Preservation project and urban restructuring. Hakka villages in the context of Huyang Master Plan.

“...to destroy without a reason it is criminal, but to preserve without a reason is coward. To build and to destroy are meaningless words if they are depleted of the moral content of culture” (Rogers, E.N., 2010). The proposal for a tourism plan in the fast developing context of Huyang district considers as a main goal the preservation of the landscape and agricultural villages: a diffused heritage built during the centuries and marked by the presence of the Hakka population. The preservation project is focused not on the fast pace of transformation processes but and on their diversity and disparity. The bottom up chaotic development of the existing urban fabric, and the top-down planning of the regional- scale city are very different transformation phenomena equally leading to a radical erasure of past artefacts and landscapes: villages, canals, agricultural land, but also hills and woodlands are razed to make room for the new residential and industrial settlements. Fragments of rural landscape remain as evidence of a past society and lifestyle. But will these remnants talk to anyone? A large scale project perspective offers the opportunity for a reflection on the emergent characteristics of preservation issues in the construction of a Chinese “ordinary” metropolis. The radicalism of the urban situation offered by the Chinese city explicates a different role which architecture and urban planning can play in dealing with conservation issues, bringing back, in a very different context, some of the ethical stances of the last century architecture culture.