Deconstructing a Landscape Out-of-Place: the Afterlife of Rural Hollowing

Abstract

This thesis explores declining villages in the process towards rural hollowing. Rural hollowing, this phenomenon exhibits increasingly in depopulating rural settlements, results from fading infrastructural services, disintegrating population structure, and incremental land abandonment. The project emphasizes against the current capitalist-oriented tourism scheme and proposes landscape architecture as a medium to remediate the disintegrating village by recognizing these rural villages’ declining reality: by reintegrating its public service infrastructure and formulating a sustainable farming economy. This thesis looks at a village in rural Fujian, China and explores landscape architecture’s agency in rebuilding abandoned rural spaces in reformulating village composition and creating a place for a community that is smaller but in a life that is still rich in culture.