Around the world, humanity is undertaking its greatest migration of all time – from countryside to city. This movement of people accelerated in mainland China after Deng Xiaoping’s 1978 reforms , and has created vast conurbations bustling with commerce and peppered with extravagant contemporary architecture, while villages continue to be drained of the young and able. Among other things, the growth of cities drives climate change . The World Green Building Council estimates that buildings alone are responsible for 39 per cent of carbon emissions, including 11 per cent in their construction. In architecture, it seems that we need a “global design reset”, which happens to be the theme of this year’s Business of Design Week (BODW), taking place from November 29 to December 4 and organised by the Hong Kong Design Centre. Among its speakers are two Beijing-based architects who have been forging a path towards a sustainable future. One is Zhu Pei, founding partner of Studio Zhu Pei and known for a string of extraordinary cultural venues across the country. For him a reset is not enough. “We should address the public [to say] our cities and buildings are crime culprits for increasing climate change ,” he says. The other is emerging architect Luo Yujie, of LUO studio, who lists “ sustainability , integration of nature, and creating architectural space for social justice” as goals. Luo includes his studio’s 2019 Shared Lady Beetle project, which reused car panels, discarded bicycle parts and chipboard to create a children’s library on a tricycle, as “one of our many efforts in trying to deliver these social messages”. China’s relationship with Western architecture is behind the need for new architectural voices. After 1949, the construction of massive, ubiquitous social housing estates followed the Soviet model, which in turn was inspired by the modernist Utopian visions of legendary architect Le Corbusier . After 1978 and starting in the southern special economic zone of Shenzhen, new Western architecture flooded in. By the 1990s, the proliferation of skyscrapers and malls designed by American architects (Louis Skidmore, Nathaniel Owings and John Merrill among them) as well as Hong Kong practices (Dennis Lau & Ng Chun Man Architects, and Tao Ho) using much the same design formulas, was under way. This century, Chinese cities have become playgrounds for “starchitects” happy to supply landmark buildings like vast abstract sculptures, while developers build ever higher, foreign-designed, glass-and-steel skyscrapers. Architecture with roots in the West transformed China’s booming cities, but at the expense of the Chinese vernacular. Zhu says: “Modernist architecture is different from traditional Eastern architecture as well as traditional Western architecture. If we see architecture as art, it needs a reflection of the specific regional culture and human survival wisdom.” Perhaps no major new building better reflects a regional-cultural approach than Zhu Pei’s internationally acclaimed Imperial Kiln Museum in Jingdezhen, Jiangxi province, which comfortably fits into the ancient street pattern and rich historic urban fabric around it. The city, known as China’s porcelain capital , has a 1,000-year tradition of brick kilns, which is echoed in the Imperial Kilm Museum’s materiality and shapes. Calm, long vaulted concrete arches are surfaced with bricks, including old kiln bricks. As Zhu explains, this continues the “tradition of reusing old wooden frames and materials to build new buildings; ‘the use of the useless’, an ancient Chinese philosophy”. He asserts that the “most intelligent ways to save energy and protect the natural environment” are to reuse and recycle. To move cities forward, Zhu says, “we need an intelligent, sustainable urban model to react to the challenges of global climate change and rupture of regional culture”. That regional culture is key to the work of Luo, previously director at the China New Rural Planning and Design Institute’s Sustainable Village Studio. “When I was rooted in rural villages in China in 2005, I start gaining inspiration from the local wisdom found in rural architecture built without architects,” he says. Such architecture had intrinsic sustainability long before the word was coined, and its influence is evident in LUO Studio’s recent “natural architecture” works in villages. For example, the new, award-winning Nature Book House (also called Nature Library) in Zheshui, Shanxi province, is a glazed wooden structure built against a rock face, with raw, natural stones providing seating. Local villagers were part of the construction crew. Luo says that “with joint efforts from multiple stakeholders, some villages have become more dynamic and young people are returning”. Both Zhu and Luo have visited Hong Kong before and are full of praise for its vibrancy and culture, although Luo admits he does “find that it is a bit too packed”. For BODW they offer the city vital messages for shaping the human habitat, and they have not just regional but global relevance. Any “global design reset” must take them on board, because, to use Zhu’s expression, they carry “human survival wisdom”. “Creative Placemaking of the World”, live-streamed on Viu, 9.25pm-10pm on December 2, includes speakers Zhu Pei and Robert Greenwood, of Snohetta. Luo Yujie is a panellist alongside architects Li Xiaodong and Liu Jiakun, in the session “Inside China: Evolution of Community in Place”, live-streamed on viuTV in Mandarin (with simultaneous English interpretation), 2pm-2.45pm, on December 4. For details visit 2021.bodw.com