The Rural Reinvention.
Sofia Leoni is an architect, urbanist, and researcher whose work has developed through a long engagement with China and its rapidly changing territories. Moving between architecture, urban studies, teaching, and curatorial practice, she is particularly interested in how emerging technologies reshape space, labour, and everyday life.
She holds a PhD in Urban and Regional Development from Politecnico di Torino, where she is a fellow of the China Room research group, and is currently a researcher at the GBA Lab at Shenzhen University. She studied architecture at Politecnico di Torino and Tsinghua University and has taught urbanism in both Turin and Shenzhen. Her work has also contributed to the 2022 Shenzhen Biennale, the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale, and the 2025 Nantou Cyber City exhibition. She was a visiting scholar at Shenzhen University in 2024 and a research fellow at Brown University in 2025.
Her doctoral research followed the transformations produced by Alibaba’s Rural Taobao initiative, exploring how digital platforms, logistics, and household production are reinventing rural China. More broadly, her research asks how technology changes the ways people work, inhabit space, and imagine their futures, from platform economies to the growing influence of artificial intelligence.
Her relationship with China extends beyond academic research. In Shenzhen, she collaborates with Making in Nantou, a grassroots regeneration initiative bringing together local villagers and students in Nantou Ancient City, where she usually lives during her stays in China. She is also fascinated by the meeting of architecture with utopian and science fiction imaginaries, especially cyberpunk aesthetics and videogame world building, and by the ways these fictional worlds influence how contemporary cities and possible futures are understood.
What happens when online commerce transforms a village without turning it into a city? The Rural Reinvention explores Taobao Villages, rural settlements in China where houses, courtyards, streets, and agricultural land are being reorganized through e commerce, domestic production, and logistics. Based on extended fieldwork, the project examines how digital platforms enter everyday spaces and turn homes into workshops, warehouses, studios, and distribution points.
These transformations are often described as evidence of expanding urbanization. This project proposes a different reading. Rather than disappearing, the rural is being actively reconstructed through new relations among digital technologies, household labour, collective land, local institutions, and logistical networks. The village becomes a hybrid infrastructure in which dwelling, care, production, and circulation coexist.
Through visual research, territorial mappings, photographs, drawings, interviews, and spatial narratives, The Rural Reinvention makes visible a geography largely absent from dominant accounts of contemporary China. It asks how architecture can document forms of change that emerge without masterplans, professional designers, or conventional construction projects.
The project aims to develop an adaptable platform for exhibitions, publications, workshops, films, and public conversations. By bringing rural China into dialogue with European territories facing depopulation, economic transition, and digital restructuring, it opens a broader question: how might overlooked rural spaces become laboratories for imagining different spatial futures?