From proto-sustainable to contemporaneous sustainable village systems - this process supports an emergent future, respecting human needs combined with the needs of nature.
What to maintain?
Proto-Sustainability is the leading hypothesis for the SUCCESS-Case studies. The selected Chinese settlements have consistent social systems that allow them to consider community as a basis for a common identity and to organize themselves in a proto-sustainable way.
This proto-sustainable socio-economic system has very little waste and many regenerative systems (from the usage of earth and clay for the housing construction to the usage of human manure in the agriculture). The project will show and examine the hypothesis that this ecological system together with a local exchange economy, solid social coherence and adapted built environment give the idea of a proto-sustainable performance. SUCCESS will figure out how these qualities can be maintained.
What to change?
We will build and examine scenarios of how to maintain the highly ecological and socio-cultural level of existing rural structures, and at the same time introducing the necessary upgrading of the living conditions. These results will be put at the disposition of the village leaders, the policy-makers in town development and in the building sector who are participants in this project.
The whole process of the project ranges from integrated analysis to future scenarios of sustainable pathways, concentrating on 4 modules: ecology, economy, socio-cultural patterns and upgrading the built environment.
Bottom Up – Top Down
SUCCESS will break the question of sustainability from the policy-level down to the community level. It has a strong bottom-up approach, combined with top-down elements from Chinese ministries. It will give inputs for the policy-making on urban governance, for poverty-alleviation and for a sustainable approach to the booming building-sector in China.
Objectives:
-to assess the sustainability of current peri-urban and rural settlements in China by means of case-studies.
-to support the essential sense of the “ownership” of the process of community development, through applying participatory approaches jointly by dwellers (insiders) and researchers (outsiders).
-to establish a participatory sustainability process that brings about the cross-checking of poverty alleviation and environmental impacts in the very dynamic socio-political situation in China.
-to establish a creative process which will lead to a pool of integrated knowledge consisting of the experts knowledge and the local knowledge
-to establish a well structured process integrating the multi-disciplinary approaches of the projects expert-pool and the indigenous knowledge, thereby dealing with the enormous amount of possible data.
-to give an integrated profile of the community based on the “7 theses on town and city quality” (urban sustainability) link!
-to combine findings from the fields of agro forestry, agriculture, socio-economy, energy, the built environment, housing and construction
-to develop a systems methodology (sustainable area budget) for assessing the ecological impacts.
-to develop sustainable future scenarios (business as usual, agro-industrial future, sustainable future) and options for the case study – communities, taking into account the knowledge from all the different disciplines represented by the participants
-to develop models for integrated community-services on sustainable basis for the specific local conditions in the seven settlements (community-energy supply on renewable basis combining solar, biogas, wind and water).
Case-studies at a glance
SUCCESS develops and carries out seven case-studies of peri-urban and rural settlements in six different Chinese provinces. It will produce a profile of each settlement from the point of view of sustainability and describes pathways into the future from the ecological, economic and socio-cultural urbanistic point of view.
Final result: A tool for settlements good governance as well as for policy making.
