Community Response to State-Created Environmental Crisis: A Transdisciplinary Participatory Action Research on Alternative Development in Rural China

Rural revitalisation is a key state development strategy that was announced by the Chinese central government in 2017 and further promoted in 2021. It recognises that rural sustainability is foundational to China’s development and targets to ensure rural revitalisation by 2050. However, capital forces mediated by the state commodified rural lands and landscapes, demolished traditional buildings, repetitively produced symbols of post-modern nostalgia landscapes, and drew in businesses to serve the tourism market. Repercussions accompanied by this “spectacle of prosperity” destroyed local traditions and ecology, marginalised villagers, and reproduced unequal relations and the hegemony of development. We also discovered that the mainstream revitalisation project caused a cultural and environmental crisis.

In response to this trend, a transdisciplinary team comprised of sociologists, NGO practitioners, and architectural designers attempted to fight for villagers' right to rural space through culturally specific and locally based democratic participation from below. By adopting the design idea of co-creation and place-making, the research team endeavours to build up the subjectivity of local people in rural development, raise people’s awareness of cultural and environmental protection, and transform the local participants from passive construction workers to community co-creators.

Since 2017, the authors and local partners have spearheaded the "House of Dream" project, successfully preserving the traditional cave dwelling houses in a village in the Henan province of China. In this research, we conclude that “alternative development” implies a radical departure from mainstream developmentalism through social empowerment, which values building the capacity of the local community and transforming local actors into the subject of development. We argued that local villagers are not passive service recipients of development interventions but active co-creators in rebuilding communities. This transdisciplinary participatory action research project has developed common practice frameworks for tackling environmental and cultural crises, as well as facilitating long-term sustainable community development.