The 2017 edition of the Rural China Lab shifted focus from villages in the Chinese countryside to villages within China’s cities. In the southern metropolis of Shenzhen, where the monthlong workshop took place, more than 240 “cheng zhong cun” (城中村), or “urban villages,” dot the city fabric.
The theme of the upcoming 2017-18 Bi-City Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism (Shenzhen/Hong Kong) centers on these former fishing and farming villages, which were engulfed in the rapid urbanization of the Pearl River Delta over the past 35 years. Studio X was invited to be a core contributor to the Biennale’s main exhibition, and this student workshop is the first component of that participation.
As part of their curatorial approach to the 2017 Biennale, Meng Yan and Liu Xiaodu of URBANUS envisioned the creation of a comprehensive archive of urban village related research, theory, and documentation. In light of that goal, our workshop asks whether it is possible to use contemporary data-mining tools to collect everything yet written on urban village, and then, if machine-learning tools can be used to parse that data and draw useful conclusions from it. Colloquially speaking, can we, as Meng Yan asked, “close the book” on a generation of urban village writings?
The research tasks, and the students, were divided into three groups of focus: Academic Works, Professional Journalism, and Social Media. Using python-scripting, each group tailored custom approaches to the respective data sources and endeavored to collect all available texts (in Chinese and English) which were potentially relevant. The students then had to develop ways of sorting and organizing the information such that it would be both usable to others and readily accessible to computer analysis. In parallel with this effort, they began prototyping machine-learning algorithms to create proofs of concept for ways in which the collected data might be utilized in the post-workshop stage of development.
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Burning Man
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Black Rock City, Nevada
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Aug 7, 2017 – Sep 2, 2017
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Building Yacoubian, A Social Biopsy of Modernist Architecture
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Beirut, Lebanon
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Aug 5, 2017 – Aug 19, 2017
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Justice in Place: Downtown Regeneration in the Shadow of Urban Renewal in Hudson River Valley, NY
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Poughkeepsie, New York
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Aug 1, 2017 – Aug 18, 2017
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Aging Tokyo in Japan
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Tokyo, Japan
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Jul 24, 2017 – Aug 4, 2017
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Afro-Imaginaries in Harare, Zimbabwe
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Harare, Zimbabwe
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Jun 26, 2017 – Jul 13, 2017
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The Environmentalist Dilemma: Reducing the economic and social costs of a low carbon city in Madrid
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Madrid, Spain
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Jun 10, 2017 – Jul 9, 2017
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Heritage Sites of the Jordan Trail: Documenting and Interpreting 7,000 Years of Urban Living in Jordan
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Jordan Trail, Jordan
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Jun 13, 2017 – Jun 26, 2017
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