Farming Guangming

Abstract

Hundreds of new towns are being built or planned today in China, which mostly remove the existing agricultural landscape. The study is motivated by a very simple question: instead of being eaten up by new towns, can agricultural landscape perform more actively in the process of development? I pick Guangming, a new town being built in Shenzhen, to test the idea of integrating agriculture and urban development.The project is divided into two parts: 1) reasoning the integration of agricultural and new town development; 2) investigating the planning and design methods and tools to facilitate the integration. In the project, agriculture is recognized as an existing entity that should be incorporated in urban development and transformed properly, rather than a new design concept introduced into the Green City Guangming. By analyzing the existing agricultural performance and new town development and theoretical studies on urban agriculture and landscape approach to deal with urban-rural relationship, I argue that agricultural landscape can act as a medium to achieve a more integrated landscape management of the city region, convey ecology into spatial forms, moderate impacts of new town development on local farmers, and deliver public goods for local communities in addition to food production. The new potentials of agriculture implies a new planning approach for urban growth on agricultural land, which is referred as Agricultural Landscape Approach in the project. The five principle of the approach are ecological green network, process over time, landscape characteristics, relevant for people and multi-scalar framework. The approach is tested and evaluated by the development of a city-scale design of Guangming and two district-scale designs, Xinqiang and Jiazitang.