TAISHAN, CHINA Incremental Urbanism: Evolving Collective Forms in Taishan, China

Incremental Urbanism tells the story of Taishan through the narratives surrounding the region’s market-villages (墟) and building unit — qilou (骑楼). The collective form retains a spatial legibility that arise from traditional Chinese clanship, providing a framework that facilitates urban change beginning from the late Qing Dynasty to the present time. The mapping of the collective form exhibits the wear and tear of Taishan’s historical narrative and ㅠridges fragmented memories spanning across the macro to the micro, tangible and intangible, back and forth, in a dialogue that informs the whole process. Today, Taishan represents one of many peripheral territories that await great transformation in response to the Greater-Bay-Area Plan (HK-Macau-Guangdong). Divided into three zones, the territorial policies aim to distribute the socio-economic benefits across Guangdong province. As a result, we begin to see an urban pattern that is more complex and varied than the common belief of thriving urban versus declining rural. Within this transformation, how do the shifting contexts, collective identities, and every-day life shape the socio-economic restructuring of the existing collective forms? How can we maintain and calibrate the existing framework within which change can operate? Observing the ecology surrounding the qilou (骑楼), the analysis displays the building unit’s malleability to transforming landscapes, economies and rural social structures. The nuanced reading centers on the spaces between things and the syntax of part-to-part connections, where spaces, people and objects are read not as cohesive structure but as an unstable series of association in continual transformation, constantly reorganizing itself through processes of expansion and retraction; an urbanism that is capable of hosting change over time.