A China planner packed his bags and went to Europe, which lasted for three months. He went deep into 1 developed European countries, including France, Britain, Portugal and Italy, and conducted a rural survey with 1 samples.
what does he think of the European countryside?
"Eco-countryside" becomes * * * knowledge
This planner Ye Qimao is a doctor of urban planning and design at the University of Melbourne, Australia, and a member of the Royal Australian Planning Institute. In 23, he left Australia, where he had lived for 1 years, to participate in the planning of new rural construction.
In p>24, he conducted a "Hundred Villages Survey" in the suburbs of Beijing. In 25, he conducted a national version of the "Hundred Villages Survey" in 11 representative provinces; The trip to Europe is the third chapter of Ye Qimao's "Hundred Villages Survey".
looking down from the plane window, the boundless light green fields, pastures and mountains and rivers are inlaid with dark green clusters, and colorful buildings can be seen faintly in these clusters. The gray-white road twists and turns these clusters together, and then extends to the distant horizon.
"how beautiful!" Even after living in picturesque Australia for 1 years, Ye Qimao was still amazed. He entered Europe from Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport until he left London's Heathrow Airport to bid farewell to Europe, "always surrounded by green".
Take a bird's eye view of the villages in continental Europe. They seem to be members of the oasis, "leaving no traces of artificial carving". The boundless fields and pastures will always come to an abrupt end at the edge of some Woods, and there are people in the depths of the Woods. Starting from Vienna, along the northern slope of the Alps across Bavaria and Hesse in Austria and Germany, villages with natural Taoism and Taoism can be seen everywhere, and there are always some scattered villages at the turning point, as if they were originally part of the mountains.
no village without green-this is Ye Qimao's most concise and direct evaluation of 1 villages in 1 EU countries he visited. "Compared with the space occupied by green objects, the total space occupied by buildings, roads, facilities, cars, people and animals will not exceed 1%."
In a village in the north of Italy, buildings with high and low levels appear in front of you, which makes Ye Qimao, who is used to building modular buildings in rural areas of China, feel relaxed and happy. Although there are many new houses in this village, there is no large-scale rural construction in sight, but the surrounding environment is carefully maintained. What he has done is nothing more than redevelopment on the original construction land. None of the newly built houses stand out from the crowd.
"The construction of rural communities in the EU is not completed, but in progress. However, the construction mode is changing from industrialization to ecology." Ye Qimao said that the EU's rural development policy focuses on four themes: "making the best use of natural and cultural resources", "improving the quality of rural life", "increasing the value of local products" and "developing existing technologies and creating new technologies" to allocate funds to support the development of rural communities in the EU.
By the end of 24, there were 892 rural communities in 15 EU countries participating in the EU's "Leadership+"project for rural development, and the rural communities who chose to "make the best use of natural and cultural resources" accounted for the most, accounting for 34%, and even exceeded 4% in Germany, France, Belgium, Austria, the Netherlands, Italy and the United Kingdom. It is not difficult to see that Europeans have a strong sense of identity with the concept of "ecological countryside".
9% of the land area of France, England, Belgium and Germany is still farmland, grassland and forest. Even in a highly urbanized country like the Netherlands, the construction land is only 13%. It can be predicted that this situation will not change significantly in the next few hundred years due to the decline of European population.
European rural areas are coming back from the dead
When it comes to public infrastructure and public services in European rural areas, Ye Qimao's survey results may subvert the inherent cognition that many Chinese people take it for granted.
Take rural communities in England as an example, 28% have no community activity centers and 29% have no community offices; 43% don't have a post office. In England, the post office undertakes the business entrusted by many governments and financial institutions, which is almost the only channel for formal contact with the outside world. At least 5, families there are more than 2 kilometers away from the nearest post office, accounting for about 1/6 of the total number of families. 49% have no schools engaged in compulsory education; 83% have no medical clinic in the village; 75% have no regular public transportation service. In England, about 5, rural families have no cars, accounting for about 1/6. 42% of the villages have no shops and 7% have no grocery stores. 99% have no job centers.
Although the figures are boring, this series of figures tells us the fact that the rural population in England is not only relatively poor in economic income, but also faces the reality of the shortage of public service facilities, unfair distribution, conflict of interests and social division. In England, the suicide rate of agricultural groups is the highest among all occupational groups.
