Chuxi Zhou. Redefining Logistics Infrastructure.

Redefining Logistics Infrastructure

A Case Study of Taobao Village

Redefining Logistics Infrastructure

A Case Study of Taobao Village

Projective Cities

Architectural Association

School of Architecture

Chuxi Zhou

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE

GRADUATE PROGRAMMES

COVERSHEET FOR SUBMISSION 2023

PROGRAMME

MPhil in Architecture and Urban Design (Projective Cities)

NAME

Chuxi Zhou

SUBMUSSION TITLE Dissertation

COURSE TUTOR

Platon Issaias

Hamed Khosravi

DECLARATION

I certify that this piece of work is entirely my own and that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of others is duly acknowledged.

This dissertation would not have been possible if not for the support of many people involved throughout this prolonged process. Firstly, I am grateful to the Projective Cities staff who have supported me throughout my studies. I would like to deeply thank Platon Issaias and Hamed Khosravi for their guidance, commitment and constant support. I would also like to thank Doreen Bernath, whose knowledge and patience have helped shape this work and many others. The conceptual framework of ‘territorialisation’ in Chapter 1 is in debt to her. I am also grateful to Roozbeh Elia-Azar, Cristina Gamboa, Raül Avilla, Ioanna Piniara, and Daryan Knoblauch. It is an honour to have you as tutors. Special thanks to Cosimo Campani, not only for his informative and inspirational study on Italian Fabbrichetta, but also for his generosity in sharing his expertise.

I could not be more thankful to all the Projective Cities students in 20202023. While it was a challenge to start, interrupt, and resume my study during the pandemic, the rewarding experience is to have you as colleagues.

I want to thank all those who have been by my side during my study in Nanjing, Shanghai, and London. I am grateful to the friends and tutors who have generously shared their resources and discussed with me my research and the architectural discourse in general. I want to express my gratitude to my mentors and colleagues during my year out in Shanghai and those who led me to this opportunity. I would like to thank my friend for accompanying me during my fieldwork and constantly supporting me. Finally, I am grateful to my parents for their unconditional support and encouragement.

In an age when the development of logistics has dramatically changed people’s ways of living and the built environment, this research aims to discuss the issue of logistics in the architectural discipline and challenge the stereotypical understanding of logistics infrastructure. It adopts the method of case study and takes Taobao Village, a unique urbanisation phenomenon in China, as the primary case of logistics infrastructure. It investigates the socio-spatial organization of Taobao Village, rendering the political issue of logistics as fundamentally spatial and architectural. The case study of Taobao Village works as a thread running through a series of multi-scalar discussions on logistics and space, connecting the Chinese phenomenon to a wider context. It also forms a comparison with other historical and contemporary cases, which can be analysed within the framework of logistics infrastructure as well. Through the redefinition of logistics infrastructure, this research focuses on the possibility of cooperation in logistics and reintroduces the primary architectural concern of human inhabitation into the ‘machine landscape’ of logistics.

Adopting its name from the Chinese Taobao online shopping platform, Taobao Village refers to a type of rural e-commerce hubs where local residents take advantage of logistical and informational technologies to actively engage in online sales of farm produce and local specialities. While Taobao villages are widely distributed across China, this research focuses on Dongfeng Village, one of the first three Taobao Villages identified in 2009, and neighbouring villages in the region to study the phenomenon architecturally and spatially. The major industry in these villages is furniture manufacturing based on family workshops and e-commerce. Connected by not only informational and infrastructural networks but also social relations and kinship networks inherited from traditional rural China, these villages form a Taobao Village Cluster that supports an influential regional industry, namely e-commerce-based furniture production. This unique case study promotes multi-scalar discussions on different aspects of logistics, while providing a testing ground for a series of design interventions that emphasize collaboration and cooperation in logistics networks.

1 Pier Vittorio Aureli, ‘Labor and Architecture: Revisiting Cedric Price’s Potteries Thinkbelt’, Log, no. 23 (2011): 97–118.

2 Kenneth Frampton, ‘The Status of Man and the Status of His Object: A Reading of Hannah Arendt’, in Hannah Arendt: The Recovery Of The Public World , ed. Melvyn A. Hill (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1979), 10130.

While it is difficult to engage the city in traditional ways in an age of increasing mobility and flow, logistics provides a new framework to understand the city as a fluid condition. In a narrow sense, e-commercerelated logistics has formatted buildings around transportation hubs and influenced the urban landscape through logistics activities such as delivery. In a broader sense, as a spatiotemporal model, the development of logistics has challenged our ideas of time and space and revolutionised our way of living. For architects and urban designers, it is an opportunity to revitalise the agency of design and urbanism through logistics in the age of globalisation.

However, in the face of modern logistics, architecture is in crisis. Despite the logistics connotation in general architecture, architectural design is not intended for logistics spaces. It seems that the ‘logistic turn’ has triggered an ontological discussion about architecture, as architects argued that it is the intention to build something whose meaning goes beyond mere instrumentality that makes architecture an edifice.1 They are concerned that the configuration of built form today are determined by processual elements at a far greater extent than by the hierarchic and more public criteria of place. While architecture loses its relationship with public space and becomes an instrument of circulation, the freestanding ‘edifices’ of the modern city are also reduced to ‘consumer goods’.2 This critique indicates the division of general architecture and logistics infrastructure, while the latter has no place for design.

With the concern of logistics and design, this study takes Taobao Village as the primary case, while considering it as a spatial and logistics phenomenon. This is an original and unique perspective, as existing studies on Taobao Village focus more on its geographical pattern and economic output, thus lacking systematic analyses of its built environment. In fact, it is challenging to investigate Taobao Village spatially as it is in constant change. While it generally features self-construction initiated by and for villagers, large-scale demolition and construction have occurred recently.

With a history of less than fifteen years, it is an emerging and disappearing phenomenon. The only way to avoid its dissolution into a homogeneous urbanised environment is to investigate it spatially and architecturally.

This dissertation is thus structured as a series of enquiries on logistics and spaces, with the case study of Taobao Village as the backbone and thread. The three main chapters are loosely organised according to scale, addressing territorial, urban, and architectural issues respectively. However, since each chapter is intrinsically multi-scalar, another way to explain their organisation should be network, space, and people. While Chapter 0 provides basic information about Taobao Village, the design exercise takes Taobao Village as a testing ground for a series of design interventions based on arguments in previous chapters.

The design proposition is specified at the very beginning, as this study aims to challenge the stereotypical understanding of logistics infrastructure and reclaim the role of design in logistics spaces. This recurrent theme is addressed from different perspectives in each chapter, with the help of conceptual frameworks within and beyond the discipline. In Chapter 1, the concept of ‘de-territorialisation’ refers to reclaiming the agency of design in logistics networks, while the power of modern logistics is described as ‘territorial’. In Chapter 2, a form of cooperative logistics is proposed to advocate human participation in the generic logistics spaces of ‘machine landscape’ and ‘human exclusion zone’. In Chapter 3, by inhabiting the ‘space of flows’, an essential dimension of human inhabitation is introduced into the logistics space of production. These arguments culminate in the design exercise, emphasising self-building, collaboration, and cooperation.

Chapter 0 lays out a brief history of the Tabao Village phenomenon and specifies the geographical context of this research. It aims to understand the Taobao Village phenomenon typologically and address relevant issues that will be discussed in the following chapters. Apart from objective analyses, a Photo Essay presents the subjective observation from the fieldwork.

Chapter 1 traces the etymology of the term logistics from its original military connotation to its application in production and trade. It aims to understand how logistics affect city building and arrives at the typology of networked cities in historical and contemporary contexts. It also places Taobao Village in a global network to investigate how it performs as a logistics hub. Chapter 2 is structured by three topics related to logistics: logistics forms, logistics operations, and logistics in the realm of manufacturing. Based on characters of modern logistics, these topics aim to analyse the Taobao Village phenomenon through the lens of logistics, while offering an alternative to the prevailing understanding of logistics in the discipline. Based on the theoretical framework of ‘the space of flows’, Chapter 3 examines the typology of co-existence of production and inhabitation, analysing how these spaces are shaped by logistics. It looks at the subjects in logistics networks, aiming to find out what subjectivity and social relations are produced by logistics.

Taking Taobao Village as a testing ground, the Design Exercise proposes a series of design interventions derived from arguments in previous chapters. It is divided into three parts. While the first two parts respectively involve spatial strategies for existing and new typologies, the last part is a comprehensive test of these strategies on neighbourhood and urban scales.

Disciplinary Questions

How to understand the socio-political issue of logistics spatially?

How can the logistics space, normally considered as a space of production, be related to the space of inhabitation and investigated spatially?

Urban Questions

How does logistics affect city building and challenge urban-rural relations?

How does logistics provide an alternative way of envisioning the city and therefore challenge current urban planning systems?

What kinds of urban forms are generated by logistics, and what kinds of spatial conflicts are created in these urban forms?

Typological Questions

How to understand the Taobao Village phenomenon typologically? What kinds of spatial forms are produced by logistics, and how to conceive them typologically?

How does logistics challenge existing building types and social relations? What subjectivity does logistics produce in this new spatial types? How to understand the typology of co-existence of production and living, and what role does logistics play in this typology?

To understand how logistics shapes the built environment and challenge existing norms in the discipline of architecture and urbanism through the case study of Taobao Village.

To understand the logistics space as a space of inhabitation that can be intervened through design.

To develop a multi-scalar design approach that takes the logistics network as context and catalyst and therefore reclaim the role of design in logistics spaces.

With a history of less than two decades, Taobao Village is a very contemporary phenomenon. The emergence of this phenomenon can be attributed not only to the development of informational and logistical technologies, but also to the characteristics of rural China, including its industrial history, entrepreneurial environment, kinship and social networks, etc. Spatially, this phenomenon reveals the innovative adaptation of a traditional rural typology, showing the negotiation among villagers, local governments and developers. Therefore Taobao Village is both a spatial phenomenon and a socio-political one. While one Taobao Village can function as a relatively autonomous logistics infrastructure to manufacture and distribute certain products, collaborative Taobao Village clusters contribute to a regional industry on a larger scale. Connected by informational and infrastructural networks, these villages serve as nods and hubs of a comprehensive regional network, jointly participating in global trading. This unique phenomenon can be compared with many historical and contemporary urban forms, providing new perspectives to the disciplines of architecture and urbanism. Since the built environment of Taobao Village is still in rapid change, it can also be a transient phenomenon, which makes it urgent to study it.

In this chapter, I form a typological understanding of Taobao Village and focus my study on manufacturing villages. These villages tend to develop into clusters and support a regional industry. With e-commerce-based furniture manufacturing in the Suining-Sucheng area as my primary case study, I review the selective history of industrialisation in the Yangtze River Delta, which provides the background for the emergence of Taobao Villages in this region. I then briefly introduce this specific industry and its spatial influences on architectural, urban, and regional scales, which form the basic framework for further analyses in the following chapters.

Manufacturing Village Clusters

Taobao is a Chinese online shopping platform owned by the e-commerce giant Alibaba that facilitates consumer-to-consumer (C2C) retail by providing a platform for small businesses and individual entrepreneurs to open online stores. According to Ali Research, Alibaba’s research arm, a Taobao Village is defined as a village that generates RMB 10 million or more in e-commerce sales annually and has 100 or more active online shops on Taobao operated by local residents (or the number of active online shops reaches 10% of the number of local households). 1 Therefore Taobao Villages can be understood as rural e-commerce hubs where local residents take advantage of logistical and informational technologies to actively engage in online sales of farm produce and local specialities. As Taobao Village is identified on the basis of economic criteria, qualified Taobao Villages are spread across the country and vary spatially (Fig.0.1-2)

In order to study the Taobao Village phenomenon spatially and narrow down the scope of this research, I refer to the currently available classification of Taobao Village, which categorises them into seven categories (Fig.0.3). This classification proposed by Zhendong Luo in 2018 is based on the village’s relative location in the larger spatial network and the major industry involved in the village’s production. 2 In terms of location, villages are categorised by their remoteness to evaluate the extent to which they are affected by nearby cities. There are three kinds of villages: metropolitan suburbs, villages at the edge of towns, and remote villages. The metropolitan suburbs refer to the settlements so close to

0.1. The number of Taobao Villages by province, 2020. While Taobao Villages are widely spread across China, most of them are located in eastern coastal provinces.

0.2. The number of Taobao Villages by province, 2009-2020. The first Taobao Villages were identified in 2009, six years after the establishment of Taobao online shopping platform in 2003. The number of Taobao Villages has soared from 3 in 2009 to over 5000 in 2020.

Agriculture / Agricultural Villages Remote Agricultural Villages

Manufacture Manufacturing Suburbs Manufacturing Villages Remote Manufacturing Villages

Trade-only Trading Suburbs Trading Villages /

the metropolis that many of them are already absorbed by the urban agglomeration and are constantly under the influence of the metropolis. In comparison, those villages located at the edge of small towns are more independent while enjoying the convenience of being adjacent to the city. There are also remote and isolated villages that are hardly affected by nearby cities and therefore gain more independence. In terms of industry, while Taobao Villages feature the tertiary sector 3 of e-commerce in general, many of them are also the production base of the commodities they sell and therefore are involved in agriculture or manufacturing. In this sense, Taobao Villages can be divided into three categories: agriculturaltrading villages, manufacturing-trading villages, and trading-only villages. These two dimensions of location and industry theoretically create a matrix of nine categories. However, since both ends of the matrix, namely agricultural suburbs and remote trading-only villages, can hardly exist, there are seven categories in the comprehensive classification of Taobao Villages in the end.

Among the seven types of Taobao Villages, manufacturing villages at the edge of towns are the focus of this study. They also form the largest category in the classification. 4 They are widely distributed across the country and cover almost all types of products, from raw materials to consumer goods. These Taobao Villages typically have specialised in certain products for a long time, therefore have developed a wide range of subdivided products and achieved a high market share. By taking advantage of low land and labour cost compared to cities, these Taobao Villages become competitive, as the kinds of manufacturing they involve are usually labour-intensive industries requiring large amount of land and labour.

Manufacturing Taobao Villages tend to develop into clusters and form a regional industry to reduce costs. These manufacturing villages in one cluster are usually involved in the same industry, creating a regional

0.3. The Classification of Taobao Village.

logistics and trade network closely attached to existing rural settlements. According to Ali Research, a Taobao Village Cluster is defined as a cluster of more than ten neighbouring Taobao Villages that develop together where e-commerce entrepreneurs, service providers, the regional government and industry associations work closely together and whose annual e-commerce transaction volume reaches or exceeds RMB100 million.5 In 2018, nine of the top-ten Taobao Village Clusters contained manufacturing villages, and the number of villages in one Taobao Village Cluster can be more than one hundred (Fig.0.4-5)

Industrialisation of the Yangtze River Delta

The primary case in this study, Dongfeng Village, is part of the Taobao Village Cluster in the Suining-Sucheng area, which involves a regional industry of furniture manufacturing. It is the largest and the most influential regional industry in the northern Yangtze River Delta, where villages generally started to get involved in manufacturing when e-commerce emerged. In other words, e-commerce has contributed to their industrial development from the very beginning and is an integral part of these Taobao Villages socially and spatially. This is distinct from the situation in the southern Yangtze River Delta, where the e-commercial prosperity of the manufacturing villages are based on their decades-long industrial history. As the Yangtze River Delta is the study area of this research (Fig.0.6), a recent history of industrialisation in this area provides the social and geographical condition in which Taobao Village emerged. This selective history can also help us to understand today’s e-commerce-based furniture manufacturing, while situating it in a larger background of industrialisation and globalisation, which will be further discussed in the following chapters.

