Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Vincent Peu Duvallon, Tieru Huang, Linnéa Moore & Ziyi Zhou
Located in the South of Zhejiang Province, China, Wenzhou was known during the early reform and opening up for its economic model based on small-scale private industries. This “Wenzhou Model” led to an endogenous form of rural development and ad-hoc architectural transformation, typical of what Jamie Gillen described as ‘ruralization’. Contrasting to the ‘Large Scale Demolition and Construction’ seen in first-tier cities at the same time, this organic evolution preserved most of the pre-industrial urban fabric of the rural settlements while transforming the unused space into household industries. During the last forty years, these grass-root industrial clusters have evolved following the needs of the changing economy. However, the top-down planning wave of ‘Large Scale Demolition and Construction’ has been recently deeply transforming Wenzhou urban area and its surrounding, despite the major slow-down due to the property sector crisis. Our projects delve into the vernacular forms of architectural transformation and preservation operated in the Wenzhou regions during the last forty years to develop alternative models, based on the productive landscape preservation, lightweight construction, and local know-how to achieve economic and social sustainability. The first part of our research is documenting the incremental transformation of the rural housing into cottage industries and small industrial structure into industrial clusters to understand their social, economic and constructive logics. The second part, more speculative, is developing urban and architectural models based on the lessons learned from the prior documentation, to propose an alternative to the developer-driven capital-centric urbanism of ‘Large Scale Demolition and Construction’. These alternatives capitalize on the everyday form of care implemented in local industrial clusters, to propose a critical interpretation of it focusing on the care for the built environment and ad-hoc repair, care for the man-made ecological system, care for the economic local production.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.AM.113.79
Volume Editors
Sara Jensen Carr & Rubén García Rubio
ISBN
978-1-944214-48-7
