A relational thought on the rural heritage preservation in China. The contingencies in traditional villages, taking Dawan village as a case study

The debate on the social-spatial turn have influenced the understanding of space in a dominant way in the past decades (Lefebvre, 1991), thus the absolute conception of space as a container for objects and processes shifted towards inclusive and multifaceted knowledge (Löw, 2016). The relations between spaces and social processes have been recognized, and this shift requires a more complex and scientific methodology for analysis (Heley & Jones, 2012). Urban morphology has been first considered as a methodology to address the urban design practices in order to reproduce organically the space, then it attempted to understand the built environment in an analogical way in social, historical and physical terms (Oliveira, 2019). Therefore, adopting the urban morphology and social relational theories to analyze the built environment as an assemblage is core to understand the spatiality in physical and social terms in continuous transition processes. We try to include the above-mentioned notions in Chinese rural context because they performed the relationality due to their independence on geographical conditions, the intrinsic relation with the social forms, and the cultural and social practices occurred in everyday life (Zwerger 2006; Peng, 1992). In this paper, we analyze how the spatial polices have impacted on the urban form through Dawan village as a case study for its representativeness and generality, adopting the urban morphology approaches as an instrumental device to create the linkages between social form and space. Firstly, we trace its morphological formation and the traditional paradigm of space making. Secondly, we look at the current dynamics in the spatial policies preservation and development from which the social and spatial inequality have been generated in a transitional society. By identifying the changed actors and relations in the new round of rural development, this paper proposes a holistic framework to understand relationally today’s rural heritage in China.