CITY REGION-NINGBO E IL PAESAGGIO OPERAZIONALE DEI VILLAGGI TAOBAO. STATO DELL’ARTE E ALTERNATIVE POSSIBILI DI NUOVE FORME DI INSEDIAMENTO

City Region-Ningbo and Taobao villages operational landscape. State of the art and possible alternatives of new forms of settlement. Operational landscapes in China have accompanied the construction of Chinese city-regions since several decades. The case of the Zhejiang Cixi Export Processing Zone called “Ningbo-Hangzhou Bay New Zone (NHBNZ)”, in the hinterland of Ningbo located in the Yangtze River Delta Economic Zone, is one of these, which however has some original aspects. In fact, in its surroundings, a network of production settlements called Taobao villages has been formed that sells their agricultural and manufacturing products throughout the country through the e-commerce platforms of Alibaba.com. These are located in the agricultural and industrial district of Kandun, having one of the largest concentrations of this type of settlement in China. The district of Cixi, where Kandun is located, on the southern coast of the Hangzhou Bay, is characterised by a morphology of linear strips of agricultural and small manufacturing villages parallel to the coastline. This form is due to the reclamation of coastal land through polders (sea walls) began from the Song dynasty era in the eleventh century. The territory of the original Cixi county, having a dense network of villages and local market towns (the historical form of the Chinese urban-rural continuum), after the establishment of the NHBNZ in 2001 has been interested by huge scale infrastructural works – as the 32 km maritime bridge that connects Ningbo with Shanghai, and the connection of the area to the high-speed railway network. Over the last decade, Taobao villages have developed in the historic structure of Cixi villages and market towns network and close to the NHBNZ. The paper illustrates a project for a possible settlement modelled on the base of the specific form of such historical morphology to be deserved to the type of production of Taobao villages in the hinterland of Ningbo. The project is based on the enhancement of the elements of the historical structure of the sea walls and irrigation canals of the Cixi district and of the shape of the local urban-rural continuum.