The unprecedented speed and scale of urbanization in China calls for advanced planning and design strategies. This paper aims to explore a new pedagogical approach that cultivates morphological regional design studies to develop spatial strategies that acknowledge the complex and diverse urban landscapes of Chinese megaregions. Accordingly, the objective is to compare different morphological themes that form the basis for speculative gameboarding as a regional design methodology in the setting of academic planning and design studios. The paper evaluates a collection of outcomes from four years of collaboration between The Hong Kong Polytechnic University’s School of Design and the TU Delft’s Department of Urbanism. Here, gameboarding was used as a methodology to draft scenarios for large-scale spatial transformation in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). Firstly, the paper explains the pedagogical trajectory of the studios along their three main phases — analysis, gameboarding, and evaluation. Secondly, it is investigated in how far the given morphological themes informed the design outcomes of the students. These outcomes are compared with regard to their spatial specificity as well as the radicalness of proposed transformations. Lastly, it is discussed if some of the themes are more suitable than others to respond to the socio-cultural and environmental specificities of the GBA. In six design studios, students worked on eight different morphological themes: pointillist, linear, strip, megablock, radial, ring, cross, and edge. It is found that redundancies exist between some of the themes, which suggests that the consolidation of themes might be worth exploring. Furthermore, the different context of the studios in the two universities seems to affect the role that gameboarding takes in the process. Overall, the teaching methodology has proven to generate a wide range of design strategies that point far beyond conventional spatial planning solutions. Speculative gameboarding with morphological themes is therefore a promising methodology that may be further enhanced and tested for other forms of stakeholder engagement.

Villages in Chinese megaregions are struggling to economically compete with their megaregional context. In order to prosper, villages seem to have two choices: to preserve their structure as much as possible and become “beautiful villages in the countryside” that attract tourism; or to radically re-develop and cluster with other villages, attempting to copy the economic success of larger towns. As an alternative to these conventional strategies, it is desirable to explore more endogenous forms of village- revitalization based on their transformation towards a new economy. In a megaregional context, the potentials of villagerevitalization have to be assessed in connection to fast-paced, digitalized, and globalized urbanization. This paper presents three approaches for village revitalization that are commonly used in China: e-commerce, agro-tourism, and the attraction of the creative class. For each of them, the influence of digitalization - particularly increasing mobile internet access - is assessed. It can be observed that as much as digitalization can accelerate village revitalization, it also makes the spatial extents of its appearance much less predictable. This increases the necessity to develop sustainable urbanization strategies. Therefore, the revitalization approaches are applied to a case in the north of Langfang, in the center of the Jing-Jin-Ji megaregion. In this sample area, three scenarios for urban development are presented, which could accommodate growth related to village revitalization. The three scenarios are then compared in terms of their contribution to ecosystem services, which is deemed an appropriate indicator for sustainable development. In conclusion, this paper shows that evidence-based regional design can help to cope with the challenges posed by megaregionalization, and that proactive planning approaches can contribute to more sustainable forms of village revitalization within highly urbanized regions.