From Urban Village to Urban Community. A regeneration proposal for Shixia Village in Shenzhen

Although in the last years the Urban Villages in Shenzhen have been finally recognized as crucial to the city’s past and present development, their fate, especially for the ones within the former borders of the Special Economic Zone, is demolition. This work of thesis aims at proposing a design approach on the village local level that could enhance the built-up capital, a by-product of the rapid modernization, and the social capital in it, in order to allow people to acquire a Shenzhen civic identity that represents them, and to acquire the awareness that the “Shenzhen Dream” cannot consist of either success or failure, but of the slow organic identity construction of human beings inhabiting an urban context which they have dreamed of since its origins.