Generic Chinese Village

The 2005 book The Average American: The extraordinary search for the Nation’s most ordinary citizen by Kevin O’Keefe is a research journey which uses a number of key statistics from American demography to locate the absolute average person in the US. In this project the equivalent is done to try to establish a base reading of the average village condition in China. Due to its scale, relative obscurity and the rapid changes influencing the Chinese countryside, the average condition in the countryside is not well known. There are 3.2 million villages in China. The research tries to give a portrait of this countryside by looking at averages.

Using statistics on the material conditions and social parameters, the research is divided into three different levels: who the villagers are, what the composition of their household looks like and the village composition by looking at various aspects like economy, connectivity, infrastructure, social and ideological organization and geography. Based on this, the research will try to extract its base typology and composition and physically model the most average village in China.

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Advisor: Stephan Petermann, Rem Koolhaas