This paper presents project-based research focusing on regeneration for sustainable tourism in a rural village in China, namely Dongjingyu Village, Yuyang Township, Ji County. The research by design approach was applied, introducing to the Chinese context the concept of landscape services, with a particular focus on tradition and the evolution of historical landscape element (HLE) categories and types, whose value is determined by a qualifying relationship between human beings and the environment. The aim was to regenerate and transform the village for uses that are suitable to contemporary ways of coexistence between villagers and the growing tourism industry. Although there are partial limitations to the application of participatory methodologies in the Chinese context, the authors opted for a methodological approach based on research by design in order to foster dialogue and create awareness for both government authorities and citizens regarding potential design solutions, which were determined based on landscape patterns and not only land use. Two outcomes were achieved: (1) the research working package might lead to experimental actions, including changes to land-use models, administration capabilities and considerations of feasibility; and (2) the entire work package can be applied to and implemented in other rural villages in China. Moving beyond environmental scenarios, the outcomes provide evidence that participation and social inclusion might have a deeper and more positive impact on rural village regeneration.

COVID-19 forced billions of people to restructure their daily lives and social habits. Several research projects have focused on social impacts, approaching the phenomenon on the basis of different issues and scales. This work studies the changes in social relations within the well-defined urban-territorial elements of co-housing communities. The peculiarity of this research lies in the essence of these communities, which base their existence on the spirit of sharing spaces and activities. As social distancing represented the only effective way to control the outbreak, the research studied how the rules of social distancing impacted these communities. For this reason, a questionnaire was sent to 60 communities asking them to highlight the changes that the emergency imposed on the members in their daily life and in the organization of common activities and spaces. A total of 147 responses were received and some relevant design considerations emerged: (1) the importance of feeling part of a “safe” community, with members who were known and deemed reliable, when facing a health emergency; and (2) the importance of open spaces to carry out shared activities. Overall, living in co-housing communities was evaluated as an “extremely positive circumstance” despite the fact that the emergency worsened socialization.

The paper presents further steps of study started by authors in recent years, as part of the widest international research collaboration, which focuses on shared life and regeneration of abandonment of rural settlements as strategies for the development of sustainable territories. This research aims to understand how the regeneration of ancient community buildings impacts on the sustainable development of the local context. To understand these effects, the research considered four traditional typologies of community buildings, from different cultures: Tulou (China), Cascina (Italy), Hacienda (Mexico), and Marae (New Zealand). Among the tens/hundreds of contemporary regeneration interventions, three contemporary projects per each of these typologies have been selected. To assess the territorial impact of the projects a new approach has been defined using Expert Interviews as the methodology, so as to be able to have an assessment directly by experts in the fields of regenerative projects and sustainable development. The Expert Interviews were held based on a questionnaire that assessed the effects of the projects. For the evaluation of the projects, two categories of indicators have been selected: (1) United Nations SDGs, (2) architectural regeneration indicators generated by the study “The Role of Cultural Heritage in Sustainable Development: Multidimensional Indicators as Decision-Making Tool”, by Francesca Nocca, published in Sustainability (2017, 9, 1882). The research outputs show how the urban-architectural regeneration of these historical typologies can be clearly associated with indications of sustainable development. The results also show that in all four cultures the regeneration of historic buildings provides many benefits to local communities by successfully mixing different income groups and the inclusion of marginalized or vulnerable groups.

This study is addressed to understand: (1) how the Chinese policies for tourism meet the international guidelines for sustainable development promoted by the United Nations, through the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and (2) how the Chinese policies for tourism are applied in reality by design practice. To answer these two research questions, the research considers mainly three groups of reference sources: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development; the Outline for National Tourism and Leisure 2013–2020 (ONTL) of the Chinese Government and their analyses from independent sources; the descriptions of architectural interventions for hospitality. According with the two research questions, the research is based on two phases: (1) a comparison between the Chinese policies for tourism development and the international policies for sustainable development; (2) a search of sustainable policies in the design practice, through the analysis of 30 projects for hospitality, realized in China after 2013. The results of both the phases propose a new paradigm in understanding China’s role as a country leading sustainable tourism for development.

Modeling and control theory applied to precision agriculture irrigation systems have been essential to reduce water consumption while growing healthy crops. Specifically, implementing closed-loop control irrigation based on soil moisture measurements is an effective approach for obtaining water savings in this resource-intensive activity. To enhance this strategy, the work presented in this paper proposed a new set of water management strategies for the case in which multiple irrigation areas share a single water supply source and compared them with heuristic approaches commonly used by farmers in practice. The proposed water allocation algorithms are based on techniques used in real-time computing, such as dynamic priority and feedback scheduling. Therefore, the multi-area irrigation system is presented as a resource allocation problem with availability constraints, where water consumption represents the main optimization parameter. The obtained results show that the data-driven water allocation strategies preserve the water savings for closed-loop control systems and avoid crop water stress due to the limited access to irrigation water.