DocTalks is a series dedicated to ongoing investigations by doctoral, postdoctoral, or early-career researchers into the expansive entanglement of architecture and the natural environment. These sessions are meant to create an intercollegiate cohort of scholars who workshop writing, share research findings, and experiment with methodological tools while engaging with the vision and investigations of the Ambasz Institute.
These Doc Talk sessions are intended for scholars or architecture history and theory, but scholars in related fields and the general public are welcome to attend.
The Rural Reinvention: Emerging Taobao Villages and the Infrastructural Modification of the Invisible China
Speaker
Sofia Leoni, Politecnico di Torino
In recent years, China’s e-commerce revolution has expanded beyond urban centers, integrating remote regions into the country’s economic and political framework. This profound shift addresses the “three rural issues” identified in 2006: declining agricultural productivity, the widening urban-rural divide, and insufficient rural infrastructure and services. By combining national policies with localized implementation, these challenges have catalyzed a unique form of urbanization, often shaped by the interplay of public and private initiatives.
At the forefront of this transformation are Taobao villages, a grassroots revitalization model enabled by Alibaba’s C2C, e-commerce platform. Predominantly located in less developed coastal and central regions, these villages have experienced significant economic and spatial transformations driven by digital commerce. To qualify as a Taobao village, at least 10% of households—or a minimum of 100 shops—must engage in online trade, generating annual revenues exceeding CNY 10 million. This integration of e-commerce has disrupted traditional economic systems while reshaping spatial practices and mobility infrastructures. For instance, streets are frequently appropriated as informal public spaces, adapting organically to the demands of commerce and community life.
This research investigates the infrastructural and socio-economic changes occurring in Taobao villages through a multi-scalar approach that bridges spatial analysis and infrastructural studies, with a particular focus on logistics and the informal dynamics underpinning platform economies. Fieldwork conducted in three case studies—Junpucun in Guangdong Province (specialized in clothing and leather goods), Wuchuchen in Zhejiang Province (focused on tea and bamboo), and Dongfeng in Jiangsu Province (producing furniture and “fake Ikea” products)—uncovers how digital platforms facilitate new forms of entrepreneurship and spatial organization while simultaneously reshaping traditional rural identities.
The findings reveal a dual reinvention of rural labor and space. On one hand, traditional socioeconomic structures are adapting to accommodate new entrepreneurial practices tied to global supply chains. On the other, digital infrastructures are reframing the role of logistics, relying heavily on human labor and localized knowledge to sustain platform ecosystems. These dynamics highlight the coexistence of modern and traditional systems, challenging binary perceptions of urban versus rural. At the same time, the study calls for a pluralized understanding of rural areas as spaces of negotiation and hybridity, where old and new forms of infrastructure, labor, and spatial practices intersect. By doing so, it sheds light on how rural China actively participates in global economic processes, redefining itself as a dynamic and adaptive entity in the digital era.
Sofia Leoni is an architect and a PhD candidate in urban and regional development at the Politecnico di Torino, where she has been part of the China Room research group since 2022. She holds both an MArch and a BArch from the Politecnico di Torino, as well as a second MArch from Tsinghua University in Beijing. Her academic journey also includes periods of study at La Cambre-Horta, Faculty of Architecture, Université Libre de Bruxelles; Shenzhen University, China; and Brown University in the United States. Over the years, she has actively engaged in various architecture competitions, teaching activities, and curatorial design projects. Her research interests focus on urban and rural restructuring processes in contexts of marginality and transition, with a particular emphasis on the intersection of technological innovation, infrastructure, and socio-spatial transformations. She combines approaches from the environmental humanities with infrastructural thinking and conducts methodological studies on human-soil and capitalist relations from a spatial perspective.
Respondent
Talamini Gianni, City University of Hong Kong
China’s Two Tropical Architectures: Climate, Thermal Technocracy, and Global Socialism in Guangzhou and Dar es Salaam, 1955–76
Speaker
Zhijian Sun, National University of Singapore
This paper offers a critical understanding on the entanglement between environmental history, the built environment, and geopolitics by scrutinizing socialist China’s engagements in the built environment of the decolonizing tropical world, which is still marginal to existing narratives on tropical architecture around the (post-)colonial network and global socialism. Based on archival research and fieldwork in China, Tanzania, and the UK, it reveals the concurrency and co-constitution between knowledge production and practice of China’s two tropical architectures in the mid-to-late 20th century, i.e., its overseas architectural aid in the decolonizing Tanzania (one of the largest but unnoticed African recipients of China’s aid), and its subtropical modernist architecture in Maoist Guangzhou (a stronghold for China’s subtropical building research), and thus how the Chinese socio-cultural construction of the tropics challenges established discourses on global tropical architecture. Instead of attributing architectural production merely to the genius of certain individuals, it attends to a much broader framework of socialist state-run institutions operating both within and beyond China, in which not only architects and planners, but also meteorologists, physicians, thermal engineers and Party cadres were all active agents for global flows of resources and knowledge. Drawing on theories of techno-political regimes and critical temperature studies, it develops the notion of “thermal regimes” to capture the interdependence between the use of thermal technologies and institutions of sociopolitical power. Through case studies of Guangzhou Textile Factory (1958) and China-aided Friendship Textile Mill (1968), it scrutinizes how an interlinked set of climatic knowledge, thermal comfort standards, architectural technologies and a body of expertise transcending Cold War rivalries were marshaled by Chinese and Tanzanian actors, driven by a common appetite for industrial modernity, toward the technocratic control of environmental parameters, state intervention of human bodies, and extensive exploitation of natural resources and human labor.
Zhijian Sun is a PhD candidate in architectural history at the Department of Architecture (DoA) of National University of Singapore (NUS). He also acts as a reviewer for the Journal of Architecture and the teaching assistant for the DoA course AR2227 and AR2228. Zhijian holds an MS from Columbia University and a BArch from Southeast University, China. During the Hilary Term of 2024, he was a Recognised Student at the Oxford University History Faculty. Based on archives from China, Tanzania, and the UK, his doctoral thesis looks into the techno-political history of socialist China’s two tropical architecture (1955–76), i.e., the transnational co-constitution between thermal technologies and geopolitics around China’s architectural aid in the decolonizing East Africa and its subtropical modernist architecture in southern China. His research has been published in Political Geography, Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography (SJTG), Jianzhushi [The Architect] and Xin Jianzhu [New Architecture], and has also been accepted by the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) 2024 “Global China” Dissertation Workshop and Society of Architectural Historians (SAH) 2024 Virtual Conference. His recent paper “Framing China’s Tropics” has won the 2023 Best Paper Prize awarded by the SJTG Editorial Board.
Respondent
Yiping Dong, XJTLU
This event was made possible through a generous gift from Emilio Ambasz. The Emilio Ambasz Institute for the Joint Study of the Built and the Natural Environment is a platform for fostering dialogue, promoting conversation, and facilitating research about the relationship between the built and natural environment, with the aim of making the interaction between architecture and ecology visible and accessible to the wider public while highlighting the urgent need for an ecological recalibration.