Urban village

In urban planning and design, an urban village is an urban development typically characterized by medium-density housing, mixed use zoning, good public transit and an emphasis on pedestrianization and public space.

Urban villages are seen to provide an alternative to recent patterns of urban development in many cities, especially decentralization and urban sprawl. They are generally purported to:

The concept of urban villages was formally born in Britain in the late 1980s with the establishment of the Urban Villages Group (UVG). Following pressure from the UVG, the concept was prioritized in British national planning policy between 1997 and 1999.

Application

Urban village ideals have been applied to new greenfield and brownfield developments and urban renewal projects. The concept has been widely adopted in many countries and used by both government development agencies as well as private enterprise as a guiding concept for many projects.

Urban village (China)

Urban villages (Chinese: 城中村; literally: "village in city") are villages that appear on both the outskirts and the downtown segments of major Chinese cities, including Beijing, Shenzhen and Guangzhou. They are surrounded by skyscrapers, transportation infrastructures, and other modern urban constructions. Urban villages are a unique phenomenon that formed part of China’s urbanization efforts.

Urban villages are commonly inhabited by the poor and transient, and as such they are associated with squalor, overcrowding and social problems. However, they are also among the liveliest areas in some cities and are notable for affording economic opportunity to newcomers to the city.

Characteristics

Modern life in China's urban village is vastly different from the traditional agricultural way of life due to the lack of farmland. A new lifestyle has developed in which landowners build multi-story houses (which is allocated by the village collective) and rent them to the city’s floating population, who are not able to afford an apartment in the better parts of the city.

Urban

Urban means "related to cities." It may refer to:

Media

Other uses

See also

Village

A village is a clustered human settlement or community, larger than a hamlet but smaller than a town, with a population ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand. Though often located in rural areas, the term urban village is also applied to certain urban neighbourhoods. Villages are normally permanent, with fixed dwellings; however, transient villages can occur. Further, the dwellings of a village are fairly close to one another, not scattered broadly over the landscape, as a dispersed settlement.

In the past, villages were a usual form of community for societies that practise subsistence agriculture, and also for some non-agricultural societies. In Great Britain, a hamlet earned the right to be called a village when it built a church. In many cultures, towns and cities were few, with only a small proportion of the population living in them. The Industrial Revolution attracted people in larger numbers to work in mills and factories; the concentration of people caused many villages to grow into towns and cities. This also enabled specialization of labor and crafts, and development of many trades. The trend of urbanization continues, though not always in connection with industrialization. Villages have been eclipsed in importance as units of human society and settlement.

Village Fête

Village Fête (or in Fr. La Fête villageoise) is an oil-on-canvas by French artist of the Baroque Claude Lorrain (real name Claude Gellée), painted in 1639 and given to Louis XIV in 1693 together with its companion Seaport at Sunset, by landscape architect and gardener André Le Nôtre. It is currently held and exhibited at the Louvre in Paris.

History

Claude's Liber Veritatis, a kind of register in which he recorded and drew the paintings he had done, has a note on the back of the drawing for the Fête (No. 13) that the picture had been painted for Urban VIII. Other sources also state that the artist painted a Village Fête and a Seaport at Sunset for Urban VIII, but these two paintings were sold by Prince Barberini in 1798. The Louvre painting must therefore be a replica painted by Claude Lorrain after the lost original. Another copy dated 1669 was in the possession of Lord Yarborough in England, and yet another in the Stroganovs collection, St. Petersburg. Several other replicas and copies exist.