanization development [11]. Planning alternatives to the tabula rasa model emerge in both urban and rural settings and to polycentric planning based on smaller units such as towns or Xiao Zhen (小镇) [12] replacing centralized urbanization. In second and third-tier cities where large-scale urbanization is still ongoing, landscape-based planning that enhances existing conditions [13] could drive this new form of urbanization, particularly in Wenzhou where the landscape culture is so important [14, 15]. If rural villages are central to Chinese cultural landscapes [16], rethinking the suburban village could articulate the idea of the village to contemporary town (Xiao Zhen) planning. As suburban villages are characterized by spontaneous development inherited from the industrialization of the countryside during reform and opening-up, and also by the influence of the neighboring city's economic life, their development will face centralized planning [17, 18]. This overlapping of stakeholders makes the planning of suburban villages into an object of controversy challenging from the centrally-planned urbanization usually associated with China. [19].

Wenzhou has gain a national reputation during the period of reform and opening up through its economic model based on rural industrialization, and small scale private entrepreneurship [20]. Its economic mode, its isolation from the rest of China, and the lack of outside investment and proper infrastructure were all causes of its slow urban growth. Despite the city expanding from 13 km² in the early 1980s to 175 km² in 1992 with the addition of Longwan and Ouhai districts, most of it stayed rural until the early 2000s [21]. Urban growth over this period occurred mainly on the east-west axis along the Ouhai River, from the historical district of Lucheng to the new district of Longwan but, over the last ten years, urbanization has extended south toward the Wenrui Plain linking the city of Wenzhou with the city of Rui'An.

Wangzhai village is one of the historical settlements along the Wenruitang water network, this hybrid system of natural water streams and wetland drainage that was been the transportation backbone of Wenzhou until its recent modernization. In 2006, Wangzhai village, its neighboring village of Litang and Bo’ao were chosen as the three villages on which to develop the new campus of a Sino-American University, Wenzhou-Kean (WKU). The first phase of construction began in 2012, mainly on Litang village and the northern part of Bo'ao village but the “east campus” is planned to occupy Wangzhai village [22] and is currently under construction.

According to Albena Yaneva, the pragmatist reading of architecture “assumes that architecture cannot be reduced to anything” neither its social dimension “out there” nor its formal one. The project defines itself “emerging from its participants and objects” [23]. To understand it, one has to slowly trace the network it creates. Following the controversies engage the investigator into an ethnographic project where the context is the content. Following this idea, mapping the controversies will lead us to understand the design process within its material complexity, in which each actor, with their motivation, discourse and position need to be identified. In the case of Wangzhai village, the very duration of the design process, and the multiplicity of actors, foreign and nationals, human and institutional, allowed us to establish a precise cartography of the design process. After classifying the actors in different categories, we identified their degree of agency on the design process, collect their statements from informal interviews and build up the timeline and the actors-network diagram.

Wangzhai village’s redevelopment has been closely related to the evolution of the WKU masterplan. Initially, the city government was responsible for acquiring the land, decanting the villagers and constructing the relocation housing for villagers displaced by the initial phase of campus construction. The original masterplan was designed by the South China University of Technology Design Institute, made no provision for the future development of Wangzhai village. Following the visit of the president of Kean University in 2014, the original master plan was abandoned, and the university leadership replaced. The new responsible of campus planning was the former chief planner of Wenzhou Urban Planning Bureau who will be very influential on the planning of Wangzhai. The Wenzhou Design Assembly, the local design institute, was commissioned to produce the first alternative design in which Wangzhai village was demolished to make space for additional academic buildings but this plan did not satisfy either the Chinese or the American partners (Fig. 1).

As it coincided with the creation of the Michael Graves College (MGC) at Kean University (KU), its leadership asked Michael Graves and his firm (MGA) to work on a proposal for the campus as well as for the MGC building at Wenzhou-Kean University. Michael Graves's office (MGO) produced two proposals: the first one orienting the campus along the northwest-southeast axis and following the terrain and the water flow, and a second one following the Western tradition of a central axis structuring the campus. In both plans, the area of the former Wangzhai village was dedicated to sports facilities or additional academic buildings (Fig. 2).