However, to Ye Qimao's surprise, "89% of the rural population is still unwilling to leave the countryside, while 51% of the urban population wants to live in the countryside."
This is not a mystery that cannot be solved. Ye Qimao also speaks with numbers. He wrote in the "Investigation Report of 1 Villages in Europe": 1% rural communities are in a vast green open space, surrounded by green edges and connected by green grid; 1% of rural communities have separated agricultural production activities from life in concentrated residential areas, and agricultural households around concentrated residential areas still retain the traditional way of integrating agricultural production activities and living; 1% rural communities have built centralized rainwater drainage systems, and households have provided their own septic tanks and sewage treatment systems, using sanitary toilets, and the feces are treated centrally by the municipal authorities; 1% of the domestic garbage in rural communities is collected and treated by the municipal authorities ...
"Although the Danube River we saw may not be as blue as Strauss described, the Rhine River may not be clear, especially the Seine River and Thames River, which are somewhat disappointing, the country streams we saw there are always crystal clear." Ye Qimao said that this is the reason why rural communities are the ideal living place for Europeans.
When p>1 villages came down, Ye Qimao hardly saw a white garbage bag, and even a pile of garbage was not seen on the roadside, but two garbage bags were placed at the door of each household without exception. "In the rural community there, we didn't see a common rural pit here." In rural communities in Britain, Ye Qimao can see notices such as "littering at will is a crime, and such behavior will be recorded" from time to time. In the domestic investigation, Ye Qimao found that "there are no more than three communities, and white garbage can be found in roadside ditches in our rural communities."
"Without these facilities, the rural communities there will not be green, but if these facilities expand without restraint, they will break the green border." Ye Qimao called the community infrastructure such as roads, water supply systems, sewage drainage systems and garbage disposal facilities that meet people's living needs "gray things".
everywhere Ye Qimao goes, the "gray things" are quite perfect. "Without these facilities, a rural community would not exist." However, during the industrial revolution, these simple functionalist "gray things" construction methods caused new environmental problems and security problems. In the 198s, with the growing awareness of environmental protection, if residents arbitrarily bury garbage or pave houses with cement, and arbitrarily extend community infrastructure to expand the use area of residential land or improve the value of land, it will be regarded as a crime and prosecuted.
Ye Qimao found a gratifying change. In some village communities, some roads in the old areas are often two lanes with a width of 6 meters, and the road area is naturally large, while the newly developed roads in those villages are only 3 meters. Ye Qimao also saw all kinds of newly built paths for pedestrians and bicycles. These roads have nothing to do with daily traffic, but only consider people's growing needs for walking exercise, safety and being close to nature. "Reducing the overall pavement area of roads by reducing the total length and width of roads is a great progress in road design within rural communities in Europe in recent years."
"In these countries of the European Union, new differences between urban and rural areas are emerging, but this time it is the other way around. Cities are not as good as rural areas. Rural communities do not have garbage, turbid water, crowded traffic and inhuman architectural standards in cities, but only green, birdsong, various signs and architectural standards suitable for people. European rural areas are coming back from the dead!"
contextualism has spread all over rural Europe
Perhaps, rural Europe has never been on the verge of death, but after World War II, European countries were busy restoring and developing urban economy in the background of silence for several years. However, it is precisely because Europe did not develop highways on a large scale like Americans, which allowed cities to spread endlessly, that rural communities were able to maintain themselves by adopting traditional construction methods and building materials for a long time, thus inheriting their respective historical visual characteristics.
In terms of countries, the visual characteristics of rural communities in 1 countries visited by Ye Qimao are very obvious. "It is easy to distinguish rural communities in each country." Fortunately, the European countryside escaped the flood of functionalist architectural thoughts during the industrial revolution and recorded the traces of time and space.
Ye Qimao saw that the architectural style of rural community houses remained the same.
Cottage houses with single-family houses still account for 9% of rural community houses; And the new type of conjoined row villa houses is less than 5%. In general villages, although the original old houses are rare, the doors and windows of the old houses have been replaced, the facades have been painted with new materials, and some have added parking sheds to extend new rooms. However, the shape, scale, brick and wood structure, 45-degree sloping roof and roof attic of most houses have not changed.
the market mechanism has played a very important role in this process. "In the European housing market, old houses are more expensive than new houses, rural houses are more expensive than unit buildings in cities, and old rural houses are more expensive than new villa-style rural houses. Therefore, the market urges people to maintain and update old houses as much as possible, instead of tearing down and rebuilding them in five or eight years. " Ye Qimao said.