The industrialisation and urbanisation process in the late 20 th century

0.4. Ranking of the top ten Taobao Village Clusters in 2018, eight of which are located in the Yangtze River Delta (Zhejiang and Jiangsu provinces). Main case sites for this study, Suining and Sucheng, ranked fourth and tenth respectively.

0.5. Spatial distribution of Taobao Villages in 2018. The concentration of Taobao Villages indicated the locations of Taobao Village Clusters.

laid a strong industrial foundation in the southern Yangtze River Delta, which contributed to the development of Taobao Villages in this region three decades later. Industrial development in rural China can be traced back to the late 1970s, with the southern part of the Yangtze River Delta as the forerunner. Before the Chinese economic reform in 1978, the Chinese economy was dominated by state ownership and central planning, which left no room for any private business. Meanwhile, the urban-rural dichotomy reinforced by national policy also restrained the development of rural areas. It was after a series of policy reforms in land, agriculture and economy that enterprises and non-agricultural industries started to emerge in rural areas by the end of 1970s. With the official permission of rural-urban migration in 1984, rural enterprises went through a period of rapid growing during the following years, which benefited from and in turn facilitated rural non-agricultural employment. In the southern Yangtze River Delta, this directly led to the rapid rural industrialisation and urbanisation in the southern Jiangsu coastal plain6, which has been one of the most economically developed regions in China for hundreds of years and an important industrial base close to the international port city Shanghai since late 19th century. These factors also influenced the less-developed, mountainous southern Zhejiang7, where rural enterprises started to adopt a form of family business.

In contrast to the southern Yangtze River Delta, the emergence of Taobao Villages in the northern Yangtze River Delta has little to do with the existing local industries. In fact, this region has been considered relatively underdeveloped both economically and industrially, and most villages have

seen a decline in population and investment due to a lack of local industry before venturing into e-commerce. While some villages were never fully industrialised before being transformed into Taobao Villages, others once saw industrial development and economic prosperity in the late 20th century. Although few of these industries have survived in today’s e-commerce era, the entrepreneurial environment and the remaining cooperative network has contributed to the industrial transformation and the emergence of Taobao Villages.

In order to study the furniture manufacturing industry in the SuiningSucheng area, some basic information is needed first. Suining and Sucheng are two adjacent county-level districts8 located in the northwest of Jiangsu Province, which belong to Xuzhou Municipality and Suqian Municipality respectively (Fig.0.7) . Today, e-commerce-based furniture production has become the dominant rural industry in this region, with Suining and Sucheng ranking the sixth and tenth largest Taobao Village Clusters respectively in 2018 (Fig.0.4). This area is also among the first areas where Taobao Villages appeared, with Dongfeng Village as one of the first three Taobao Villages identified in 2009. Since then, e-commerce-based furniture production has rapidly expanded from Dongfeng Village to neighbouring Dazhong Village, and then to other villages in the region. In 2013, when the first nationwide survey was carried out systematically by AliResearch, Dongfeng Village and Dazhong Village were among the first 20 Taobao Villages in China. By 2016, all of the villages in Shaji Town (to which DongFeng Village belongs) and Gengche Town (to which Dazhong Village belongs) have been qualified as Taobao Villages. Administrative boundaries

0.6. The Yangtze River Delta that consists of Jiangsu Province, Zhejiang Province and Shanghai Municipality.

0.7. The location of Dongfeng Village and the Suining-Sucheng Area in the Yangtze River Delta

0.8. Spatial Distribution of Taobao Villages in Suining-Sucheng from 2013 to 2018.

Dongfeng Village Suining-Sucheng

did not restrict the development of this manufacturing industry, which has expanded beyond the township of Shaji and Gengche and dispersed throughout the entire region (Fig.0.8).

Before venturing into e-commerce, this area was once involved in a plastic recycling industry, which shared similarities with today’s furniture manufacturing in terms of mode of production, while laying a social and entrepreneurial foundation. Located in the southeast of Suining County, Shaji Town is the first town involved in e-commerce-based furniture production since 2006. Across the river and in the northwest of Sucheng District is Gengche Town, which followed Shaji Town to enter the same industry in 2008. Both these towns were historically underdeveloped agricultural towns, with a dense population and limited arable land per capita. As a result, local people have traditionally engaged in small businesses, eager to seek every opportunity to make a living. In the 1980s and 1990s, Gengche Town was once fully involved in the plastic recycling industry9, which brought huge economic income but also caused severe environmental problems. Thanks to the encouraging policies and entrepreneurial environment following the Chinese economic reform in 1978, the low-cost and low-tech plastic recycling industry rapidly expanded to neighbouring towns, including Shaji Town. This unsustainable regional industry took a downturn in the 2000s and was finally devastated by the financial crisis of 2008, which urged an industrial transformation.

E-commerce-based Furniture Production

Inherited from the previous plastic recycling industry, the e-commercebased furniture manufacturing features domestic production and family businesses, which has shaped the rural built environment and can be compared with other historical and contemporary examples. While the emergence of this industry has a historical and geographical basis, it also involves spontaneous actions of local entrepreneurial pioneers. Over time

this industry has evolved into a complicated and comprehensive one, which incorporates various supporting businesses and services. It has also expanded from one village to neighbouring villages through infrastructural and social networks and become a regional industry.

While the plastic recycling industry marks the industrialisation of this region, the e-commerce-based furniture production indicates the combination of industrialisation and informatisation. The 1990s witnessed a massive expansion of the Internet into a global network when business and personal computers joined the universal network, and China was officially connected to the Internet in 1994. In 2003, Taobao was established in Hangzhou with an encouraging free policy, which attracted many merchants to open online stores and successfully deterred other fee-based competitors such as eBay. This provided the condition for the emergence of e-commerce in rural areas.

The emergence of furniture production in the region also has a historical and geographical basis. On the one hand, the history of the plastic recycling industry provides an industrial base and entrepreneurial environment; on the other hand, the plain of the Northern Yangtze River Delta is suitable for timber production, logistics, and transportation. Since there are many tree plantations and factories for timber production and processing in this area, it is convenient for furniture makers in Dongfeng Village to acquire wood battens and boards through land transport. The convenience of logistics and transportation not only helps to bring raw materials and accessories, but also contributes to the distribution of products. In the economically developed Yangtze River Delta, there has been a growing demand for fashionable commodities through online shopping, encouraging furniture production in the Suining-Sucheng region from the consumption end.

Despite all these favourable conditions, the start of the business has always been told as a legendary entrepreneur story. Han Sun, an unemployed

0.9. The first product sold by Han Sun's online store. Still from a documentary TV programme.

0.10. The emmergence and development of e-commerce-based furniture production in Dongfeng Village.

young man who lives in Dongfeng Village, Shaji Town, was among those pioneering online shop owners when Taobao was first established. After several failed attempts to sell different commodities in his Taobao store opened in 2006, Sun took a field trip to Shanghai in 2007, where he saw an opportunity in IKEA furniture that is easy to assemble and transport. Imitating an IKEA product, Sun and his business partner asked a local carpenter to make a simple shelf with second-hand timber battens, which became the first successful product in his online store (Fig.0.9). This marked the beginning of e-commerce-based furniture production in Dongfeng Village, which has rapidly expanded within and beyond the village through the tight rural social network (Fig.0.10)

E-commerce-based furniture production has constantly evolved since it emerged in Dongfeng Village in 2007, which gradually became a comprehensive industry involving diverse businesses. While Sun’s business began with handcrafted furniture made by local carpenters with cheap wood battens, the manufacturing process soon became more automated, and villagers tended to use laminates, timber, and combinations of timber and steel to make furniture. Furniture design also gained more attention, as villagers became aware of the importance of patents and began to design

LEI CHEN

HAN SUN PU WANG MR. WANG Unemployed Online Shop Owner Businessman Friends Neighbours Brothers

KAI XIA Teacher Media Local Carpenter

YISHENG WANG MS. WANG Student Daughter Father Teacher Student Supplier Clients Villagers

original furniture instead of simply imitating other products. As a result, furniture products in the region became more diversified, covering low-end to high-end markets. Since the expanding manufacturing industry required more raw materials and accessories, some villagers began introducing businesses such as timber processing and furniture accessories into the village, greatly extending the local supply chain. Furniture makers who used to rely on material supplies from other regions can now acquire what they need here in the village. Apart from businesses related to furniture production, there are also services related to e-commerce, such as financial services, legal services, graphic design, and photography. Meanwhile, logistics services and facilities have also developed rapidly.

When e-commerce-based furniture production expanded beyond the administrative boundary of one village and populated the entire region, the industry was transformed from a local one to a regional one. The industry’s quick expansion was both through the tight rural social network and the initiative of local governments. On the one hand, many villagers in neighbouring villages are connected to Dongfeng Village or even the pioneer Han Sun himself through kinship and social networks, which allowed them to learn and participate in the furniture businesses. On the other hand, local governments of neighbouring villages organised field trips to Dongfeng Village to seek business experiences after hearing about its fame and success, which indicated the official commitment to industrial transformation. As a result, more and more neighbouring villages are involved in the same industry, creating a regional network.

Spatial Influences: from Self-construction to Zoning Plan

The emergence and development of e-commerce-based furniture production and relevant services have dramatically changed the rural landscape and spatial structure. At first, all these production activities took place in existing built environments, namely the traditional courtyard

0.11. Typological

map of Dongfeng Village.

houses. Villagers built lightweight structures within and beyond their courtyards to provide additional spaces, which added a sense of informality to the village. However, when businesses expanded, family workshops and informal spaces were considered in need of upgrades. Local governments and speculative developers built gated communities for local residents and industrial parks for corporate furniture production, which are typical urban forms following a zoning plan. The Taobao Village has since then gone through a rapid urbanisation process, which is significantly different from the previous informal self-built period (Fig.0.11-13).

The change in the development model of Taobao Villages results from a combined effect of the need of villagers and the vision of local governments. As an industry that requires large spaces, furniture manufacturing prompts villagers to not only occupy their private courtyards but also appropriate previous agricultural fields to build industrial sheds. When the small courtyards can no longer accommodate the expanding industry and the appropriation of agricultural fields is regulated, villagers are in desperate need of more production spaces. There is also an urgent need for more residential buildings, as the expanding industry attracted those working in cities back home and new immigrants come in search of job opportunities. The shortage of housing and industrial spaces requires the local government to regulate the self-building condition and initiate new planning and building projects, while social concern and economic incentives lead to a strategy of separating production spaces from living spaces. On the one hand, local governments believe that the separation can provide a better environment for both; on the other hand, they can not

0.12. Satellite photos and diagrams showing the spatial evolution of the main crossroad in Dongfeng Village.

0.13. Satellite photos and diagrams showing the spatial evolution of a side street in Dongfeng Village.

0.14. Satellite photos and diagrams showing the first expansion and densification project south of Dongfeng Village.

December, 2006

April, 2014

December, 2018

only make a profit by selling the land to specular developers but also collect taxes from industrial parks in the future. This new strategy has in the end led to the regulation and replacement of self-built courtyard houses.

In the case of Dongfeng Village, the first expansion and densification projects around 2010 still adopted traditional rural typologies, with a southern extension of the existing main road (Fig.0.14). Along the extended road are large courtyard houses designed for commercial use and the expected self-built industrial sheds. Standard residential courtyard houses are organised in a grid pattern, densely located behind the industrial sheds to separate the living from production. However, these new courtyard houses are proved unable to meet the needs of villagers, since the residential courtyards were soon transformed into industrial sheds (Cat.14)

In between Dongfeng Village and central Shaji Town, large-scale logistical facilities and industrial parks are built to meet the growing demand for logistical services and industrial production. In recent planning, Dongfeng Village is considered part of Shaji Town, since their built areas are connected by new building projects (Fig.0.15). Following the zoning plan, the rural typology of courtyard houses that features the combination of production and living is underestimated and eliminated.

The top-down planning has also affected the larger rural landscape and the spontaneously formed regional network. Following Dongfeng Village to enter the e-commerce-based furniture industry, most villages in this region were in lack of logistical facilities at the beginning and had to rely

on Dongfeng Village, which first introduced delivery stations, for the distribution of products. Later on, these villages developed their specialities and had local delivery stations, making the regional network decentralised and less hierarchical. However, the planning of Dongfeng Village as part of Shaji Town, with the construction of large-scale industrial parks and distribution centres, reconfirmed its centrality in the regional network. In the past, this regional network comprised dispersed and relatively independent villages that featured traditional rural courtyard houses; today, it has a stunning centre of giant industrial sheds.

Despite the impact of the zoning plan, this study focuses on and values the self-construction stage. On the one hand, this initial stage demonstrated the cooperative efforts of villagers and other stakeholders; on the other hand, the spatial forms created by and for villagers can be analysed typologically, while shedding light on larger urban discourse. These spatial analyses will be carried out in the following chapters, together with a series of discussions about how Taobao Village is associated with logistics.

0.15. The official zoning plan of Shaji Town, showing Dongfeng Village as part of the urban environment of Shaji Town. Planned to be completed in 2019. During the fieldwork in 2022, Dongfeng Village was still in demolition and reconstruction.

Dongfeng Village

1 ‘China Taobao Village Development Report (2014-2018)’ (Alibaba Research Center for Rural Dynamics, 2018).

2 Ibid.

3 In economics, the three-sector model divides economies into three activity sectors: raw material extraction (primary), manufacturing (secondary), and service industries that exist to support the transport, distribution, and sale of commodities generated in the secondary sector (tertiary). This model has been widely applied across the world and officially adopted by Chinese Industrial Classification for National Economic Activities. Here the three-sector model is used as a reference for the classification of Taobao Villages.

4 Zhendong Luo, New Urbanisation from Below: The Development and Governance of Taobao Villages in China (Nanjing: Southeast University Press, 2020), 154.

5 ‘China Taobao Village Development Report (2014-2018)’.

6 Urbanisation and development of this area have been termed as ‘Sunan (Southern Jiangsu) Model’, which featured rural industrialisation initiated by grassroots governments. The Sunan model attributes the development of Southern Jiangsu to the local-state directed township and village enterprises, which focused on labour-intensive manufacturing and processing.

7 Urbanisation and development of this area have been termed as ‘Wenzhou Model’, which was driven by the market and featured small-scale family businesses.

8 County-level division is the third level in the five-level administrative hierarchy in China. The five levels are the provincial level (the first level, e.g. provinces), prefectural level (the second level, e.g. prefecture-level municipalities), county level (the third level, e.g. counties and districts), township level (the fourth level, e.g. towns and subdistricts) and basic level (the fifth level, e.g. administrative villages and communities).

9 The plastic recycling industry in Gengche Town was once so prosperous that the economic development model has been termed as ‘Gengche Model’.

