Utopia of the Proper Ratio. Theories for an Antiurban China

Antiurban thought is the strongest weapon in the fight against the uncontrolled development of countries with emerging economy and fast demographical growing such as China. This ideology save us from the defeat of the capitalistic system in which the city, designed as a machine, has triumphed over the rural areas, generating disparities and conflicts.

The project interpretate the “village” word as a set of villas: the Italian type of Palladian villa is chosen as a courtyard model with a proper ratio between architecture and earth. The place of experimentation is the city of Linxia, in ??the Gansu region, for its of particular location in the border dividing urban and rural China. The ongoing urbanization process sees the demolition of rural areas with the replacement of alien settlements that follow the main road axes. The only protected historical district on which the government invests, for its spatial quality and historical importance, is called Bafang: it is used for understanding the local vernacular typologies. We identify the different types of courtyard that exist, their role in everyday life and subsequently the transformations that are taking place related to the contemporary changing of lifestyles. The area, as other Chinese urbanizations, is growing along the main roads and the anti-urban village that is overwritten follows the logic of the linear city. The project is a Palladian courtyard plant on which a Chinese elevation is grafted, the road is the place where the car-free infrastructure accompanies all the necessary equipment to the community. At the center of the village there’s the countryside; in which the use of new technologies deprives the work of efforts that everyone has repudiated. The anti-urban village will be a homeland in which work, leisure and residence coincide in the same place; movings will no longer be synonymous of prison but freedom, and a new way of living will involve both the comforts of today's urban areas and traditional activities aimed at satisfying primary needs. The technologies used give to the village liquid properties: the villa’s rules make the possibility to generate architectural heresies following the spirit of its own time. The Utopia of the proper ratio, for its implicit equilibrium, could be imagined as an infinitely repeatable model that still maintains the conditions for its existence: its inclusive and promiscuous logic make it an expression of spatial democracy.