Ye Qimao sees that the diversity of rural community housing remains the same.
Except for the newly-developed conjoined row villa-style houses, it is almost impossible to find a house with exactly the same appearance and scale, and each house has its own personality. Old houses, churches and wells, no matter whether they have lost their usefulness or not, are well preserved. "It is impossible for these buildings to use standard drawings, and it is impossible to rely entirely on reinforced concrete and adopt large-scale industrial construction methods."
Ye Qimao saw that the landmark buildings in rural communities remained the same. In addition to the rural community in Britain, in nine countries on the European continent, the church is still the landmark building of a rural community, which is higher than other buildings in all residential areas.
Ye Qimao sees that the social atmosphere in rural communities is still simple. There, you can't see the prohibitive wide roads, nor can you see the huge commercial advertisements, golden commercial gatehouses, shops, price reduction advertisements and poles hanging with various commercial signs along the street. People can walk to fields and streams within 5-1 minutes, or talk to neighbors' partition walls. Open space, narrow paths, fields and pastures are still the background of those rural core residential areas.
"The visual characteristics of rural communities in Europe are appearance, culture and history." Ye Qimao commented that Europeans can't imagine building uniform rows of industrialized houses in rural communities and opening shops, hotels, restaurants or McDonald's fast food restaurants along the streets there. "Europeans are probably the most determined historical and cultural protectionists in the world today."
Visual features mean many things. They express what people want their world and themselves to be. These historical features are a colorless but time-bound historical boundary of rural community construction. Europeans are very worried about being swallowed up by other cultures. Now they resist American culture in a coordinated way, and Europeans have best achieved the overall protection of history and culture in their rural areas.
Nowadays, these rural community models in old Europe have become an example. Not only should the EU extend this model to the new EU countries, but since the 199s, advocates of new urban planning in the United States have often transplanted the existing models of rural communities in Europe to the United States as their basic models for designing urban communities.
In a rural square in Fabrizi, Italy, Ye Qimao was shocked by the faintly visible cultural traces left by the Renaissance, amazed by the quaint folk customs, and attracted by the retro style of the old village square. However, the local people told Ye Qimao that this square was only restored in recent years. It was built as a parking lot 3 years ago, which caused serious damage to the harmony of the village's historical and cultural atmosphere. What impressed Ye Qimao was that the local government had the courage and foresight to "mend after it is too late".
during the village reconstruction in 197s, the old village square was paved with cement and turned into a parking lot. At that time, the damage to the environment, especially to the historical building environment of the village, was not considered. For decades, the population of villages here has decreased sharply, the villages have shrunk, and the quality of life of local residents has decreased significantly. At this time, they felt the mistake of being eager for modernization at that time. "Fortunately, these places have only become parking lots. If houses are built or those old buildings are destroyed, it is impossible to restore them today." Ye Qimao sighed.
Today, 3 years later, the old village square has been restored to its original pavement and plant state, and the characteristics of traditional buildings around it have been restored, and the street public facilities built after the 197s have been demolished. After the update, Little Square has once again become a gathering place for local residents and a concentrated place for community convenience shops. At the same time, notice boards for village communities have been added and a series of community cultural activities have been held there. "These places combine different people and activities, making it possible for people to connect with each other, so as to form common interests and constitute the' social capital' of a community."
From the case of the restored old village square, Ye Qimao sees that Europeans are trying to restore the rural community before the industrial revolution for more than 4 years. "Natural resources or regional culture are' social capital', and their role in improving the quality of life in rural communities is irreplaceable by funds." Ye Qimao was very emotional.
Bruges, a famous ancient city in Brussels, Belgium, attracts many tourists with its natural landscape, architectural features and original delicacies. Instead of "re-processing" and "packaging" the scenic spots, community residents try their best to maintain the original customs and charm of the ancient city. "If Bruges doesn't have the surrounding traditional rural landscape as the background, it is just an outdoor museum."
According to the statistics of the European Union in 2, there are 18, natural scenic spots with special value in Bruges in 1 countries of the old European Union visited by Ye Qimao, accounting for about 17% of the land area of the old European Union. This is the extension and victory of contextualism in Europe.