Image Sources

0.1-4. Drawn by the author.

0.5. ‘China Taobao Village Development Report (2014-2018)’, annotated by the author.

0.6-7. Drawn by the author.

0.8. Luo, New Urbanization from Below: The Development and Governance of Taobao Villages in China, annotated by author.

0.9.'“ 淘宝 ” 的村庄 [Taobao Village]', CCTV, December 15, 2011, documentary, https://tv.cctv.com/2011/12/15/ VIDE1355583928910276.shtml?spm=C55924871139.PT8hUEEDkoTi.0.0

0.10-11. Drawn by the author.

0.12-14. Satellite photos from Google Maps. Diagrams drawn by the author.

0.15. The official website of Jiangsu Town

Planning, annotated by the author. http:// www.jstsxz.com/town/c/sjds.htm

Getting off at Suqian Railway Station, you are at the south end of Suqian City. Built in 2018 and starting operation in 2019, this station is still in the midst of rural landscapes and construction sites, indicating the ongoing urbanization process. From here, it takes about 25 minutes by taxi to reach Dongfeng Village. Although it belongs to Xuzhou City administratively, Dongfeng Village is adjacent to Suqian City, which makes it categorized as a Taobao village ‘at the edge of town’. Through the car window, large-scale industrial parks are among rural fields and dispersed villages, showing the recent history of industrialization.

Along the main street of Dongfeng Village are typical concrete courtyard houses. However, those signs reveal commercial activities behind domestic facades. While the most common signs are furniture workshops and delivery stations, there are all kinds of other signs, such as furniture accessories, packaging materials, forklift truck renting, design and photography, financial and legal services, and restaurants. Various activities are happening in front of these houses, from family gatherings, children playing, agricultural activities, to truck loading. In rural China, the boundaries between indoor and outdoor, private and public are blurred. On the same day, I first passed by a rural wedding, with firecrackers going off in front of a restaurant; and then I witnessed a funeral, where dozens of large wreaths were placed in front of a house and in the nearby fields.

The street is also multi-modal, as the village carries flows of people and goods. Next to trucks and cars, there are also motorcycles, tricycles, and people walking. On top of their heads is the high-speed railway viaduct that cuts through the village. Despite that there is no railway station in this village, the striking presence of the viaduct not only renders the village a hub of fluxes in a symbolic way, but also brings people and goods to this region, facilitating the manufacturing and distribution of products. A train speeds across the field every few minutes, parallel with the side streets.

Turning into a side street, the hustle and bustle of the main street is

Photo Essay

Field Trip to Dongfeng Village

replaced by the faint rumble of machines behind the walls. I approached an open door and asked if I could enter, as I did on the main street. But I was rejected by the woman who worked there, because she could not decide as a hired worker. Then I tried a neighbouring workshop, and the house owner turned me down protectively, since this street is facing the problems of demolition and compensation. At the end of this side street is the newly built industrial park, which keeps growing and will devour the village eventually.

1 A furniture maker working in front of his courtyard house.

2 A farmer drying crop straws in front of his courtyard house, in the middle of the village’s main street.

3 Some agricultural products are drying in front of a courtyard house. The sign indicates that this is a carton provider.

4 A delivery station with trucks parking in the front. A job advertisement is hanging on the wall, saying they are hiring logistics workers.

5 Looking through the front door, an industrial shed occupies the courtyard. A sign on the wall says that the shed is for rent.

6 Looking through the front door, a farmer is working in his courtyard.

7 A delivery station with trucks parking in the front.

8 The front of a courtyard house-furniture workshop.

9 The main street in the village, with the railway viaduct in the back. On the left, crops are growing in a flower bed.

10 A multi-modal street.

11 and 12 The railway viaduct cutting through the village.

13 New-built courtyard houses in the first extension and densification project.

14 New-built courtyard houses in the first extension and densification project, with villagers building industrial sheds in their courtyards.

15 The back of the main street, showing industrial sheds built by villagers.

16 A high-speed train passing through the village.

17 Large-scale logistics facilities in the new-built industrial park, with children playing in the front.

18 Large-scale logistics facilities in the new-built industrial park, with trucks parking in the front.

19 Large-scale logistics facilities in the new-built industrial park.

20 The interior of the logistics facility, showing conveyor belts.

21 The new-built apartment buildings are replacing courtyard houses.

22 An office building in the new-built industrial park, next to old courtyard houses.

23 The ongoing process of demolition and reconstruction.

De-territorialising the Territory

The term logistics is commonly associated with production and trade today as a part of corporate operations and supply chain management that deals with efficient flows of commodities, materials, services, and related information. It is recorded in Key Words for Retail as ‘the management of the flow of goods between point of origin and point of destination to meet customer and corporate requirements’ 1. Although the term is narrowly defined here, it delineates the Taobao Village phenomenon in a straightforward way, since the distribution of products is both an essential daily activity and one of the enabling factors of Taobao Villages. However, in this research, the term logistics is used in a broader sense to analyse Taobao Villages and engage disciplinary issues in architecture and urbanism.

In this chapter, I trace the etymology of the term logistics in the western context from its original military connotation to its application in production and trade. Through the terminology of pre-territorialisation, territorialisation, and de-territorialisation, I intend to discuss how logistics affect city building and interrogate the role of design in this process. As an exemplary urban form produced by logistics, the networked city also serves as a starting point to define logistics in the Chinese context and today’s globalised world. All these provide the background for Taobao Village, which adopts the form of a networked city while actively participating in a global network.

Pre-territorial, Territorial, and De-territorial Logistics

In the Western context, the term logistics traditionally entailed a military connotation, while it has been borrowed by business since the last century and has become the modern commercial logistics we are familiar with. I take this transformation as a turning point and define them as preterritorial and territorial logistics. While these two types of logistics affect city building in different ways and thus create distinct urban forms, they anticipate a new form of de-territorial logistics that will become the centre of this study.

While pre-territorial logistics had a military implication, it intrinsically entailed architecture and urbanisation. Etymologically, the term logistics derives from the Greek verb logizein , which means to calculate, reckon, organise rationally, and plan2. When it entered into English lexicon in the late 19th century from French logistique , it has already acquired a military connotation, meaning ‘art of moving and quartering troops and naval units’ 3. In warfare, the efficient composition and movement of troops required intelligent arrangement of provisions in hostile territories, including the transportation and storage of food, medicine, fuel, artillery and other military supplies. Therefore logistics can be understood as the practical and artful organisation of complex flows within and beyond the battlefield to win the war. In addition, logistics also involved the disposition of the battlefield, the construction of defensive systems, the

1.1. Albrecht Dürer, Plan of a city in the form of a fortress, 1527.

organisation of urban settlements, and the planning of infrastructure and communication networks, which is in accordance with the process of city building.

In terms of city building, pre-territorial logistics was a process of defining boundaries and served as a tool for abstraction. Meanwhile, design was to adapt the abstract diagram to specific sites. As early as Vitruvius’s time, cities were conceived as war machines and designed according to the protocols of military encampment. When Vitruvian theories were rediscovered and revalued in the early 15 th century, cities began to be investigated as logistics apparatuses, dealing not only with physical objects and people, but also with abstract ideas like the management and control of fluxes. The work of Albrecht Durer is the embodiment of this ideology in city building. In his plan of a city in the form of a fortress, Durer used abstract diagrams to represent spaces and objects in orthogonal projection, where efficiency and rationality were prioritised over formal elaboration. The city was organised in clear hierarchy and geometry, with a central square defined by monarchical, civic, and commercial buildings, rows of housing surrounding it, and peripheral buildings of workshops (Fig.1.1) 4 While this diagram indicated the use of logistics for administering space and time in the form of abstract rationality, it did not directly apply to city building. Instead, design was required to translate this general diagram into site-specific schemes (Fig.1.2). At the time of fortress cities, logistics had not yet been territorialised.

While logistics has been used as a military term for centuries, it has been appropriated by business as a term for corporate management since the 1960s. This transformation happened against the backdrop of modern warfare. During the Second World War, the term logistics was used to refer to the planning and management process in providing and supplying the allied troops5. In the following notorious Vietnam War, the importance of logistics was emphasised through various U.S. Army propaganda, as it

1.2. Albrecht Dürer, The Siege of a fortress, 1527.

was not only the background of military actions but also responsible for making the distant war possible in the first place. Logistics was dubbed as ‘lifeline’6 and ‘pipeline to victory’7 in U.S. Army propaganda documentary television programmes, and a statement of ‘victory is dependent upon the logistic problem’8 was published to ensure the efficacy of the campaign. It is no coincidence that containerisation and intermodal transportation, one of the most prominent characteristics of modern logistics, were also developed during the Vietnam War and extended from military operations to the civilian sector. In 1967, Sea-Land, the first container shipping company, was awarded a contract to sail between the U.S. West Coast and Vietnam, with ships carrying military freight westbound for troops involved in the escalation of the war and empty containers eastbound, while the rates paid by the U.S. government covered all costs for the entire voyage 9. As a commercial company, it strived to get the maximum profits in a war zone and thus decided to provide sailings from Japan by simply stop at Yokohama during their eastbound journey. This new Japan-West Coast route guaranteed the company pure profits and attracted other companies to enter the market, competing for that eastbound freight of televisions and stereos produced by Japanese factories. This not only marked the commercial application of containerisation and intermodal transportation, but also indicated that logistics had transformed from an instrument for military actions to an essential device in commerce (Fig.1.3)

Since logistics gets involved in production and trade, it has become a process of territorialisation. Although it may share similarities with military logistics in terms of comprehensive and precise coordination of space and time, it adopts an opposed strategy towards the territory and thus shapes the architecture and city differently. In other words, while logistics still acts as a tool for abstraction, design is now merely the materialisation of abstract diagrams (Fig.1.4). While trading has replaced military actions as the instrument to exercise power over an untamed territory, logistics becomes the tool to define a territory, occupy a zone, and render it a general site-less place. Distinct from military logistics and the defensive protocols of city

1.3. Containerisation and intermodal transportation are one of the most prominent characteristics of modern logistics.

1.4. Urbanism in Disguise: Five-Sided City, aerial perspective, 2014. A new prototype with the combination of distribution center, park and housing in the same structure.

building, modern logistics follows the principles of capitalism and adopts exchange as its essence. As a process of eliminating boundaries, it marks the opening of the city rather than the enclosure of it. In this way, modern logistics creates a kind of generic cities distinct from ancient fortress cities. This distinction lies not only in form, but also in their attitude towards place and territory. From the perspective of modern commercial logistics, architecture, cities, and territories are no longer viewed as static and specific objects, but as abstract embodiments of their operational systems and procedural flows, which are constantly fluid.

This brief historical analysis of pre-territorial and territorial logistics defines my research aims and design proposition in the first place, which is to address a form of de-territorial logistics. De-territorialisation refers to the reconnection of logistics zones with the place and people they belong to. In an age when modern logistics exercises its territorialising power to an extreme, the study of Taobao Village and other alternative models aims to discover and define de-territorial logistics that value the interaction between space and people. This action will be further discussed from different perspectives in the flowing two chapters as a recurrent theme.

Networked Cities

With its power to coordinate space and time, logistics has affected city building and challenged urban-rural relations. Among the urban forms shaped by logistics, the networked city is an exemplary model that exists in

different contexts and has evolved throughout history. On the one hand, the network of market towns in traditional China provided a social and historical foundation for Taobao Village; on the other hand, the networked cities envisioned by contemporary scholars demonstrate the global situation in which Taobao Village exists. While the logistics power of city-building has been manifested to the extreme in the constantly expanding models of networked cities, the connotation of logistics has also changed. It not only refers to physical organisation and mobility, but also implies political, economic, and socio-cultural connections.

Traditional Chinese Market Towns

Following the wide application of logistics in production and trade, the term was first translated into Japanese and then introduced into Chinese with the same Chinese characters, which literally means ‘the flow of things’10. Therefore, in the Chinese context, logistics has been deprived of other meanings and refers to the commercial activity of distribution from the beginning11. However, long before the introduction of modern logistics, commercial logistics existed in ancient China for centuries and shaped the territories and cities accordingly. This unique form of logistics created an urban form strikingly different from the fortress city in the European context, which still influences the urban and rural territories of contemporary China.

1.5. The distribution of market towns in Sichuan Province.

1.6. Skinner's abstraction of the same landscape showing theoretic standard and intermediate marketing areas.

At the centre of the discussion about how logistics shaped ancient Chinese cities is the village or the ‘market town’, which intrinsically challenged the urban-rural dichotomy. Different from ancient Europe, ancient China has long been a centralised state based on the agricultural economy. While the hierarchical structure of the imperial administrative system created a typology of administrative centres, the demand for exchange facilitated the spontaneous emergence of small towns and the development of commercial networks with markets as their hubs. The former were typically fortified settlements, imposed artificially on the landscape from above and positioned according to defensive considerations. They were cities that conformed to the traditional Chines understanding of urbanity and shared similarities with European fortress cities. Those market-centred settlements, by contrast, were usually unwalled, naturally formed in wellconnected locations, and served commercial functions. They facilitated the exchange of goods and provided services for rural households in the dependent area of the market. As basic units in both the market system and the urban hierarchy, they marked the beginning of the upward flow of agricultural and craft commodities into higher levels of the market system and the end of the downward flow of imported products for peasant consumption. This kind of settlement was defined in the study of anthropologist G. William Skinner as a ‘standard market town’, but it was also commonly referred to as a ‘village’ in the general literature.

Extending its power across the territory through logistics, market towns created an interlocking spatial network, which demonstrated

how a context-specific type of commercial logistics shaped the form of human settlements. According to Skinner, a standard market town and its dependent area that consisted of dispersed villages constituted the territorial unit of traditional China, extending family and local social relations to a larger ‘standard market community’ and beyond. Peasants, merchants, and all sorts of service providers commuted and worked within this area. In Skinner’s work, this area was diagrammed as a hexagon with the standard market town at its centre, seamlessly covering the entire land (Fig.1.5-6). This model effectively demonstrated that a typical standard market community comprised of about 18 natural villages in an area of 50 km2 and housing approximately 1,500 households, which is consistent with ancient Chinese records.12 However, in reality, the standard market community and its territory were both fluid, as peasants had choices among all the accessible market towns, while markets and villages were formed and dissolved naturally through the history. On this fluid territory, there is an interlocking spatial network. On the one hand, the movement and circulation between villages and the standard market town created links within the basic territorial unit; on the other hand, the movement of goods and mobile merchants among market towns formed a larger regional logistics network (Fig.1.5-6). 13

The logistics networks discussed here involved physical and temporal dimensions, which helped form an urban-rural continuum. In fact, the essence of logistics has always been its capacity to calibrate space and time according to needs. From the perspective of peasants, the nearest standard market town should be within the distance that one could travel in half a day at the time, which thus defined the spatial and social territory of the standard market town. The markets were also time-based, as they were normally periodic rather than continuous. The periodicity is related to the limited demand in one single market and the mobility of individual traders and service providers, since they usually travelled among several markets on different days to make a living. As a result, a group of related markets tended to operate on coordinated periodic schedules, making the regional

logistics network not only a spatial one but also a temporal one.

