Regional Criticism: A Passive Resistance to Planetary Urbanization: Fid-Bau Portal

Regional Criticism: A Passive Resistance to Planetary Urbanization

Shen, Chensi

While the theory of Planetary Urbanization is valuable in understanding the realities of widespread urbanization and capital expansion, it also constructs an over-linked spatial approach, ignoring non-urban processes and the subjective efforts of architects. Emphasizing the specific regional character and taking the rural imagination to a higher level, Regional Criticism is a factual resistance to global urbanization. However, this resistance often becomes powerless to declare in a socio-economic context with its substance of compromising globalization. The isolated and scattered resistance based on architectural forms does not shake the social foundation and is difficult to have a voice. Although the resistance of Regional Criticism successfully portrayed non-urban living landscapes but did not create spaces outside the urban, the practice ultimately confirmed the validity of the Planetary Urbanization theory. This article uses Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu’s rural reform project “Wandering Wen Village” as an example to illustrate how a typical Regional Criticism practice encountered difficulties in reality and ultimately absorbed them as part of the urbanization process. By analyzing how this resistance interacts with local communities, capital and political stakeholders, the article argues to rethink sustainable design ideologies in a changing social context. Rethinking the role that architects should play in sustainable transformation can be aided by an interdisciplinary approach to analysis, which can help architectural discussions go beyond the confines of the manifestation practice and attempt to understand and affect the socio-economic-political processes of an entire territory.