Architecture and rural urbanism in Europe. New cities and villages regeneration.

The crisis in rural areas is essentially a European problem: depopulation and ageing of the population, abandonment and decay of small town centres, difficulty in keeping existing businesses and/or in launching new start-ups, intensive agricultural practices to the detriment of biodiversity, pollution, a lack of infrastructures and services for tourism, as well as a shortage of job opportunities for the population, etc. The book describes methodology and results of a research project carried out by the Research group Rural Architectural Intensification (RAI) within the Italian research project PRIN-MIUR2009. The RAI research group is composed by scholars from University of Pavia and from Tongji University of Shanghai which are the Authors. The book illustrates 140 selected case studies. The output is a collection of semantically indexed datasheets that represent built projects that apply the theme of Rural Architectural Intensification. In the book we analysed all the architectural case studies, which generate positive actions in the territory where they are located through which we have evaluated the production of sustainable Intensification. The overall framework has been interested in terms of quality and design’s behaviour. In order to this reason was built the RAI Case studies Report, which is the basic reference in which many case studies from EU and from all over the world have been classified and assessed in order to find a common ground. the book has been presented at the 2013 Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism / Architecture: Urban Border, Shenzhen, China. Dec. 6, 2013 – Feb. 28, 2014.