Towards Ecumenopolis

While the traditional Chinese case demonstrated a form of networked settlements shaped by spatiotemporal logistics, different forms of networked cities can be found in historical precedents and theoretical conceptions to adapt to the mobility level at the time. Since we are living in an era of unprecedented mobility and complete globalisation, features of previous networked cities are distorted and applied to an extreme. As a new form of commercial logistics and a new set of time-space networks

1.7. The shrinking map of the world.

have been radically reshaping the built environment and the way we live since the 1970s, scholarships focusing on the relationship between urbanisation and fluidity have also proposed alternative theories that explain contemporary conditions and envision future modes of urban organisation. These new urban theories and models can be understood in the framework of networked cities.

According to some urban theories, the networked city today has a planetary scale, which is not only a spatial but also a socio-political phenomenon resulting from globalisation and capitalism. In the 1960s, French sociologist Henri Lefebvre envisioned a holey ‘mesh’ in his thesis on complete urbanisation to illustrate the situation in which rural and agricultural lands continue to be absorbed into urban areas due to global capitalism.14 Built upon this thesis, the urban theorist Neil Brenner using the conceptual framework of planetary urbanisation to describe the phenomenon of a networked city occupying the entire planet.15 In this hypothetical extreme condition, the spatial distance can be replaced by the time distance and the world shrinks, which is the result of the improved level of mobility thanks to technological innovation (Fig.1.7) . Since cities are connected by highspeed transportation systems and frequent flows of people, goods, and information, it is natural to consider them as an integrated networked city that represents one unified community. In between the fragmented major cities are thin supporting landscapes such as infrastructural, industrial and commercial zones, which serve as the glue to connect the core settlements.

Apart from these theories, the similar hypothesis has been demonstrated in a formal way. During the 1960s and 1970s, Greek architect and urban planner Constantinos Doxiadis projected the city of the future as a continuously urbanised zone. He coined terms like megalopolis, eperopolis, and ecumenopolis to describe the different stages of the constantly growing urban complex as the population expands and cities become increasingly linked together. In this urbanisation process, all the settlements will be absorbed by the urban mass (Fig.1.8). According to his theory, today’s

1.8. (Top Right) An urban complex depicted by Doxiadis, formed as population expands and cities become increasingly linked together.

1.9. (Bottom Right) Ecumenopolis at night, as seen from a satellite.

1.10. (Left) The three forces which will shape Ecumenopolis. (Grid: 10×10km)

Top:centripetal forces of major ekistic centres;

Middle: linear forces along lines of transportation of modern circulatory systems;

Bottom: aesthetic forces along coastal and other pleasant areas.

metropolis will first merge into megalopolises, which will then constitute eperopolises and ultimately form the ecumenopolis, a universal settlement that will cover the entire earth as a continuous system (Fig.1.9) 16 Doxiadis believed that the ecumenopolis will be shaped by three forces: centripetal forces of major ekistic centres, linear forces along the lines of transportation of modern circulatory systems, and aesthetic forces along coastal and other pleasant areas (Fig.1.10). 17 Despite its extreme scale, the ecumenopolis still adopts the form of a networked city that consists of nodes, hubs, and most importantly, logistics links.

Three decades later, Spanish sociologist Manuel Castells anticipated an emerging networked city that he referred to as a mega-city in a more realistic scenario: the Hongkong-Shenzhen-Canton-Pearl River DeltaMacau-Zhuhai metropolitan regional system (Fig.1.11) . 18 While Doxiadis’s theory emerged from Jean Gottman’s identification of megalopolis on the north-eastern seaboard of the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, Castells argued that the new metropolitan region is distinct from the traditional megalopolis, as its spatial units no longer maintain relative functional autonomy but are becoming interdependent economically, functionally, and socially. According to his research, in 1995, although these spatial units were dispersed in a predominantly rural landscape, they were functionally connected on a daily basis and communicated via a multimodal transportation system that included railways, freeways, country roads,

hovercrafts, boats, and planes.19 In the future, these spatial units will only be more interconnected and interdependent through various flows, making the metropolitan regional network the most representative urban form of the 21st century. His prediction has been fulfilled in an unexpected way through the networks of Taobao Village.

Taobao Village in Networks

Taobao Village Cluster, as defined by Ali Research, adopts the form of a networked city. Despite that today’s China has changed dramatically since late traditional times, the network of traditional market towns has left its marks both on the territory of distinct urban-rural relations and on the social organisation. In fact, the word “ji” (meaning market in Chinese) is included in the name of Shaji Town in this study, indicating that it was a market town in history. Many similar names can be found in the SuiningSucheng area, showing how ancient networks have shaped this territory.

1.11. Diagrammatic representation of major nodes and links in the urban region of the Pearl River Delta.

While Taobao Villages are deeply connected through daily flows of people and goods that have existed on this land for centuries, the new modes of production have brought new flows and social relations, which resulted in a ‘return to the countryside’ phenomenon. Neighbouring villages are associated not only by social relations and kinship networks inherited from traditional rural China, for example, intermarriage between villages, but also through new forms of movements such as migration in search of business partnerships or job opportunities. In fact, before the emergence of e-commerce and the development of Taobao Villages, Chinese rural areas had seen a severe population loss, as the rapid urbanisation process in major cities attracted a large amount of labour force. The prosperity of local e-commerce not only generates employment opportunities but also provides an entrepreneurial environment, attracting both villagers working in cities and immigrants from adjacent areas. This indicates a phenomenon of ‘return to the countryside’, but it is driven by economic incentives rather than political propaganda or aesthetic reasons, which is thus distinguished from similar phenomena in other places.

In this way, the Taobao village cluster becomes a unique type of networked city, as rural settlements replace major cities to serve as hubs of production and nodes of fluxes. This new networked city may challenge existing urban theories and models, prompting people to conceive the issues of logistics, mobility, network, and globalisation from another perspective. While the theory of Lefebvre’s holey mesh and Brenner’s planetary urbanisation emphasise the expansion of major metropolis and take the ‘neither rural nor urban’ condition as the ‘glue’, the by-product, and the unwanted result of uneven urbanisation, Taobao Village is the ‘neither rural nor urban’ condition itself. However, instead of being the dispersed in-between zone or the supporting landscape, it functions as the nodes and hubs of the network and actively participates in global trade.

The Taobao village cluster is not simply an agglomeration of productive villages connected by infrastructural networks. Instead, the networked city

contributes to a regional industry. For manufacturing villages in one cluster, involving in the same industry means reducing costs through sharing facilities, materials, technologies, industry expertise, and even human resources. A regional industry of a large scale can also be more competitive than a local or family one, as they can share promotional resources and gain more market share. In the case of e-commerce-based furniture production in the Suining-Sucheng area, the business expanded quickly from Dongfeng Village to neighbouring villages through the tight rural social network and the promotion role of the grassroots governments. When many villages in the adjacent area are involved in the manufacturing industry, they take advantage of the logistics and industrial infrastructure in the region. However, since large-scale industrial parks and logistics facilities have been built by order of the local government both close to the west of Dongfeng Village to connect it with neighbouring Shaji Town and to the east of it in suburban areas of Suqian City, the network of Taobao villages has been rendered as a hierarchical one, with Dongfeng Village, now virtually part of Shaji Town, as its logistics centre (Fig.1.12). On a larger scale, the furniture industry has expanded to such an extent that it involves almost all the villages in the entire region. They share the evergrowing regional transportation system, including country roads, highways, motorways, railroads, and airports (Fig.1.13). This transportation system is not only the internal link within the Taobao Village cluster, but also connects the regional network with a national and even a global one.

In the discussion of how logistics affects city building, the networked city, regardless of its scale, is not the only outcome. In fact, logistics has such a capacity that it liberates the city from traditional territorial constraints and places it into a larger network of connectivity. In an age of globalisation and extreme mobility, this network can be as large as the globe. Through informational and infrastructural networks, a Taobao village can become a node in any regional, territorial, or global network and participate actively in global trading, no matter where it is geographically. For example, a piece of furniture manufactured by villagers in a family workshop in the plain

1.12. (Previous Page) Taobao Village Clusters and Logistics Facilities in Shaji-Gengche.

1.13. (Previous Page) Infrastructural Network and Taobao Towns in Suining – Sucheng.

1.14. Customised bookshelves manufactured in Dongfeng Village can be ordered online and delivered to Shanghai and London.

1.15. Logistics records showing how the bookshelf was transported from Dongfeng Village to Shanghai.

of the Northern Yangtze River Delta can be ordered online by customers anywhere in the world and delivered to its destination within several days.

In order to illustrate the active role of Taobao Village in a global network, I ordered two pieces of furniture from Dongfeng Village through the Taobao platform and had them delivered to Shanghai and London respectively (Fig.1.14-19).. Their journey can be easily traced and visualised through the service of the Taobao platform and the logistics provider. While the journey to Shanghai was smooth and fast, the cross-border delivery was much more complicated. The furniture had to first arrive at a transhipment depot, then operated by a cross-border logistics provider, and finally shipped to London by an international express company. However, there is little difference for customers except for time and price, as logistics operation is concealed from their view. Only when people look beyond the brief descriptions on logistics records can they realise that it is not a seamless flow but a complex process negotiating between efficiency, contingency, and redundancy. Although it is usually neglected, this logistics process produces unique spatial forms and creates certain spatial conflicts, which will be discussed in the next chapter.

1.16. Logistics records showing how the bookshelf was transported from Dongfeng Village to Dongguan Transhipment Depot.

1.17. Logistics records showing how the bookshelf was operated in Dongguan Transhipment Depot.

1.18. Logistics records showing how the bookshelf was transported from Dongguan Transhipment Depot to London.

1.19. (Next Spread) Map showing the journeys of the two bookshelves.

1 Collins COBUILD Key Words for Retail (London: Collins COBUILD, 2013).

2 Francesco Marullo, ‘Logistics Takes Command’, Log, no. 35 (2015): 103–20.

3 Charles Talbut Onions, George Washington Salisbury Friedrichsen, and Robert William Burchfield, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (Oxford: Oxford university press, 1992).

4 Marullo, ‘Logistics Takes Command’.

5 Jovan Tepic, Ilija Tanackov, and Gordan Stojić, ‘Ancient Logistics - Historical Timeline and Etymology’.

6 Lifeline of Logistics . (The Big Picture, 1966). https://vimeo.com/335588075

7 Logistics in Vietnam: Pipeline to Victory (The Big Picture, 1968). https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=Hl6uhdKbHkg

8 James A. Huston, The Sinews of War: Army Logistics, 1775-1953 (University Press of the Pacific, 2004).

9 Marc Levinson, The Box: How the Shipping Container Made the World Smaller and the World Economy Bigger, Revised edition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008).

10 The term logistics was translated into Chinese as 物流 (Wu Liu), in which 物 (Wu) means things, objects and 流 (Liu) means flow.

11 The concept of military logistics has a separate Chinese equivalent term, 后 勤 ( Hou Qin), which entered the Chinese vocabulary much earlier and is not related to commercial logistics 物流 (Wu Liu).

12 Ibid.

13 Skinner proposed a three-level market system of central, intermediate and standard market towns, in which the standard market town is at the lowest level and aimed to meet all the normal trade needs of the peasant household, while the central market town is normally situated at a strategic site in the transportation network and has important wholesaling functions. Ibid.

14 Henri Lefebvre, Writings On Cities , trans. Eleonore Kofman and Elizabeth Lebas, 1st edition (Cambridge, Mass, USA: WileyBlackwell, 2010).

15 Neil Brenner, ‘The Urban Question: Reflections on Henri Lefebvre, Urban Theory and the Politics of Scale’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 24, no. 2 (2000): 361–78.

16 Constantinos A. Doxiadis, ‘Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City’, in Britannica Book of the Year 1968 (William Benton Publisher / Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1968).

17 Constantinos A. Doxiadis, ‘The City, II: Ecumenopolis, World-City of Tomorrow’, Impact of Science on Society XIX, no. 2 (1969): 179–93.

18 Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society , 2nd ed., with a new pref, The Information Age : Economy, Society, and Culture, v. 1 (Chichester, West Sussex ; Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010).

19 Ibid.

Image Sources

1.1. Marullo, ‘Logistics Takes Command’.

1.2. National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne. Felton Bequest, 1956, https://www.ngv.vic. gov.au/explore/collection/work/43519/

1.3. Allan Sekula, Fish Story , 3rd edition (London: MACK, 2018).

1.4. Lyster, Learning from Logistics

1.5-6. Skinner, ‘Marketing and Social Structure in Rural China: Part I’.

1.7. David Harvey, The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change , 1st edition (Oxford England ; Cambridge, Mass., USA: WileyBlackwell, 1991).

1.8 and 1.10. Doxiadis, ‘The City, II: Ecumenopolis, World-City of Tomorrow’.

1.9. Doxiadis, ‘Ecumenopolis: Tomorrow’s City’.

1.11. Castells, The Rise of the Network Society

1.12-19. Drawn by the author.

While there are abundant studies on logistics in architecture and urbanism, they generally focus on the analysis of corporate logistics systems or the investigation of logistics infrastructure and logistics landscape. In these west-centric studies, logistics architecture is stereotypically considered as ‘non-human’ spaces where ‘logistics activities’ happen: viaducts, bridges, warehouses, fulfilment centres, transportation hubs, and cargo terminals. These constructs adopt a rather generic and abstract form to indicate the principle of exchange and control, which are instrumental to commodity production and capital accumulation. Due to these characteristics, the architecture of logistics has played an essential role in the global economic regime that features exploitation and inequality.

In this chapter, I choose three topics related to logistics operations and investigate how they intersect with Taobao Village. It turns out that Taobao Village is not only a logistics phenomenon but also provides an alternative to the prevailing models of logistics operation. Since almost everyone lives in this production-consumption cycle today, the scope of ‘logistics activities’ should be expanded. By challenging the stereotypical understanding of logistics, Taobao Village reintroduces the fundamental issue of people and inhabitation, while emphasising the potential of cooperation.

Logistics Forms: Black Box and Yellow Line

While modern logistics adopts exchange as its essence and acts as an instrument of capitalism, it refers to a formless organisational system. However, this system has been materialised and spatialised into certain forms, therefore allowing people to perceive it directly. The forms of modern logistics need to be simplified and standardised, thus facilitating the most economical and efficient means of production and distribution. Both physically and metaphorically, these forms can be summarised as boxes and lines. They follow the optimisation of logistics and adjust to the mode of movement of machines rather than humans. As a logistics infrastructure, Taobao Village contains these forms while occasionally allowing exceptions. In the case of exceptions, it facilitates unique and customised forms that go against the logistics rules, thus providing an alternative that emphasises people and living. In this way, Taobao Village shows how it mediates between modern production and rural living.

Black Box

Different types of boxes are basic units of logistics operation that embody the idea of standardisation and optimisation. This includes the cardboard box, the shipping container, and the big box of buildings, which allows for the most cost-effective means of stacking, shipping, and exhibiting merchandise.1 Metaphorically, logistics operation can also be understood as a black box, where the logistics process from production to consumption is rendered invisible. In the case of Taobao Village, while these physical and metaphorical boxes exist to facilitate efficient manufacturing and distribution, there are also non-standardised and visible modes of production, which provide an alternative to existing logistics rules and forms.

