Syndicated from Design China
Ou Ning discusses Beijing’s Climate Politics and why he relocated to Anhui Province earlier this year:
“In April 2013, I packed all my stuff into nearly a hundred boxes and transported them by an eight-meter container truck from Beijing to Bishan, a village in Yi County, Anhui Province. Actually, I didn’t move here specifically to avoid the haze in Beijing, and my fear of air pollution was not so strong that I needed to buy canned fresh air from Chen Guangbiao…I moved to Bishan because I decided to reconstruct this rural area and conduct ecological experiments here. Instead of being overly dependent on the city, we should retrieve the value of the countryside through agricultural development and eco-environmental protection. Only in this way can we balance the population between urban and rural areas, reduce city pollution and control energy use, solving environmental problems in the whole of society fundamentally. This point of view may still be more of a brainstorm or an ‘artwork’, like the bike designed by my friend Matt Hope (see below), and it may still face many practical difficulties in reality, but at least we have made our first step”. Read more.