Transizioni macro-scalari. Pianificazione urbana e modificazione nella Cina di oggi

The People’s Republic of China appears today as one of the most important “open-air” construction sites in the world. In addition to a renewed interest in the infrastructure network, enhanced over the past ten years by the “Belt and Road Initiative” programmes, the country has proposed numerous urban development programmes. The “opening of China”, which began under Deng Xiaoping, initiated a series of urban policies that, from the 1980s through 2014 – the year in which the NUP New-Type Urbanisation Plans were adopted – have brought profound changes to the urban form of Chinese cities. It is important to emphasize how the NUPs not only identify new sites in which to build cities for the country’s new expansion, they also seek to include a substantial number of rural villages within the borders of these new cities. The peasants who inhabit these places are the ideal users for the new Chinese cities, and are considered to be a fundamental component in the process imagined by Xi Jinping to “convert” rural China into urban China. It is clear that, in the act of altering the agricultural vocation of entire contexts and the prospects of life of the inhabitants therein, the cultural and social specicities of these places risk being totally lost, to comply with the logic by which each citizen must contribute to the country’s great urbanization plan.