The thesis explores the phenomenon of Modern China rapid urbanization and the resulting disappearance of rural villages, leading to an uneven distribution of urban-rural population affecting the Chinese social-cultural landscape. Moreover, contrary to most countries in the world, Chinese culture is largely preserved in the countryside where rural communities are custodians of a wide range of traditional practices unique to China such as art and crafts, architecture and farming related that will be lost forever within the next few decades (Cheung, Fassi 2015) unless new ways to integrate these villages into modern China and preserve rural environment are not found. Within this framework, such a concern is crucial and also preservation lately has been encouraged by the President Xi Jinping, who claimed that China needs to increase its efforts to protect its cultural heritage (Thomson Reuters 2016). To cope with this situation new sustainable strategies are emerging nowadays aiming at the regeneration of the villages and their local community. The research provides the reader with case studies of sustainable tourism interventions, such as the case of the Maasai Tribe in Africa, to show the negative effects of a wrongly implemented sustainable action and the successful interventions in China of the Old Town of Lijiang and the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat in Yunnan province, the case of Puxing City in Sichuan province and the case of a village regeneration action in Inner Mongolia. The study specifically focuses on the intervention strategy carried out in the Cangdong village, a forgotten settlement about 140 km West to Guangzhou, in the Kaiping County, Guangdong Province, also called the “cradle of Overseas Chinese”. They are a large community now living a wealthy life abroad with ancestral roots in this area and representing a useful resource for the village as owners of many ancestral houses that without their permission cannot be restored and used as new infrastructures for educational tourism. Kaiping and the surrounding villages were chosen to be inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage Site list in 2007, and in 2010 the Cangdong Education Center started its activity in the area with the main purpose of enhancing the interest of young generations and common people for cultural heritage conservation and educational tourism throughout instructive workshops, activities and projects enabling the participation of the local villagers to also ultimately build a wealthy community in Cangdong. The author has collaborated with the Cangdong Education Center with the main goal to design an effective and compelling communication strategy to promote educational tourism and heritage conservation in the village, supported by meaningful case studies of successful examples of empathic communication with the target audience. The strategy is applied to digital touch-points, storytelling powerful and impressive contents about the village addressed to foreign tourists, international students and Overseas Chinese. This will finally contribute to the achievement of the main design challenge of the study: strengthen the territorial identity of Cangdong.
La tesi esplora il fenomeno di rapida urbanizzazione della Cina moderna e la conseguente scomparsa dei villaggi rurali. Contrariamente alla maggior parte dei paesi del mondo, la cultura cinese è in gran parte conservata nelle champagne, dove le comunità rurali custodiscono pratiche tradizionali uniche, patrimonio perso per sempre se entro i prossimi decenni non verranno trovati dei modi per integrare i villaggi nella Cina moderna. Per fronteggiare tale panorama, strategie sostenibili stanno oggi emergendo, finalizzate alla riqualificazione dei villaggi e delle loro comunità locali. Lo studio si concentra in particolare sulla strategia di intervento effettuato per il villaggio di Cangdong, un insediamento a 140 chilometri a ovest di Guangzhou nella contea di Kaiping, provincia del Guangdong, chiamata anche la "culla dei cinesi d'oltremare". L'autore ha collaborato con il Cangdong Education Center con l'obiettivo principale di progettare una strategia di comunicazione efficace e convincente per la promozione educativa, il turismo e la conservazione del patrimonio nel villaggio, supportata da casi di studio significativi.
Village regeneration. A new communication system to storytell the soul of Cangdong village
MARINO, CAMILLA
2015/2016
Abstract
The thesis explores the phenomenon of Modern China rapid urbanization and the resulting disappearance of rural villages, leading to an uneven distribution of urban-rural population affecting the Chinese social-cultural landscape. Moreover, contrary to most countries in the world, Chinese culture is largely preserved in the countryside where rural communities are custodians of a wide range of traditional practices unique to China such as art and crafts, architecture and farming related that will be lost forever within the next few decades (Cheung, Fassi 2015) unless new ways to integrate these villages into modern China and preserve rural environment are not found. Within this framework, such a concern is crucial and also preservation lately has been encouraged by the President Xi Jinping, who claimed that China needs to increase its efforts to protect its cultural heritage (Thomson Reuters 2016). To cope with this situation new sustainable strategies are emerging nowadays aiming at the regeneration of the villages and their local community. The research provides the reader with case studies of sustainable tourism interventions, such as the case of the Maasai Tribe in Africa, to show the negative effects of a wrongly implemented sustainable action and the successful interventions in China of the Old Town of Lijiang and the Yangshuo Mountain Retreat in Yunnan province, the case of Puxing City in Sichuan province and the case of a village regeneration action in Inner Mongolia. The study specifically focuses on the intervention strategy carried out in the Cangdong village, a forgotten settlement about 140 km West to Guangzhou, in the Kaiping County, Guangdong Province, also called the “cradle of Overseas Chinese”. They are a large community now living a wealthy life abroad with ancestral roots in this area and representing a useful resource for the village as owners of many ancestral houses that without their permission cannot be restored and used as new infrastructures for educational tourism. Kaiping and the surrounding villages were chosen to be inscribed in the UNESCO World Heritage Site list in 2007, and in 2010 the Cangdong Education Center started its activity in the area with the main purpose of enhancing the interest of young generations and common people for cultural heritage conservation and educational tourism throughout instructive workshops, activities and projects enabling the participation of the local villagers to also ultimately build a wealthy community in Cangdong. The author has collaborated with the Cangdong Education Center with the main goal to design an effective and compelling communication strategy to promote educational tourism and heritage conservation in the village, supported by meaningful case studies of successful examples of empathic communication with the target audience. The strategy is applied to digital touch-points, storytelling powerful and impressive contents about the village addressed to foreign tourists, international students and Overseas Chinese. This will finally contribute to the achievement of the main design challenge of the study: strengthen the territorial identity of Cangdong.| File | Dimensione | Formato | |
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2016_07_Marino.pdf
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Descrizione: Product Service System Design Thesis LM
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https://hdl.handle.net/10589/123586