Culture-based rural revitalisation in China : the entanglements of discourse, capital and materiality

Abstract

The existing literature has extensively examined the rural as a social representation and a set of discourses and cultural assumptions that exist in a specific spatial-temporal framework. Relatively limited work, however, has focused on the material practices in rural society, especially architectural and building practices, and their mutual constitution with rurality. In fact, as the material embodiment of family and clan ties, architecture is at the centre of everyday practices and emotional experiences for local residents in the context of the Chinese countryside. In particular, architectural practice has been incorporated into political agendas after the state has redefined the countryside as an object of active intervention. With the emphasis on material agency in recent years, the concept of vernacular architecture can no longer be limited to that of the material carrier of rural peculiarities, and of the symbolic existence of resistance to modernization. Engaging with the theory of materiality and non-representation, this research suggests that the vernacular architecture, in the context of rural revitalisation and renaissance movements in China, has transcended the narrow definition as evidence of regional residential pattern and culture, but must be conceptualised as an assemblage of power relations, political economy and cultural aspirations. It is overdetermined by a broad spatial-temporal framework characterised by cross-references between the two social systems of the urban and the rural, with regard to material conditions, cultural concepts and lifestyles. The materiality of the vernacular architecture stitches up culture, capital and development aspirations that reverberate as multi-dimensional and multi-scalar, and actively shapes the rural community and urban-rural relationship. On the one hand, the practice of vernacular architecture provides a substantial opportunity for the economic re-activation of rural society, avoiding the decline of the countryside under the powerful syphon effect of the city. Meanwhile, the mutual construction of discourses of vernacular architectural culture and rurality provides a window into post-rurality of contemporary China. On the other hand, rural architectural experiments have confirmed that the considerable increase in circuits of capital, knowledge, and culture between urban and rural areas has not led to the gradual demise of urban-rural borders, but rather the reconstruction of such normative distinctions through constant interaction. At the same time as the logic of the city inevitably spreads to the whole world and intertwine with the rural, the inherent asymmetry of power between the urban and the rural, and the desiring cultural gaze cast upon the rural, reproduce the identity of the countryside rather than annihilate it.