The cardboard box and the shipping container create a machine-oriented

2.1. A parcel shipped from Dongfeng Village to London with the bookshelf inside. Since the cross-border delivery is a complex process involving different logistics providers, the parcel was affixed with many barcodes throughout the process. This allowed the parcel to be tracked.

2.2. In an Amazon Fulfilment Centre, smart robots are moving shelves loaded with products. This environment requires human absence to function.

environment that excludes human presence. They not only formulate contractually obligatory criteria for manufacturers to condense packaging and therefore reduce space requirements, but also accommodate the norms of processing tools (pallets, forklifts, conveyor belts), transports (trucks, carriages, ships), and spatial products (warehouses, distribution centres, harbours). These boxes are processed by automatic machines in generic spaces, thus creating a standardised built environment. Apart from the flow of physical boxes, there is also the flow of information in this standardised setting. While UPC (Universal Product Code) or EAN (European Article Number) is assigned to every product and scanned both upon delivery and at the point of purchase to close the loop of supply and demand, all the boxes are also tagged with unique barcodes to be tracked (Fig.2.1). These barcodes can be scanned at every step of distribution, allowing logistics providers to better manage the flow of goods and customers to simply trace the journey of their purchase via their smart devices (Fig.1.1518). In this sense, standardisation and automation not only mean to reduce the amount of manual labour to move merchandise, but also to create a machine-oriented environment that facilitates efficient and seamless flow of products. This kind of environment not only has no need for human presence, but requires human absence to function (Fig.2.2). 2

Containerisation and intermodal transportation thus generate a new building type commonly referred to as “big box”, extending their influence from the commercial field to architecture and city. The big box of buildings accommodates the norms of objects and machines, and now it is human that needs to adjust to it. On the one hand, the containerisation of goods has contributed to a new pattern of production and distribution that has formatted the buildings that populate areas around transportation hubs.3 These buildings adopt a form of large-scale generic box and are designed to warehouse goods of specific dimensions. On the other hand, the idea of standardisation and organisation behind the development of containerisation impact other types of architecture, including those commercial and domestic buildings. In this case, it is the number of

buildings produced rather than their aesthetical appearances that matter. The organisational protocol not only facilitates architecture but becomes architecture itself. 4 In the case of Taobao Village, the former building type widely exists in the newly-built industrial parks, creating ‘human exclusion zones’ and ‘machine landscapes’5 amid traditional villages and rural landscapes (Cat.17-20). The standardised courtyard houses in the early extension project can then be considered as an example of the latter building type (Cat.13). While organisational protocols are created by people to facilitate quick and efficient flows, they are in turn designed to regulate and manage people’s lives.

The common principle of boxes of different scales is that they prioritise performance over content, which makes them function as a black box. The black box has an issue that precludes human involvement, and therefore it is essential to open it up. While the term black box generally refers to a complex system whose inputs and outputs are the only observable information, logistics operation is similarly a black box as the process between production and consumption is rendered invisible and irrelevant. Therefore products are not only sealed in physical boxes but also concealed in a black box. On the one hand, logistics operation has become so complicated and convenient that there is no need to bother to understand the process. On the other hand, the more one tries to optimise logistics, the more one considers its ins and outs, the less chance one has of regarding it as a coherent whole. This has the effect of removing responsibility from logistics designers, providers, and users, who may not fully understand the consequences of their actions. To rephrase Bruno Latour’s argument of ‘making the beings of technology visible’6 in the context of logistics, it is necessary to open up the black box and expose the inner workings of logistics to scrutiny. By doing so, we can better understand the impact that logistics has on society and the built environment, and take responsibility for our actions.

As a logistics hub that facilitates efficient production and distribution,

Taobao Village is standardised and organised in accordance with the rules of modern logistics to some extent. However, there also remain the nonstandardised and flexible modes of production, which can not only deal with possible contingencies, but also make the concealed process visible. Instead of rendering logistics operation a black box and a realm for machines, Taobao Village provides an alternative that emphasises people and living. The family workshop with automatic machines is a unique manufacturing model between artisan workshops and factories. With the convenience of e-commerce, they can adjust their products according to market demands and provide customised products. As a result, their products are not subject to standardisation, while enjoying the benefits of mass production. In addition to products, the typical buildings in Taobao Village are not standardised either. While the courtyard houses are built on designated slots with the requirements of tradition and regulation, villagers exploit available spaces to build industrial sheds with few restrictions. By hanging signs on the front and occupying open space for production, villagers also make the concealed production process visible. Similarly, the renovated courtyard houses accommodate delivery stations as well, while logistics process is also rendered visible through the moving of vehicles carrying materials and products on the village streets. Moreover, since Taobao Village is a phenomenon based on e-commerce, logistics operations there are again made visible through the Internet as a means of advertising. When the logistics process is no longer standardised and concealed, it is possible to look beyond the seamless flow and observe how people live in such a logistics landscape.

Yellow Line

With the domination of boxes in logistics operations, the scale of logistics infrastructure has expanded to regional and global. And that is where the line gets involved and acts as the ultimate rule that logistics follows. Ideally, the route between the site of production and the point of consumption

should be a straight line, therefore optimising the delivery. Practically, the line incarnates as the conveyor belt in the warehouse, the optimal path that smart robots follow in the fulfilment centre, and the bright yellow road marking that coordinates the routes of delivery trucks. In the vision of architects and urban designers, a design that extends the rule of logistics from warehouses and distribution centres to the scale of cities and regions always adopts the form of megastructure and linear city.

As the line represents the most efficient transportation route, the linear city is a way to rationalise urban planning and growth along transportation networks. Although linear settlements naturally exist, the idea of futuristic linear cities has increasingly preoccupied the imaginations of architects since the rapid development of communication and transportation technologies. While the first linear city was proposed by the Spanish engineer Arturo Soria y Mata in 1882 and developed later as a suburb of Madrid (Fig.2.3), the first linear city that adopts the form of megastructure could be Roadtown proposed by Edgar Chambless in 1909 in the United States (Fig.2.4). In fact, the megastructure might be the only architectural form to visualise continuous large-scale urban configurations that are discussed in Chapter 1 at the regional and global scale as networked cities. The megastructure and linear city have since then become a recurring theme for architects, and such examples include Le Corbusier’s Plan Obus

2.3.

Plan showing location of La Ciudad Lineal in relation to Madrid, 1911.

for Algiers (1933), Ivan Leonidov’s Competition Proposal for the Town of Magnitogorsk (1930), Peter Eisenman and Michael Graves’ Linear City in New Jersey (1965), Superstudio’s conceptual proposal Continuous Monument (1969), and most recently, the controversial project The Line that started to be constructed in Saudi Arabia in 2022.

It is not a coincidence that some Taobao Villages naturally have formal characteristics that apply to logistics rules, such as linear features. In fact, these features could be an advantage in their development as logistics infrastructure. In China, some villages are naturally linear settlements along transportation routes, which prepares them for efficient logistics flows. In addition to linearity, the other important character of linear configurations is that they tend to develop horizontally rather than vertically, which also reflects the logistics rule. Logistics facilities are usually composed of only one or two stories, since everything wants to be accessible and close to the ground. As a result, the size of the footprint of logistics infrastructure is striking, making it fall between the category of architecture and landscape. Similarly, most Chinese villages in the northern Yangtze River Delta consist of one- to three-storey courtyard houses that provide scattered ground space, making them ideal for manufacturing and distribution. Some basic features of logistics facilities also naturally exist in Taobao Village, such as loading docks and yards 7. With courtyard houses set back from the

2.4. Sketch of Edgar Chambless' Roadtown. From 'The Independent', May 5, 1910.

activities and temporary storage.

While Taobao Villages are not necessarily natural linear settlements, their development shows a tendency towards linearity. This could be the result of their involvement in e-commerce and dynamic local logistics activities. Since manufacturers need to deliver their products and receive materials on a daily basis, the village tends to be formed in such a way that optimises logistics. Therefore it is not surprising that the first expansion project in Dongfeng Village was added to its south end to make the village longer rather than wider (Fig.0.11). In fact, the more villagers participate in e-commerce-related manufacturing, the more the village is formed along a main street. In the Suining-Sucheng region, three villages at different stages of development can demonstrate this rule (Fig.2.5). While Dongfeng Village, the first village involved in e-commerce-based furniture manufacturing, exhibits a clear linear pattern, Jiucheng Village, a relatively isolated village that started participating in the industry much later, is still formed in clusters. Meanwhile, Dazhong Village, the neighbouring village that followed Dongfeng Village into furniture production, is developing linearly along the major transportation route, while still having some clusters of settlements remaining.

Although Taobao Village shares formal features with logistics facilities,

2.5. (Left) A satellite map indicating the location of the three villages.

(Right) Satellite maps of the three villages.

1. Dongfeng Village (Top)

2. Dazhong Village (Middle)

3. Jiucheng Village (Bottom)

it does not have the characteristics that logistics is always criticised for, which makes it fundamentally different from the megastructure and linear city. As Kevin Lynch once criticised, linear cities are ‘the direct expression of machine values’ and ‘the result of thinking the city as a power station or an assembly line’.8 In short, the settlements that are built according to the rules of logistics are not made by or for people. However, despite its formal similarities to logistics facilities, Taobao Village is built by and for its residents in the first place. Different from large-scale logistics facilities or the megastructure that formulates the linear city, Taobao Village consists of many small and flexible parts, which distinguishes it from the machine landscape in form and operation. In this urban form that has accumulated from small, individual buildings, there are many exceptions. Similar to the non-standardised condition discussed above, these exceptions interrupt the efficient, seamless flow, therefore making spaces for people in the world dominated by machine values. In this sense, the formal condition of Taobao Village allows it to operate in an alternative way, which is to be discussed in the next section.

Logistics Operation: Towards Cooperative Logistics

Logistics operation entails a double vision simultaneously top-down and bottom-up, and this dichotomy is imported by the discipline of architecture and urbanism to describe forms of decision-making. The linear, standardised form discussed in the previous section reflects the topdown aspect of logistics that presupposes an optimised scenario, as most logistical networks are national or transnational corporate entities organised by top-down decision-making. In contrast, when logistics facilitates user participation, improvisation and flexibility by providing customised options and choices, it demonstrates its bottom-up aspect that is less strategic and more incremental. In the case of Taobao Village, since the e-commerce giant Alibaba has played a significant role in its formation, it appears to be the outcome of a top-down decision. However, as villagers,

grassroots elites, local governments, developers, and logistics corporates all participate in its production and urbanisation process, one cannot simply define Taobao Village as top-down or bottom-up. The Taobao Village phenomenon goes beyond this dichotomy and provides an alternative that involves different levels of cooperation.

To untangle the multiple layers of cooperation in Taobao Village, one should first observe how the dominant business started and expanded, and here the tight rural social network inherited from traditional China plays a major role. In Dongfeng Village, the history of the plastic recycling industry left an industrial base and entrepreneurial environment, while its decline prompted villagers to find another way to make a living. The emergence of e-commerce coincided with this background, and therefore it is not surprising that the village turned to e-commerce-based industries. When the entrepreneurial pioneer Han Sun and his business partner Lei Chen first found success in selling furniture online, they decided to keep their ‘business secrets’ only to a few close friends, as they clearly understood that the business would quickly expand through social networks to create many competitors. To ensure that this commitment is well implemented, five pioneering online shop owners signed a confidentiality agreement in 2008, promising that they would not pass on the business secrets to others (Fig.0.10). However, none of them kept their promises, as the importance of social relationship is so deeply rooted in rural China that the desire for business success cannot overweigh it. As a result, e-commerce-based furniture production has rapidly expanded within and beyond the village through the tight rural social network (Fig.2.8).

In addition to friendship and kinship networks, local governments and grassroots organisations add another formal layer to rural social relations. The furniture business expanded beyond the administrative boundary of Dongfeng Village not only through friendship and kinship networks, but also through the active role of local governments. Since villages in the region were also in desperate need of industrial transformation at

2.6. The administrative structure of the E-commerce Association in Shaji Town, with Han Sun as the president and Kai Xia as the general secretary. All five pioneering online shop owners who signed the confidentiality agreement in 2008 are the management.

2.7. The opening ceremony of the E-commerce Association.

2.8. (Next Spread) The rapid expansion of e-commerce-based furniture production within and beyond Dongfeng Village through the tight rural social network.

the time, local governments organised field trips to Dongfeng Village in seek of business experiences after hearing about its fame and success. Government officials also participated in e-commerce to act as role models to fellow villagers. Since these officials are elected by local residents, many of them coincide with elite entrepreneurs, which in turn facilities the local entrepreneurial environment. Apart from the government, some pioneering entrepreneurs also set up grassroots organisations to avoid unhealthy internal competition and look for cooperation models. In 2011, Han Sun and several other pioneering furniture manufacturers established the E-commerce Association in Shaji Town to set standards in furniture quality and pricing (Fig.2.6-7) . While they believed that standardisation could improve the industry, some villagers refused to comply with the association’s decisions because they questioned its organisation and elections. This indicates that cooperation is a complicated process that can also entail conflicts. Nonetheless, furniture manufacturers and online shop owners no longer run their businesses individually. Instead, multiple cooperative networks have been established to facilitate a local and even regional industry.

As the furniture manufacturing industry expanded, villagers also began to diversify their businesses to form a self-sufficient local industry, which demonstrates another level of cooperation. In the beginning, only a few entrepreneurial pioneers had their own furniture workshops, and other villagers typically started by opening online shops to sell furniture made by their relatives and neighbours. Later on, while some villagers developed their own workshops and factories, others were involved in various businesses related to furniture manufacturing. With the development of businesses such as raw materials and furniture accessories, the local industry has gradually covered the upstream and downstream of the supply chain, making it self-sufficient. E-commerce-related services, such as financial services, legal services, graphic design, and photography, also emerged in the village. These services populated the main street, as some furniture workshop owners rented their front spaces to these service

CUNZHONG LI

MS.LI

XINGLAI LIU

LING WANG XINGLI LIU

XINGQI LIU

Customer Service Designer & Sales Furniture Maker

BIN CHEN Employee Boss Daughter Father Neighbours Neighbours

Anonymous

HAN SUN

Brother & Sister

MS. SUN MS. SUN

Anonymous

WEIYIN WANG MIN XU

MR.WANG Son Parents

LEI CHEN PU WANG Friends Neighbours Brothers

Fellow Villagers Immigrant

Anonymous Immigrants WEIZHONG SHI

Anonymous Immigrants

YU QIU MS.QIU Anonymous KUN QIU

Anonymous Friends

MR. WANG Anonymous Friends

CUIHUA DING

HUAIBAO CHENG Immigrant Laminates Furniture Timber Furniture Sales Customer Service Sales Brother Sister Anonymous JIE QIU

XIAOLIN LIU Anonymous

MING LIU Anonymous

WEI ZHANG Mother Sons Brothers Friends Friends

providers (Fig.2.9). The entrepreneurial environment also prompted some innovative businesses that make the most use of existing resources. For example, a villager has developed a business selling recycled charcoal made from wood cuttings and sawdust from furniture manufacturing (Fig.2.8). With the diverse businesses, a traditional village has been finally transformed into a Taobao Village, which can function as a self-sufficient factory.

