Housing and Community Development

This webinar is part of a series sponsored by the Housing Knowledge Community on AIA KnowledgeNet. Traditional houses in Yunnan have deep cultural significance quite different from anything one encounters in the United States. Within Yunnan, different regions and ethnicities have distinctive local housing traditions, which are defined by particular building techniques, materials, spatial designs, and ornamentation. Embedded in vernacular housing are ideas about gender, power, religion, and moral values. In addition, Yunnan houses reflect the particular productive and social activities for which they are intended, be it farming, feasting, or increasingly, housing wage laborers. Houses also bear witness to the radical historical transformations of this region over the last century. In this webinar, we will review some of these key features of Yunnan houses and consider their particular meanings, as well as discuss how houses have changed in recent years with the decline of farming and the rising importance of the market economy. Register for the webinar. Attendees can earn 1 AIA LUs.

About the Speakers

John Flower (historian, Ph.D. University of Virginia) and Pam Leonard (anthropologist, Ph.D. University of Cambridge) began working in rural China in 1991. Their research over a twenty year period is a longitudinal study of the changing economy, environment, culture and values in Xiakou village, Sichuan, during a time of fundamental transformation in the Chinese countryside. That research is collected online in Moral Landscape in a Sichuan Mountain Village: a digital ethnography of place published by the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia. The ethnography explores the creation of place and local understandings of the landscape, documenting the transition from subsistence agriculture to wage labor, as well as changes in domestic space, material culture, social institutions and religious belief. Their particular interest in vernacular architecture and sustainable housing stems from both their experiences in the Chinese countryside, and from their ongoing personal experiments in green building and organic farming at home. Former faculty at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, they currently teach at Sidwell Friends School in Washington DC where they are leading the new China Fieldwork Semester program for high school students to learn about rural life and economic change in China.

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