The project for the regeneration of Guming village, 20 km west of Nanning, China, offers a model for a socially appropriate and economically robust form of bottom-up urban transformation of rural communities around the country. The gradual upgrade of the existing neighborhood tissue, combined with new carefully integrated interventions, goes hand in hand with economic measures that guarantee – via stakeholder participation – a sustainable development of the village’s physical and social space.

The proposal, according to the jury, delivers proof of how modernization might evolve within the context of a rural village, without taking recourse to tabula rasa strategies. On the contrary, due respect is given to traditional building morphologies, while allowing the built fabric to be improved and technically upgraded in time. The project offers a discourse on how to bridge the gap between historic preservation on the one hand and the need to modernize on the other. The jury applauded the measures taken to promote a form of habitation based on low-rise, high-density structures – as opposed to high-rise, high-density responses – that could well evolve as a transferable model for future urbanization in general, whether in China or other regions of the world