Double Surge: Political Mobilisation, Landscape Consumption, and the Slippage of Rural Life Part 2 Dissertation 2026 Hongji Zhu Central Saint Martins, UAL | UK Double Surge critically examines rural spatial production in post-growth China, asking what happens when economic growth has lost credibility yet continues to operate as policy language, capital desire and architectural imagery. Set in Sima Village near Lushan Xihai in Jiangxi Province, the title refers both to the romanticised lake landscape and to two converging surges: land-policy restructuring and tourism-oriented capital investment.The thesis conceptualises these forces as Factory Logic and Theatre Logic. Factory Logic organises space through efficiency, discipline, extraction and auditable production; Theatre Logic operates through image-making, display, landscape consumption and a viewable rural imaginary. These overlapping regimes turn the countryside into a field of production and a stage for consumer desire.Through critical policy analysis, archival reconstruction, walking-based fieldwork, interviews, photography, typological classification and autobiographical narration, the thesis traces how development discourses reshape land, water, housing, infrastructure and everyday life. By attending obscured rural experience, embodied memory and affective knowledge, it turns against technocratic growth narratives and proposes alternative ethics and epistemology for spatial practice.The thesis proposes a counter-cartographic practice: reclassifying residual spaces, water systems, everyday labour and undervalued material cultures as latent resources for maintenance, care and collective use. It transforms what is dismissed as failure, disorder, or ugliness into evidence of life’s persistence. In doing so, Double Surge recasts the architect as a 'spatial forager': recognising what sustains life, recording everyday practices and mediating conditions from which livable rural futures may be assembled after growth’s myth recedes. Tutor(s) Thomas Dyckhoff