Provincializing transnational landscape is attracting increasing attention from international academia with the rise of transnational landscape practice and the shift of the academic research paradigm. It calls for us to move beyond the national political, economic, social, and cultural boundaries to examine the provincialization mechanisms, processes, and influence of transnational landscape activities.
It is particularly important for China to explore the provincializing transnational landscape. It will contribute to examining China’s historical local-global interactions over the landscape, and providing a lens of „the Other” to study the regional landscape characteristics in China. Significantly, it will not only deepen the understanding of the development of the research on landscape, cultural, and communication histories in China and beyond, but also promote China’s transnational economic cooperation frameworks, such as the Belt and Road Initiative and the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, to better tell China’s story and let the world better understand China.
Private Chinese gardens in 19th-century Singapore were rarely designed in the same way as their contemporary counterparts in China, though there were a few authentic Chinese mansions in the city. In response to this phenomenon, this paper attempts to use Whampoa’s Garden, the finest and earliest private Chinese garden on the island, as an example, to explain how and why garden owners selectively adopted certain Chinese features while designing the rest of their gardens in a way deviating from Chinese traditions.
The study of Whampoa’s Garden begins with a sketchy introduction to the career and cultural background of the garden’s owner, Cantonese businessman Hoo Ah Kay, addressing his social connections, personal hobbies, and cultural identities. As the garden no longer exists, a study of available pictorial and written records from Chinese and Western sources is conducted in order to reveal the spatial layout and other designed features of the garden, some of which may have facilitated the display of Chineseness. Contemporaneous gardens from Hoo’s hometown will be compared to unveil hidden linkages between Whampoa’s Garden and Chinese garden ideas. Furthermore, the relationship between the selection of Chinese symbols and the identities of their audience is examined as an approach to studying what affected how Chineseness was presented and how the landscape of south China was transplanted to this equatorial colony.
This research probes into the process, impact, and mechanism of the production of global space in Yiwu under the transnational entrepreneurship, utilizing the „spatial ternary theory” and methods of field investigation and in-depth interview. It focuses on analyzing how the local government, state-owned enterprises, transnational traders, local residents, and domestic migrants act and interact in the production of global space since the 1980s. Results showed that the production of global space in Yiwu goes through a process from delocalization, globalization to relocalization, indicating the local construction and reconstruction of economic, social, and living relationships in small- and medium-sized cities influenced by transnational entrepreneurship. The production of global space in Yiwu is jointly promoted by top-down government power and bottom-up social strength, and local governmental entrepreneurialism that has been directly influenced by globalization is a key engine. Field investigation also discovered that there is a phenomenon of transnational traders’ apparent integration and invisible isolation with local residents and domestic migrants in the new social relationships in Yiwu. These findings will enrich the empirical research on the global space in small- and medium-sized cities in the context of China, and on the dialectical and interchangable relationship of the trinity of ternary elements in the spatial ternary theory; and help deepen the understanding on urbanization and globalization of small-and medium-sized Chinese cities, and optimize the governance of transnational migrants and the ethnic enclaves they live.
Climate adaptation research should consider both climate change and regional climate contexts. Research evaluating the regional climate adaptability of urban spaces helps identify weaknesses of climate resilience in spatial planning. This paper constructs a climate adaptation evaluation indicator system for cities in the severe cold zones of China, and evaluates the temporal-spatial changes of climate adaptability in the central area of Harbin. The evaluation outcome reveals that the overall climate adaptability of the study area generally improved from 2008 to 2017 despite staying at a relatively lower level. There are significant differences in spatial pattern and development of spatial elements of climate adaptability by districts. Accordingly, this paper proposes countermeasures supporting future decision-making on climate adaptation planning for the study area, offering a reference for other cities in the severe cold zones of China.
After reform and opening up, Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and its urban construction have an unusual significance for China. However, the prevailing emergence of urban parks built in a super speed in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone is not paid much attention by the academia regarding its historical process of construction. This study examines the history of urban park construction through dual lenses of „nation–state” and „global–local” with a hope to explore the genealogy and reason lying behind the local practice of urban park construction in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone from a transnational global perspective. The authors argue that the construction of urban parks in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in the 1980s was closely related to foreign capital investment. Moreover, the national form adopted in park design during this period coincided with that of the special economic zones as a node of national rejuvenation. Relying on the global flow of ideas, this research attempts to provide interpretative view to comprehend the construction history of urban parks in China at the very beginning of the reform and opening.
Prompted by increased domestic and transnational demand for Pu’er tea, an emergence of agroecosystem intensification in Southern Yunnan, China has resulted in various agro-ecosystems including tea forests, mixed crop systems, and monocultural terrace tea gardens, in the tea production system. Plants of Camellia sinensis assamica often grow as trees in forests whilst C. sinensis sinensis grow as shrubs in terrace tea gardens. Inspired by the wine industry, the concept „Terroir” acts as a framework that analyzes both environmental and human factors yielding var ying botanic profiles, and hence quantifies values created by the cultivation process. The approach allows economic opportunities of place-based tea products to be driven by the origin in lieu of extrinsic qualities, which has resulted in to the fabricated reputation of terroir. In response to a common gap in terms of botanical and cultural values between tea cultivation and marketing trends, this artic le investigates an alternative scenario in which tea production and promotion model could minimize its environmental impacts and utilize its economic weight to advance land conservation efforts specific to cultural complexity at community scales.
Although tree burial has been proposed for decades, it is not yet widely accepted in China, mainly due to the lack of recognition of its embedded ecological ethics and the not fully localized practice. The article suggests that localizing tree burial activities in China should consider regional urban-rural relationship and combine tomb-sweeping activities with the renewal of local traditional ceremonies in rural areas, thus engaging urban residents.
The site selected in this article, Youlong Village of Anhui Province, is located at the origin of the Xin’an River, which is an endowed advantage to attract downstream urban residents. Taking the Bench Dragon as the case study subject, the article analyzes its existing ritual sections and spatial nodes to sort out its ritual structure. Based on this analysis, the article proposes a design of the ritual sections and the marching route of the Bench Dragon for the Chinese Tomb-sweeping Festival, guiding the place-making of tree burial sites and the development of daily management strategies for the ritual landscape.
Appropriate ritual design in rural areas can help perforate the evaluation items in strictly categorized cultural ecosystem services, which, through embodiment, calls for a holistic landscape experience. Additionally, ritual design is supposed to activate the potential aesthetic value in the countryside today, while the ecological ethics it carries may also introduce new meanings to the traditional view of life and death in Chinese culture, ultimately opening a new horizon for contemporary rural construction.