Logistics services in Taobao Village also entail a cooperative model that transcends the dichotomy of top-down and bottom-up. When Han Sun started his business in 2007, there was only one third-party logistics provider in the village: the state-owned China Post. The growing demand for logistics attracted more logistics corporations to enter the market, which generally started by inviting local villagers to open delivery stations. This kind of delivery stations is a combination of corporate logistics and private businesses, since the station owners are both the agent of the corporate and the entrepreneur, who have their own warehouses, trucks, and staff. There are dozens of delivery stations in one village, collecting products from local furniture makers and transporting them to nearby distribution centres. By the end of 2010, these delivery stations could no longer meet the demand of the expanding manufacturing industry. In order to solve the logistics problems, village leaders negotiated with logistics corporations and successfully persuaded them to build distribution centres adjacent to the village. The Taobao Village can now be considered the logistics infrastructure combining production and distribution.

Cooperation not only exists within the geographical and administrative boundary of villages, but also at a regional scale and among villages. In the beginning, most villages manufactured similar products and followed the same business model, which created competition among themselves and reduced profits. In order to avoid this situation, some villages decided to produce and sell different furniture products than others, further diversifying the regional furniture industry. Similar to the situation

2.9. A map showing the diverse businesses along the main street in Dongfeng Village.

within one village, the division of labour also appeared regionally, with some villages specialised in raw materials or furniture accessories rather than furniture manufacturing itself. Since then, the relationship among these villages has been transformed from competition to collaboration, and a comprehensive regional industry was finally formed. Connected by infrastructural and social networks, these dispersed villages create a cooperative regional network that supports the regional industry (Fig.2.10)

The urbanisation process in Taobao Village has also been discussed in the framework of the top-down and bottom-up dichotomy, but here I argue that it is a more complex process involving different levels of cooperation and conflicts. While China has been famous for its ‘top-down urbanisation’ driven by the state or municipal governments for the past few decades, there is also a form of ‘bottom-up urbanisation’ which refers to the in-situ urbanisation process led and promoted by the grassroots governments and villagers in rural areas. While the former process is featured by the expansion of large cities, the later one generally involves small towns and villages. In the 1980s and 1990s, the industrialisation and urbanisation of rural areas led by local entrepreneurs were summarised as bottom-up urbanisation. Following a similar path, the urbanisation process in Taobao Village is summarised as ‘new urbanisation from below’ 9 , as it started with villagers spontaneously building industrial sheds in their courtyards. However, the urbanisation process has been regulated through top-down decision making since local governments and speculative developers implemented zoning plan and introduced urban forms like gated communities and industrial parks. As both these modes involve negotiations among individuals, grassroots associations, and local governments, one cannot simply define them as bottom-up or top-down. Moreover, the coexistence of different modes also adds a layer of complexity to the urbanisation process in Taobao Village, making it transcend the dichotomy. In short, although the industrialisation and urbanisation process in Taobao Village has inherited the previous bottomup urbanisation, it is fundamentally different. In order to better understand

2.10. Spatial distribution of patents records for different types of furniture in the SuiningSucheng area from 2011 to 2018, showing that villages in the region have various specialities.

Beds

Assembled furniture

Chairs

Furniture for shops

Decorations

this unique phenomenon, we should situate it in a larger historical and geographical context and interrogate its modes of production.

Logistics, Manufacturing and Globalisation

While manufacturing is the major industry in the type of Taobao Village studied here, logistics makes it possible by facilitating the efficient flow of materials and products. In fact, logistics not only is a supporting service for manufacturing, but also contributes to a global system of production. Based on international production and distribution, this system entails an uneven global manufacturing economy that features deindustrialisation in some areas of the West and massive industrialisation in East and South Asia. Taobao Village is not only the result of this process but also plays an active role in it. Derived from the traditional domestic economy, it also provides an alternative to the Fordist-Taylorist model while anticipating the post-Fordist mode of production.

The mode of production in Taobao Village inherits previous historical models and shares a lot in common with traditional domestic production. In order to understand this unique manufacturing system, it is necessary to investigate the form of manufacture before mass production. The term manufacturing emerged from the Latin manu factum or ‘made by hand’ in the 16th century and first adopted the form of artisanship.10 It typically involved small-scale manufacturing and family-operated businesses. This system of manufacture, described as the domestic economy, was in widespread use for centuries. 11 It has similarities with the mode of production in Taobao Village in many aspects. In terms of spatial organisation, the home was used as a place of work in both cases, and much manufacture was combined with farming. In terms of business operation, each family member had specific tasks within the family business, and these businesses tended to cluster to take advantage of interdependencies or resources. This description of the domestic economy

Tables

Cabinets and drawers

Others

Mirrors and frames

Clothes hangers

is also appropriate for Taobao Village. In the Suining-Sucheng region, e-commerce-based furniture manufacturing originated from the region’s booming plastic recycling industry in the 1980s and 1990s. Both these industries involved family-operated businesses and shared the same rural spaces. They have the characteristics of domestic economy spatially and organisationally.

The history of industrialisation and globalisation has set the larger context for industrialisation in China and the development of Taobao Village. In Europe, the dominance of the domestic economy was disrupted when the factory system was developed in the late 18 th and 19th centuries. In this new system, workers no longer had ownership of the production process, as they were required to concentrate on its simple and repeatable aspects. Peasants and artisans failed to compete with this new system of capitalist mass production, and they were forced to leave the land and close their workshops. These uprooted poor poured into cities, which saw significant growth accordingly. 12 The factory system later evolved into Taylorism and Fordism, which once greatly increased productivity and shaped Western cities. This situation changed radically during the second half of the 20th century due to trade, costs, technology and urban policy, as manufacturing globalised and moved from developed nations to other parts of the world. From a Western-centred perspective, this is a process of labour outsourcing in seek of the lowest costs of production, which marked its transformation from an industrial to a post-industrial economy. This economic transformation can be understood as the shift from Fordism to post-Fordism, a more flexible form of production with small manufacturing units and increased consumer choice.13 For those countries that replaced the West as the new manufacturing base, such as those in East and South Asia, this process led to massive industrialisation that dramatically changed their cities and economies. Ironically, while the global shift has resulted in environmental issues and miserable labour conditions in these recently industrialising countries, it also creates a new global economic regime that undermines Western hegemony (Fig.2.11-12)

2.11. Still from the 2006 documentary film Manufactured Landscapes, showing a huge factory in China. Industrial sites in other Asian countries were also filmed, including slag heaps, e-waste dumps, and a place in Bangladesh where ships were taken apart for recycling.

2.12. A poster for the Swedish experimental film Logistics, 2012. In the film, the directors follow the production cycle of a pedometer in reverse chronological order from end sales in Stockholm, Sweden back to its origin and manufacture in Shenzhen, China.

The prehistory of Taobao Village happened against the backdrop of the global shift. While rural enterprises once saw rapid growth after the Chinese economic reform and the official permission of rural-urban migration in the 1980s and 1990s, their development was disrupted by the increasing foreign investment in China in the early 2000s following the global shift. Similar to the rise of mass production in Europe, industrialisation in China led to the decline of traditional domestic production and the outflow of the rural population. Rural residents migrated to cities and overseas in seek of job opportunities. In the SuiningSucheng region, this marked the decline of the plastic recycling industry and prompted rural industrial transformation. After a period of crisis and struggle, e-commerce-based furniture manufacturing became the dominant industry in the region, leading to the emergence of Taobao Village.

While the mode of production in Taobao Village shares similarities with the traditional domestic economy, it is in fact a new model in the age of globalisation and informatisation. This new model provides an alternative to the Fordist-Taylorist model and anticipates the post-Fordist mode of production. Combining artisanship and the factory system, Taobao Village provides an alternative to the Fordist-Taylorist model, which attracts uprooted villagers back to their hometown and further influences the urban-rural relationship. As fragmented family workshops function collectively to form a comprehensive ‘factory’ at the village scale, and villages work jointly to form a regional industry, Taobao Village also entails a flexible system that anticipates the post-Fordist mode of production. On the one hand, automation is introduced in family workshops to manufacture standardised products efficiently; on the other hand, goods can be customised or varied in response to consumer markets timely thanks to the simultaneity provided by e-commerce. In this way, Taobao Village not only forms a regional network of logistics, information, and social relations, but also breaks the geographical constraints and participates in a global trading network.

Despite its uniqueness, the mode of production in Taobao Village can be compared with similar examples in other contexts, and these comparative case studies in turn contribute to our understanding of Taobao Village. One of these examples is the Chinese Fabbrichetta, 14 namely ‘tiny factory’, in Prato, Italy. While Prato had a history of textile production based on networks of domestic production, this early post-Fordist model has seen a decline since the mid-1990s, together with a shrinking Italian population. At the same time, there has been a growing number of new small Chinese businesses in the knitwear and ready-to-wear fashion sectors resulting from Chinese immigration to Prato. Most of these immigrants come from Wenzhou15, a city in the Southern Yangtze River Delta, as their traditional family businesses and rural enterprises were interrupted by foreigninvested factories. While these rural areas were transformed into Taobao Villages decades later, those who left the country developed the Chinese Fabbrichetta in Prato. Since the immigrants kept the traditional Chinese family structure and social network, the mode of production in Prato shares a lot in common with the one in Taobao Village and generates comparable spatial organisations. The comparative analysis in space will be carried out in the next chapter, as the discussion of manufacturing and modes of production here can help us better understand production and living in Taobao Village and analyse it spatially.

NOTES

1 Marc M. Angélil and Cary Siress, ‘Discounting Territory: Logistics as Capital Principle of Spatial Practices’, 2011.

2 G eoff Manaugh, “Where Tomorrow Arrives Today: Infrastructure as Processional Space”, in Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene , ed. Liam Young (Oxford: Wiley, 2019), 36-43.

3 Keller Easterling, ‘Interchange and Container: The New Orgman’, Perspecta, no. 30 (1999): 112–21.

4 Ibid.

5 Jesse LeCavalier, “Human Exclusion Zones: Logistics and New Machine Landscapes”, in Machine Landscapes: Architectures of the Post Anthropocene, ed. Liam Young (Oxford: Wiley, 2019), 48-55.

6 Bruno Latour, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence: An Anthropology of the Moderns (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2013).

7 Adrian Vickery Hill, ed., Foundries of the Future: A Guide for 21st Century Cities of Making (Delft, Netherlands: TU Delft Open, 2020).

8 Kevin Lynch, Theory of A Good City Form , 1st Edition (Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press, 1981).

9 Luo, New Urbanisation from Below: The Development and Governance of Taobao Villages in China

10 Adrian Vickery Hill, ed., Foundries of the Future: A Guide for 21st Century Cities of Making (Delft, Netherlands: TU Delft Open, 2020).

11 David Hey, ed., Oxford Companion to Family and Local History, 2nd ed (Oxford ; New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

12 Marshall Berman, All That Is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity, Nachdr. (London: Verso, 2002).

13 Clare Lyster, Learning from Logistics: How Networks Change Our Cities (Basel, Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2016).

14 Cosimo Campani, ‘Redneck Urbanism: The Architecture of the Fabbrichetta’ (PhD diss., Roma Tre University, Architectural Association, 2021).

15 See Chapter 0 for ‘Wenzhou Model’.

Image Sources

2.1. Photo taken by the author.

2.2. Shawn Knight, ‘Amazon Deploys an Army of Robots to Help Fulfill Cyber Monday Orders’, Techspot (website), 1 December 2014, https://www.techspot.com/ news/59027-amazon-deploys-army-robotshelp-fulfill-cyber-monday.html.

2.3. Ivan Boileau, ‘La Ciudad Lineal: A Critical Study of the Linear Suburb of Madrid’, The Town Planning Review 30, no. 3 (1959): 230–38.

2.4. Image via Wikimedia Commons, public domain.

2.5. Google Maps. Annotated by the author.

2.6-7. Taobao Village, CCTV.

2.8. Drawn by the author. Satellite photo from Google Maps.

2.9. Drawn by the author.

2.10. Luo, New Urbanization from Below: The Development and Governance of Taobao Villages in China.Annotated by the author.

2.11. Manufactured Landscapes, directed by Jennifer Baichwal (2006).

2.12. Logistics, directed by Erika Magnusson and Daniel Andersson (2012), https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=QYFG0xP12yE

Inhabiting the Space of Flows

In the age of global trade and e-commerce, logistics has profoundly shaped people’s way of living and today’s urban and rural landscapes. It also offers us an alternative way of envisioning the organisation of the city apart from space, which is according to time. The traditional understanding of space and time has been challenged by the advance of logistics networks, as they facilitate almost simultaneous exchange between places of production and sites of consumption to produce unprecedented urbanism. While architects have conventionally interrogated the city in terms of architectural objects, they may have to shift to the perspective of its operational systems and procedural flows today. In other words, in order to understand the spatial organisation of the city today, one needs to adopt a logistics way of thinking and investigate how space is shaped by time, while time is materialised through the lives of subjects.

In this chapter, I turn to examine logistics and the Taobao Village phenomenon through the lens of subjects, while placing their lives and the space they live in the theoretical framework of the space of flows. While this framework helps us understand Taobao Village typologically, I emphasise the particularity of individual villages by introducing the dimension of inhabitation. Through identifying the subjects and observing their lives, I first analyse the logistics influence in Taobao Village in terms of time. These influences are then reflected in the space, which leads to the discussion of the typology of the co-existence of production and living.

The Space of Flows

While Taobao Village is a phenomenon that exists widely across China, the theorisation of the spaces of ‘flow’ and ‘network’ by Manuel Castells can help us understand it as a specific type. According to his theory, the space of flows represents the material arrangements that allow for the simultaneity of social practices without territorial contiguity. 1 In other words, the space of flows is placeless, as remote locations may have more in common than places within the same city. These spaces are connected with each other and act as nodes and hubs in a larger network. In this sense, logistics infrastructure can be examined as the space of flows, and so is Taobao Village.

As the rules of the space of flows apply to Taobao Village, this theory can be used to analyse the phenomenon. According to Castells, the space of flows can be described by the combination of at least three layers of material supports. The first layer is constituted by a circuit of electronic exchanges that forms the material basis for the strategically crucial processes in the network of society. This applied to Taobao Villages as they emerged in the information age when the Internet and smartphone developed rapidly. The second layer of the space of flows is constituted by its nodes and hubs, as the electronic network upon which it is based links up specific places with well-defined social, cultural, physical, and functional characteristics. The emergence and development of Taobao Villages represent the inclusion of peripheral villages into the regional, national or even global network of production and consumption, which significantly expands the nodes and hubs of the space of flows. The third important layer refers to the spatial organisation of the dominant, managerial elites that exercise the directional functions around which the space of flows is articulated. In Taobao Villages, a group of grassroots entrepreneurs tactically combine the internet with local production, thus promoting rural e-commerce.

