Towards 2025: developing a Sino-European approach to teaching sustainable landscape urbanism

China’s leaders have announced an urbanisation target of 70% (approximately 900 million people) by 2025. Future urbanisation would be characterised now by an expansion of megacities but by growth in rural towns and small cities. Even in China’s agricultural heartland, vast numbers of rural villages are becoming small satellite cities, and these forms of onrushing urbanisation are reshaping rural China – its landscape, cultural heritage, and social structures. Those diverse changes formed the basis of a workshop about “Construction of Small Towns and Villages” that ECNU School of Design organised with Sapienza Università di Roma and other European Universities, in 2014. China is a good laboratory for studying the nuance variations of how best correct the massive imbalance between urban and rural areas, thanks to its great local diversity and also because urbanisation has already proven to be one of the most impacting changes in China’s 36 years of economic transition. The concept of urban resilience has so far been related mainly to climate change mitigation and adaptation. The intent pursued in the workshop has been to broaden this discussion by showing how the approach to urban resilience can also be related to wider challenges, including i) climate change and natural hazard threats, ii) unsustainable urban metabolism patterns and iii) increasing social inequalities in cities. The workshop experience represented for the author a significant test case of hypothesis and theories at the base of her research “Green Infrastructure. Traditional Knowledge and Technological Innovation for improved Urban Resilience”. She describes her experience and the different approaches and proposals for “Preserving Rural Nature and Humanity Features during Urbanisation” which emerged during the workshop. She concludes describing how landscape architecture and in particular Green Infrastructure design can take the key role in addressing the major challenges of Rural China urbanisation.