The sudden death of Michael Graves in 2015 pushed the University leaders and the City Planning Bureau to organize a new bid to provide a masterplan for the campus which was won by the landscape company EADG. The MGC Dean, also appointed as Kean University President’s advisor for Wenzhou-Kean University planning, worked closely with the EADG partners on site to redevelop the winning entry drawing from both the Michael Graves’ option and the intention of creating a large variety of spaces such as at the Princeton campus. This proposal was finalized in 2016 and in this plan the village of Wangzhai was preserved and the new campus developed around it. This option was accepted by both the central government and the University.

The lack of funds of the local government and the lack of plans from the University side, working on developing the west campus, left Wangzhai in a semi-abandoned condition between 2017 and 2020, after half of the population being decanted.

In 2020, the University commissioned EADG again to work on a master plan for the east campus upon advice by the Dean of the MGC and the W-Klab, the design lab of the newly created School of Public Architecture in WKU and part of MGC. The master plan preserved Wangzhai and provided student housing in the north and east areas while suggesting limited redevelopment of Wangzhai village where academic and commercial activities could coexist. The idea of developing the east campus as a form of campus town comes from the local Ouhai district government plan designating the area around the WKU campus as “Kean-Town.’’ A master plan for Kean Town was commissioned to JAO International in 2017 but was never implemented.

In 2022, the Ouhai government organized a new bid (without consulting WKU leaders), for the commercial development of Wangzhai, awarded to a local developer to redevelop the settlement into a leisure village without strong connections to either the University or the local community.

The future status of Wangzhai is still uncertain. If its preservation is agreed upon, its productive landscape has already disappeared and most of its population will have been relocated to new residential developments. The village's location: on the axis of urbanization, next to an international campus, and nested between mountains makes it prime real estate. The conflicting interests of the central government, the university campus, the local governments of Li'ao Street and Wangzhai villages, and the local investors and villagers have frozen its transformation for years. The value given to the land and settlements varies depending on the actor. Some villagers are hoping to receive proper compensation for the loss of their agricultural land and houses and are looking forward to moving into the new housing, while others are too attached to their home and their land to move and the local government is using unorthodox methods to convince them to move. The central government is investing most of the money to buy the land and build up the campus, while the Planning Bureau is managing the bidding process. On the university side, the leadership is willing to retain the land promised by the central government yet needs to provide a growth plan to gain access to the land and the budget to develop it. On the academic side, the Dean of the MGC and the W-Klab are pushing to develop a spatially rich east campus that integrates existing landscape structures and preserves the urban quality of the historical settlement while providing a variety of uses at the same time. The late head of the environmental science department had been pushing for preservation, particularly that of the water streams and their ecosystems. The vice chancellor in charge of academic affairs consults with all departments to see that the academic needs of the University are implemented in the village (Fig. 3).

These conflicting interests and the batting back and forth between different actors, are slowing down the planning of Wangzhai. However, it also reveals the complex “logic of the local” [24] which is characteristic of urbanization in China and the social dynamic in urban fringes. The technical process of land acquisition, development, and urbanization in China has often been described [25] but always within an urban-rural dualism without considering the possibility of capitalizing on this middle landscape. The case of Wangzhai village, similar to most suburban village, provided the opportunity to look for alternative urban developments and thinking of a model in between ruralization and urbanization: suburbanism.

Sub-Urbanism has been used to define an alternative approach to urbanism based on land art and landscape design practices [26] in which the “site invents the program” and addressing the design and planning of suburban condition, not unlike landscape urbanism previously mentioned. In the case of Wenzhou, where landscape culture is deeply rooted in the natural mountain setting, the idea of a Landscape City (Shanshui city [27]), based on the work of Qian Xuesen, appeared as an early principle for guiding urban development in the 2000. The current discussion around the development of Wangzhai could bridge the two visions of landscape planning and opens the door to new forms of land development where actors traditionally less represented, such as the ecosystem, or the local villagers get more involved,