However, the theory of the space of flows has certain limitations, as it has been proposed in contrast to the traditional understanding of space, namely the space of places. This theory can be included in the intellectual movement named ‘spatial turn’ in social science in the 1980s and its extension, the ‘mobility turn’ in the 1990s.2 While sociologists who began to focus on space studies examined space and the social relation of its production, those who promoted the ‘mobility turn’ paid more attention to the dynamic and unstable aspects of space. This trend of thought was deeply connected to the global political economy and urban process in the 1980s and 1990s, when technological development in communication and transportation enabled a capitalist world market and destroyed local communities, as discussed in the previous chapter. A new, fluid global power continued to conquer new territories, cancelled their solid order and opened them up to its own operations. This process led to a condition of ‘liquid modernity’, as named by Zygmunt Bauman, and it created a feeling that ‘all that is solid melts into air’, as Marshall Berman quoted from Marx. In order to analyse the fluid social condition, scholars tend to redefine space and time and their relations. As a result, the space of flows is proposed. In contrast to the space of places, it is placeless and homogeneous, thus losing its architectural ground.

As unique villages rooted in historical and geographical contexts, Taobao Village incorporates the aspect of the space of places and creates an interaction between the ‘flow’ and the ‘place’. While the space of flows provides a framework to understand dispersed Taobao Villages as a type that shares basic features in common, I intend to see the generic logistics space as fundamentally a space for people and a space for living, which is an action summarised as inhabiting the space of flows. With the development of rural e-commerce, the flow of information, investments, goods and people are intertwined in these rural areas, shaping the local landscape and the life of residents.

Logistics Subjects

In order to understand the space in Taobao Village, one should first define the subjects. Through the investigation of the people and their daily life, one can understand how they interact with the built environment. Moreover, as typical spaces in Taobao Village are built for and by villagers, it is essential to understand their agents in the production of space. Based on the understanding of the mode of production in Taobao Village, as discussed in the previous chapter, we can first define the subjects, and then explore the multiple layers of social relations. The influence of logistics on these subjects is firstly reflected in time and then in space.

As the mode of production in Taobao Village largely inherits traditional domestic economy, owners of the family workshop can be considered as petite bourgeoisie. In today’s Chinese context, they have a desirable identity as rural entrepreneurs. This identity is distinguished from migrant workers, as they can not only stay in their hometown but also have ownership of the means of production. Although it has been common for rural residents to seek jobs in major cities, especially when the factory system largely replaced rural domestic production, it is always a step by force rather than by choice. Therefore the rise of e-commerce and local industry successfully attracted many people back to their hometowns, which contributed to the ‘return to the countryside’ phenomenon (Fig.3.1).

The expectation of owning a business and becoming an entrepreneur not only attracts people back to the village, but also affects local labour relations. With this expectation, workers believe they are only temporarily engaged in wage labour and therefore consider their employers the model to imitate rather than the enemy to fight. While it is challenging to start a furniture workshop due to the high requirements for site and funding, it is much easier to open an online store. Therefore villagers typically started by opening online stores to sell furniture made by local pioneering workshops. When the online store grows, the owner usually needs to hire a customer

3.1. A slogan in Dongfeng Village, saying 'Tired of living in a foreign city, it is better to go home and start an e-commerce'.

3.2. When Han Sun first started his buisiness, he rented a pigsty and transformed it into a furniture workshop. It had very low ceilings, so workers had to bend over to work.

service agent, who will have the opportunity to learn e-commerce-related skills and get access to the entire business process. These customer service agents normally resign within one or two months and start their own businesses. As a result, local businesses tend to be family-operated and only hire extended family members when they grow.

Although the workers do not see capitalists as exploiters, different forms of exploitation exist within family-operated businesses. Firstly, there is always a form of self-exploitation, as villagers tend to work long hours in a contaminated environment. This is a result of the lack of regulation both in working time and working place. However, the local economy and industry have benefited from this self-exploitation, as the prosperity of Taobao Village is the result of the villagers’ hard work. Since each family member, including the child and the elderly, is pushed into such working conditions and assigned particular tasks, self-exploitation is transformed into familial exploitation (Fig.3.2)

The division of labour in the family business also reflects exploitation. Since domestic production in Taobao Village is based on a patriarchal system inherited from traditional rural China, exploitation is often gender-based. In a typical family business, the older generation runs the furniture workshop, while the younger generation operates the online store. This is because the older generation, who is deeply rooted in the rural social network, can better engage in external coordination and internal management, while the younger generation is more familiar with e-commerce and informational technologies. Normally the older man, the patriarch of the multi-generational family, is the owner of the family business and in charge of the manufacturing in the workshop. His wife usually supports him in cleaning the working places and cooking for the workers. The younger man, namely the son of the patriarch and the coowner of the business, is also the online store owner and in charge of e-commerce-related work, such as marketing and distribution. The younger women in the family, including the shop owner’s wife, sisters, and cousins,

typically work in sales and customer service (Fig.2.8). This suggests that male members of the family are always business owners, which is consistent with the rural situation where men are the owners of property and land. Since the family house is also a place for work, the household becomes a space for both reproduction and production. Female members of the family not only work for the family business, but also have to carry out domestic work, which is unpaid and undervalued. The overlap of working and living spaces also makes it difficult to define and evaluate women’s work, as they may work in front of a screen while taking care of children, or cook for workers and family members at the same time (Fig.3.3). Therefore in a typical family business, the family’s patriarchal structure leads to gender-based exploitation.

The mode of production in Taobao Village also features the exclusion of immigrants, which is caused by material conditions and policies rather than discrimination. As a result, most immigrants are involved in e-commercerelated services rather than furniture manufacturing. According to the rural policy, immigrants without a local hukou 3 (household registration) have no right to purchase land or houses. Since local residents typically build furniture workshops in their courtyards, it is difficult for immigrants to start such businesses. Instead, they tend to rent a place, sometimes the storefront of a family workshop, to provide design, photography, financial, and legal services. These services require more training and are less profitable than furniture manufacturing, so local residents have little incentive to get involved. In the end, most service providers in Taobao Village are immigrants.

By transforming peasants into entrepreneurs and workers, the industrialisation of the village has reshaped the way people think, behave, and live. In a sense, it is the people that are industrialised and urbanised, as they need to adjust their daily routine according to the schedule of production and consumption. In other words, although they live in the village, their lives are calibrated by urban time, logistics time, and

3.3. Stills from a documentary showing women taking care of children while delivering materials and products.

manufacturing time. In the past, villagers worked from sunrise to sunset, without a clear division of work time and leisure time. Today, with the introduction of a factory-like system, working hours in the furniture workshop is typically defined as 7am to 7pm, with a lunch break at noon. In the evening, especially after 8pm, customer service agents become busy because this is the time when city dwellers shop online. While family workshops usually deliver products and receive materials before and after work, distribution centres work around the clock to process parcels. In the end, rural time is replaced by logistics time, which also has spatial influences (Fig.3.4).

Production and Inhabitation

Industrialisation and informatisation of Taobao Village have not only affected the daily routine of local residents, but also shaped public and domestic spaces. These spatial influences are represented by new spatiotemporal models, as villagers have modified the built environment according to their different needs at different times. These spatiotemporal models indicate that there is no clear division between working and living in the village shaped by logistics, since the two activities can exist in one place at different times or in different spaces simultaneously. Therefore the spatiotemporal models bring informality and temporality. In public spaces, they are presented as time-based appropriation of streets and outdoor spaces. In domestic spaces, they involve the typology of co-existence of production and inhabitation, which has historical and contemporary examples.

The spatiotemporal model is a logistics model, as it shows how logistics challenge the conventional understanding of time and space. While industrialisation and modernity introduced a disciplinary regimentation of time that artificially divides a worker’s life into work time and leisure time, 4 this division has been materialised through the zoning of work

3.4. A timetable showing how logistics and production have influenced rural life.

and leisure in urban space. In Taobao Village, the recent implementation of a zoning plan that introduces industrial parks and gated communities reflects this rule. However, this disciplinary time is in conflict with the simultaneous time of information and logistics, while the spatiotemporal model anticipates and prevents this conflict by providing a productive environment where working and living can overlap and merge.5 Since the appropriation and construction are initiated by villagers, they are not a form of control, but a collective effort to connect traditional rural living with production in the age of information and logistics. In this way, the archaic space and time of work and leisure is dissolving into a continuous landscape of production.

Villagers’ regular appropriation of public spaces has rendered streets in Taobao Village a spatiotemporal model. Traditionally, courtyard houses along the main street are set at some distance back from the front boundary, and many agricultural and social activities used to take place at these outdoor spaces. In fact, holding ceremonies and social events outdoors has always been a rural character. With the rise of e-commercerelated production, these front spaces can perfectly serve as loading docks, while other activities can continue to take place at different times (Fig.3.5). As a result, the public street is constantly appropriated by and shared among villagers, creating a dynamic scenario of production and living.

When traditional courtyard houses are transformed by villagers into production spaces such as manufacturing workshops, they also become a spatiotemporal model. In fact, the self-built examples in Taobao Village can be summarised as a courtyard house-workshop typology. In Taobao Village, the courtyard house along the main streets typically consists of a two-storey building at the front and two one-storey buildings at the back to define the courtyard. Although it is common to start an online shop by simply placing a computer in the living space (Fig.3.6), opening of the front store can provide a formal space for commercial activities. While the courtyard has been used for family gatherings and domestic activities,

3.5.

From top to bottom:

Row 1. A rural wedding with firecrackers in front of a restaurant. The bridegroom's relatives welcome guests on the street.

Row 2. A forklift truck operates on the street.

Row 3. A multi-modal street.

Row 4. In the evening, the villagers enjoy themselves on the street.

3.6. Villagers started online shops by simply placing a computer in the living spaces.

it is now occupied by productive activities such as manufacturing and storage. This transformation usually involves demolition of part of the original house and construction of light industrial sheds. Despite the variety of informal renovation and construction, they can be simplified and summarised as a courtyard house-workshop typology according to the combination of different forms of houses and industrial sheds. Each prototype in this typology is suitable for specific programmes and uses. In general, the courtyard house-workshop type features the horizontal and vertical division of production and inhabitation, with the store in the front and the house in the back, the workshop on the ground floor and the living spaces on the upper floor. As a spatiotemporal model, it is also characterised by different uses of the same space at different times, showing the division of working and living in the temporal dimension. (See spreads following the chapter)

The courtyard house-workshop typology entails an important idea of the co-existence of production and inhabitation, and therefore can be compared with other historical and contemporary examples. The historical examples existed widely across the world, while many of them shared similar spatial organisations and involved traditional domestic production. In the medieval European artisan workshop, the living area was typically located above the working space while the front entrance to workshops doubled as a form of storefront.6 Sometimes there was a courtyard inside the workshop, which not only separates the front store from the living area, but also provides space for production activities (Fig.3.7) . Similar examples can also be found in traditional China, as the association of ground-floor shop with housing accommodation over is as old as urban life itself.7 This traditional building type was brought by Chinese immigrants to Southeast Asia, where they were reshaped by colonial regulations and became the predecessor of the shophouse type. According to colonial planning, shophouses were typically narrow in width and long in depth, with a hierarchical arrangement of spaces that extended from public and commercial at the front to private and production at the back (Fig.3.9)

(Left) Sequences of still images from videos taken in Dongfeng Village, showing different activities on the streets.

Although both traditional and colonial shophouses are no longer in use today, architects and urban designers see potential in these building types and the mode of production they support. In the 1990s, some Chinese architects proposed a new ‘front store and back house’ type for villages and small towns to promote small-scale production and commerce (Fig.3.8) 8 This indicates the importance of domestic production in rural China and anticipates the emergence of Taobao Village.

Apart from the typical division of working and living within a house, there are also examples that share the informality of the courtyard houseworkshop typology in Taobao Village. One of such examples is the residents of Chinese immigrants in Prato. Traditionally, buildings designed for artisans and small manufacturers are widespread in Prato. These buildings typically have a large open space on the ground floor for working and an upper floor for dwelling. Some of the houses also have sheds at

3.7. Plans and the elevation of an artisan workshop in medieval Cluny, France. The red hatch indicates the working space.

3.8. A new ‘front store and back house’ type proposed by Chinese architects for villages and small towns in 1995.

3.9. A typical Chinese Shophouse in Malacca, Malaysia.

the back for textile production.9 While the combination of production and living undoubtedly helped attract aspiring Chinese entrepreneurs, not all of them had access to these buildings. Instead, they built informal and illegal settlements in the abandoned spaces of the old industrial neighbourhood. Different from the self-built industrial sheds in Taobao Village’s domestic courtyards, the spatial organisation in Prato is reversed, with temporary structures built in factories for living (Fig.3.10-11). This unique building type has accelerated the paradigm of living and working in a form that allows extreme productive flexibility.

The spatiotemporal models, especially the typology of the co-existence of production and inhabitation, mark the intersection between logistics and architecture. They are basic spatial units in this series of multi-scalar discussions of logistics and Taobao Village, while indicating the starting point of design interventions. With the understanding of people and their lives, the design of logistics spaces is no longer the materialisation of abstract diagrams for the optimisation of efficient flows. Instead, it is a dynamic process of conflicts, negotiation, and cooperation.

3.10. Diagram of a Chinese workshop in Prato. The red volume shows the space dedicated to sleeping and eating.

3.11. A narrow kitchen wedged between two exterior walls and roofed with plastic siding in Prato. Women stood along a single row of burners, preparing food for the congregation.

1 Castells, The Rise of the Network Society

2 Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in An Age of Extremes (London ; Brooklyn, NY: Verso, 2018).

3 Hukou is a system of household registration used in mainland China. Hukou registration identifies a person's origins and entitles the registrant to specific benefits in that area, such as hospitals, schools, or landpurchasing rights.

4 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, October 59 (1992): 3–7.

5 Mary Louise Lobsinger, "Cybernetic Theory and the Architecture of Performance: Cedric Price's Fun Palace", in Anxious Modernisms: Experimentation in Postwar Architectural Culture , ed. Sarah Williams Goldhagen and Réjean Legault (Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2000), 119-39.

6 Hill, Foundries of the Future

7 Robert Home, Of Planting and Planning: The Making of British Colonial Cities , 2nd edition (New York: Routledge, 2013).

8 Wendi Luo and Wanli Zhang, ‘“经营 户型”模式探讨──“前店后宅”建筑 文化的延续 [Discussion on the Model of ’Business House Type’: The Continuation of the Architectural Culture of ‘Front Shop and Back House’]’, Architectural Journal, no. 09 (1995): 22–23.

9 Campani, ‘Redneck Urbanism: The Architecture of the Fabbrichetta’.

Image Sources

3.1. Photo taken by the author.

3.2. Liang Chen, 沙集模式十五年——信息 化时代中国农民网商的生产生活 [Fifteen Years of the Shaji Model: The Production and Life of Chinese Rural E-commerce in the Information Era ], 1st edition (Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2022).

3.3. Taobao Village, CCTV.

3.4. Drawn by the author, with photos from the documentary Taobao Village and taken by the author.

3.5. Video taken by the author.

3.6. Taobao Village, CCTV.

3.7. Drawn by the author, based on drawings from Leonardo Benevolo, The History of the City (MIT Press, 1980).

3.8. Drawn by the author, based on drawings from Luo and Zhang, ‘[Discussion on the Model of ’Business House Type’ The Continuation of the Architectural Culture of ’Front Shop and Back House’]’.

