This research investigates how tourism development can be balanced with ecological and cultural sustainability in the karst region of Puzhehei, Yunnan, China. In recent years, Puzhehei has experienced rapid tourism growth, resulting in overtourism and placing significant pressure on its fragile karst ecosystems and rich ethnic cultural heritage. The study identifies key challenges, including ecological vulnerability, cultural homogenization, and the absence of integrated governance.

A mixed-methods approach was employed, combining field surveys, stakeholder interviews, GIS-based spatial analysis, and ecological security pattern (ESP) modeling. The research evaluates the economic, ecological, and cultural effects of tourism. Based on the ESP analysis, the research develops a typological zoning framework that classifies the landscape into four categories: priority tourism development areas with ecological resilience, strictly protected fragile zones, ecologically important zones unsuitable for tourism, and potential reserve areas for future activation. This typology informs targeted planning principles and strategies that align tourism development with long-term ecological and cultural sustainability.
The research highlights the urgent need for a paradigm shift toward ecology- and culture-based tourism planning, emphasizing the integration of ecological science, local knowledge, and participatory governance. The analytical methods and design principles presented offer a replicable model for sustainable tourism development in ecologically sensitive areas, aiming to preserve both the natural and cultural distinctiveness of karst landscapes.

The starting point of this project is the search for a renewal approach, including process and outcome, that allows urban village communities to move from labour-intensive industry-dominated production and living space to a sustainable and livable high-density community in the context of industrial transition.

Shenzhen's labour-intensive manufacturing-based system attracted a large number of migrants from other cities. Urban villages were born along with the rapid expansion of factories. However, Shenzhen's shortage of land and expensive housing has forced migrants to live in urban villages, turning them into areas of extremely high density, both in terms of population and building structures. They became the characteristic feature of Shenzhen's landscape. About 60 percent of the people in Shenzhen now live in urban villages, where there are many environmental problems, such as inadequate public facilities and a shortage of housing. Shenzhen government has undertaken various urban village renewal programes. They either demolish villages for the sake of land finance or focus on micro revitalization aimed at improving the environmental conditions of public spaces.

However, industrial transition has affected people and space along the entire labour-intensive industry chain, which means that the model of high-density urban villages and industrial parks dominated by labour-intensity is facing mismatches in population, space and system in the industrial transition.

In recent years, Shenzhen has launched a new round of urban village improvement projects, which plans to retain most of the existing living spaces in urban villages, while changing the functions or redeveloping the large-footprint industrial zones that collectively owned by villages. The latter contains great opportunities to enhance the urban sustainability and livability. For this project, urban villages' industrial parks in Shenzhen's periphery were selected for planning and design

For this project, industrial parks in the periphery of Shenzhen, which is going to become a high-tech industrial park in the future, were selected for planning and design.