has made trade, services and tourism more feasible and attractive relative to agriculture, and therefore low-valley settlements have grown while higher settlements have lost population. Younger residents everywhere increasingly leave to seek education or jobs in larger cities.
As villagers position themselves to take advantage of increased accessibility, they have become less dependent on their neighbors, and at the same time more sensitive to shifts in local and regional governmental policy. Kinship relations between relatives in different villages have become more important than relations between different families in the same village; high-valley residents have become more economically dependent on their low-valley relatives. These trends express themselves in the dominant new housing typology of low-valley village expansion. Individual families employ their high-valley relatives to help them build their new houses. The houses tend to maximize floor area per lot in order to take advantage of windows of opportunity that may close due to changing policy or economic conditions. The houses are also completely detached from their neighbors, in order to minimize coordination between households, despite the savings in land and material that common walls would allow.
The survey of Taoping itself focused on fourteen topics: land use; physical fabric; built form typology; socio-spatial boundaries; cultural meanings of space; social issues and priorities; ecology and climate response; water and ecology; water networks; vegetation and agriculture; vegetation and animal resources; historic preservation measures; tourism amenities; and earthquake impacts and responses. A team of 3-4 students – usually a mix from UW and SU – gathered information on each of these topics, and produced a report.
Before producing their reports, and as a part of the survey process, the students recombined teams and undertook a design charrette for presentation of ideas to county officials and village residents. The students were asked to draw on their observations of development in Lijiang, |
Survey and Design Work in Taoping