3.9. Drawn by the author, based on drawings from Noorfadhilah Mohd Baroldin and Shamzani Affendy Mohd Din, ‘Documentation and Conservation Guidelines of Melaka Heritage Shophouses’, Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences, AcE-Bs 2012 Bangkok, Sukosol Hotel, Bangkok, Thailand, 16-18 July, 2012, 50 (1 January 2012): 192–203; and Wang Han and Jia Beisi, ‘Urban Morphology of Commercial Port Cities and Shophouses in Southeast Asia’, Procedia Engineering , Proceeding of Sustainable Development of

Civil, Urban and Transportation Engineering, 142 (1 January 2016): 190–97.

3.10. Drawn by the author, based on drawings from Campani, ‘Redneck Urbanism: The Architecture of the Fabbrichetta’.

3.11. Mei Lun Xue, ‘Factory/City. A Study in Unexpected Prosperity’, Festival dell’Architettura Magazine. Ricerche e progetti sull’architettura e la città , no. 31 (January 2015).

Evolution of the Courtyard House Type

Original Courtyard House

I. Opening of Front Store

II. Demolition of Back House

III. Demolition of Side House

Renovation and New Construction Examples

I. Opening of Front Store

II. Demolition of Back House

III. Demolition of Side House Services Furniture Workshop Furniture Workshop

Furniture Workshop + Exhibition

Furniture Workshop + Exhibition

Logistics Services

A. Original Courtyard House

1. Original Courtyard House

B. Demolition of Back House

2. Opening of Front Store

C. Demolition of Side House

D. Occupying the Courtyard

Typical Forms and Structures of Courtyard Houses

Typical Forms and Structures of Industrial Sheds

While previous chapters discuss how Taobao Village intersects with modern logistics spatially and operationally, the design proposition translates these arguments into spatial strategies and tests them in specific contexts. On the one hand, as a logistics infrastructure, Taobao Village is shaped by logistics socially and spatially, with its built environment sharing a lot in common with typical production and logistics spaces. On the other hand, as a village rooted in the unique and complex context of China, Taobao Village challenges the stereotypical understanding of logistics operation and provides an alternative to the generic logistics space. Taking Taobao Village as a testing ground, here I propose a series of design interventions that emphasize collaboration and cooperation in logistics networks. Despite its specific contexts, the design proposition aims to generate transferrable knowledge and shed light on larger issues. In short, it aims to develop a multi-scalar design approach that takes the logistics network as context and catalyst and therefore reclaim the role of design in the logistics space.

The design proposition is divided into three parts. It starts with an enquiry into the most prominent typology in Taobao Village, namely the courtyard house-workshop typology. In order to maintain the current self-built situation and encourage cooperation among neighbours, this first part is presented as a design guidebook for villagers. Apart from interventions in the existing typology, the second part proposes new typologies to extend the cooperation to a larger scale and provides diverse spaces for the villagers. While the first two parts show design prototypes and strategies at architectural scale, the last part applies these strategies to specific sites to test how they perform at neighbourhood and urban scale.

Taobao Village Design Guide

The design guide focuses on the renovation and extension of the courtyard house-workshop typology, providing villagers with self-building design suggestions. Each design strategy is presented as a specific scheme or scenario, thus rendering them transferable. The design guidebook is divided into two sections. While the first section is for single courtyard house-workshops, the second section focuses on the relationship between neighbouring units.

For single courtyard house-workshops, the owner tends to make the most use of the limited space. On the one hand, they build extensions inside the courtyard and outside the front door to occupy more spaces. On the other hand, they use the same space for different activities at different times, thus rendering the courtyard house-workshop and the public space in front of it as a spatiotemporal model. Following this intention, this section focuses on the extension of the courtyard house-workshop, providing two main strategies for house owners. The first design strategy aims to provide various additional spaces to meet the different needs of residents; the second design strategy focuses on the flexible use of the same space at different times.

Design interventions for adjacent units require negotiation and cooperation between neighbours. By collaborating, neighbouring workshops can pool funds to purchase expensive machines and facilities, which will benefit both sides. To strengthen cooperation, they can also share the use of a space. Through careful coordination and time-sharing plans, they can make the most use of the limited space. Neighbouring workshops can also collectively renovate the neglected spaces between them, thus providing additional spaces and facilities not only for themselves but for other villagers. In this way, there are three design strategies: shared facilities, shared spaces, and insertions.

STRATEGY I.I

Scheme I

Scheme II

Scheme III

STRATEGY I.II

Scenario I

Scenario II

Scenario III

EXTENSION

Green House

Restaurant & Ceremonial Space

Furniture Exhibition + Balcony

EXTENDABLES

Logistics Services + Workshop (DAY)

Family Gatherings (NIGHT)

Truck Operating (REGULAR)

STRATEGY I.I EXTENSION

The extension strategy aims to provide villagers with design suggestions when they need to extend their living and working beyond the threshold and appropriate the public spaces in front of their courtyard houses. Based on the observation of villagers’ lives, I propose three exemplary design schemes to meet the different needs of the villagers. All the schemes adopt light steel structure, which can be built by villagers themselves.

The first design scheme is a green house where villagers can grow agricultural products. Although the Taobao Village has been industrialised, many villagers keep their rural lifestyle and prefer to grow their own crops and vegetables. Since most villagers no longer have fields, they tend to occupy the small flowerbeds alongside the main street. A green house with light steel structure and polycarbonate sheets can better meet their needs.

The second design scheme is an extension of a restaurant. Since villagers are used to having rituals outdoors, this openable glasshouse with a terrace can provide them with ceremonial spaces. Curtains adjust the light according to the weather, while folding doors allow the space to extend into the courtyard.

The third design scheme is an exhibition space for furniture workshops. The glass elevation can serve as a showcase, while the balcony on top of it can provide additional living spaces.

Scheme III

STRATEGY I.II EXTENDABLES

The extendable strategy is presented as a structure that looks like an enlarged flap door. It can be installed on both sides of the courtyard house, controlling the openness of the spatial sequence from the street to the courtyard. As courtyard houses typically set a distance back from the main street, the front space of each workshop usually serve as a loading dock. Meanwhile, the courtyards also provide essential spaces for logistics activities and temporary storage. The flap structure can serve as a shed for these outdoor spaces when open and separate them when closed.

In order to better illustrate the application of this design strategy, I propose a courtyard house with flap structures on both sides. During the day, the structure at the back is closed to create a distraction-free environment for furniture manufacturing, while the structure at the front is open to provide additional spaces for the logistics station. During the night, the structure at the front is closed, and the structure at the back serves as a shed for family gatherings in the courtyard. At certain times of the day, usually before and after the working hours of the furniture workshop, structures on both sides are open to allow forklift trucks to operate in the courtyard.

DESIGN II

COLLABORATION AND COOPERATION

STRATEGY II.I

STRATEGY II.II

Scenario I

Scenario II

Scenario III

Scenario IV

STRATEGY II.III

Scheme I

Scheme II

SHARED FACILITIES

SHARED SPACES

Furniture Manufacturing (Different Parts)

Furniture Manufacturing + Other Activities

Furniture Assembling

Packaging + Distribution

INSERTIONS

Co-working Space

Housing + Social Balconies

STRATEGY II.I SHARED FACILITIES

While it is common for villagers to build small structures inside the industrial sheds, this one is shared between neighbouring workshops. As it is elevated, the ground area will not be compromised. In fact, the two workshops can remain independent while enjoying additional working spaces on the upper floor. With flexible partitions, this working space can be used as an open space or divided into small offices. When the neighbours agree to collaborate further, the can also use the ground floor as a shared space. Such a space allows the neighbours to invest collectively in expensive technology such as a CNC cutter or metal working tools.

STRATEGY II.II SHARED SPACES

Different from sharing facilities, sharing spaces requires further negotiation and cooperation between neighbours. They need a detailed protocol to coordinate how and when to share the space so that they can make the most use of it. This design strategy replace the partition wall between neighbouring workshops with a rotatable structure. When the structure is closed, they can serve as a partition wall. When it is open, it connects the neighbouring courtyards and provides a shaded area. As it is a simple structure made of steel and wood, it is easy for local furniture makers to fabricate them.

It is possible to install several such structures in the courtyards. When they rotate and combine in different ways, they can reallocate the spaces and create various working scenarios. I use an example of three such structures to create four possible working scenarios of two neighbouring furniture workshops.

Furniture Manufacturing (Different Parts)

Furniture Manufacturing (Different Parts)

Furniture Manufacturing + Other Activities

Furniture Assembling

Furniture Assembling

STRATEGY II.III INSERTIONS

In some cases, there is a gap between neighbouring courtyard houses, which provides an opportunity for insertions. For this kind of sites, I propose a basic narrow structure with double height spaces on the ground and first floor. While the ground floor is open as a passage to the courtyard, the first and second floor can be used for various programmes. By placing this structure in opposite directions, there can be two different schemes.

With an entrance open to the street, the first scheme provides co-working spaces. These spaces can not only be shared between adjacent houses but also be used by other villagers.

With an entrance open to the courtyard, the second scheme provides housing for immigrant workers. In this way, they can have their own living spaces rather than rent a room in courtyard houses and share spaces with local families. A continuous balcony is attached to the structure to facilitate social activities among neighbours.

Co-working Spaces

Housing + Social Balconies

While self-built design strategies can allow collaboration and cooperation between neighbours, I also introduce new typologies to expand the scope of cooperation. These new projects are independent of the courtyard house clusters, thus allowing villagers to participate without geographical or familial constraints. In addition, they can also provide villagers with the necessary physical and social infrastructure. In fact, the rapid industrialisation and informatisation of Taobao Village have broadened the horizons of the villagers and calibrated their lives to the urban lifestyle, while keeping them in a village where production is the ultimate goal. The village is in desperate need of public facilities.

The introduction of new typologies thus adds two other layers to the selfbuilt situation in the village, the community and the public. On the one hand, cooperatives and community owned businesses can pool funds to purchase expensive technology or share the use of a large space, which would otherwise be impossible for small family businesses. Within such community-facing organisations, decision making is often based on direct democracy, thus avoiding patriarchal or corporate exploitation. On the other hand, there is also a need for public financing and stimulation. Many existing problems, such as the housing crisis, the development of local industry, and the lack of public facilities, can only be solved through public planning and funding.

In order to render the design transferable, I propose a prototype structure with similar form and dimensions to the self-built structures in the village. In this way, it can be humbly integrated into the rural landscape, which is in contrast to the large-scale buildings in the newly built industrial parks. The prototype structure is extendable in both directions and therefore flexible for various programmes and different sites. Here I present two exemplary design schemes using the prototype structure. The first one is a one-storey structure for cooperative workshops, and the second one is a two-storey structure for housing and public activities.

Extendable Prototype Structure

Scheme I

Cooperative Workshops

The one-storey structure provides villagers with spaces for manufacturing workshops. Since it is a free-standing building, the workshops here are not owned by individual families, but are shared among communities and groups. Through sharing and reassigning the spaces, the architectural design also allows for collaboration and negotiation among different workshops. The continuous pitched roof creates spaces of varying sizes. While larger spaces are used for manufacturing, smaller spaces can be used as service spaces, such as offices and lounges for workers. Flexible partitions allow these service spaces to be used as private rooms for one workshop or shared between neighbouring workshops, thus facilitating cooperation among different workshops. The building sits on an elevated platform that serves as a loading dock.

Scheme II

Social Infrastructure + Housing

When the prototype structure is extended to two storeys, it can be used for more comprehensive programmes. This scheme provides housing for immigrant workers on the upper floor and keeps the ground floor open to the public. Since immigrant workers are typically single youths or young couples, housing units are designed as small basic units. However, the carefully designed structure system allows each unit to be a duplex with a courtyard open to the sky, thus making it comparable with traditional courtyard houses. The enlarged circulation spaces provide residents with social places. In this way, a new layer of social relations is added to the rural kinship network, and immigrant workers no longer have to feel inferior to local residents.

While the upper floor is more private and organised inwardly, the ground floor is open to the environment and encourages public participation. It can be used as a community centre to provide all the programmes needed by the villagers, such as public canteens, communal kitchens, educational facilities, social facilities, etc. The glazing elevation and the skylights provide sufficient light to the interior.

Cooperative Neighbourhoods

The design strategies are tested on site to form a cooperative neighbourhood, with adjustments and specific designs according to the site conditions and the needs of villagers.

The application of design strategies on site is an incremental process involving different stakeholders. While the renovation of courtyard houses is initiated by house owners and only involves negotiation between neighbours, the construction of new buildings requires public participation and collective agreement. The incremental process itself also demonstrates a form of collaboration and cooperation, as it is opposite to the top-down zoning plan implemented in Dongfeng Village. Instead of moving into apartment buildings, villagers have the right to keep their land and property, while keeping the social relations and lifestyle deeply rooted in traditional rural China. Rather than give up their family businesses and work in large corporates, villagers have the choice to join cooperatives and participate in decision-making. Immigrant workers no longer need to rent a room and share spaces with local families. Instead, they have the opportunity to form their own community. Public and community-facing facilities are designed by and for villagers, emphasising living rather than production.

The testing site for design interventions is in the middle of the village, where the main street and the railway viaduct intersect. In between of the main street and the old village clusters, there are some available fields. Since it is the east end of the village, it is less affected by the top-down zoning plan that aims to develop an industrial park to the west of the village at this stage. While the railway viaduct aggressively divides the village, the space beneath it provides an opportunity for a site-specific design that reconnects both sides while providing additional spaces for public activities.

STRATEGY II.I

Shared Facilities

STRATEGY I

Extension & Extendables

STRATEGY II.II

Shared Spaces

NEW TYPOLOGIES

Cooperative Workshops & Housing

STRATEGY II.III Insertions

SITE-SPECIFIC DESIGN

Public Platform + Commercial Spaces

While this study presents various forms and definitions of logistics through frameworks and cases within and beyond the discipline, it has no intention to reach one ultimate definition of logistics. On the contrary, the research aims to demonstrate that there are various forms of logistics in different contexts, while their performances shed light on general issues of logistics and architecture.

In this sense, Taobao Village is such an alternative model that involves not one but many forms of logistics. By describing Taobao Village as an alternative in terms of form, operation, mobility, modes of production, urbanisation, and so on, this research challenges the limited and biased view of logistics infrastructure. Logistics infrastructure is not only the invisible facility that processes consumer goods through automated technologies, but also the space that hosts various kinds of human activities. It is both the space of production and the space of inhabitation, in which an expanded scope of logistics activities occurs.

Through design interventions in the specific context of Dongfeng Village, this study aims to produce transferable design strategies that take the logistics network as context and catalyst. By emphasising self-construction, collaboration, and cooperation, it provides an alternative design strategy in the age of globalisation, while reclaiming the role of design in logistics spaces. In other words, it is a design strategy learning from logistics and applying to logistics spaces, while both of them have a broader meaning now.

In conclusion, the research and design demonstrate that even though we are living in an age of precise calculation, seamless flows, and top-down control, there are always alternatives. That is what we can learn from the case study of Taobao Village from a perspective of logistics.

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