"In response to these failures [of American modernization of agriculture], many experiments with smaller, slower, and more local agricultural production are currently underway. These alternative models of ecologically informed farming tend to focus on smaller-scale local producers working with interplanted crop mixtures and the rotation of livestock across the land. While these remain limited in scope compared to the dominant mode of agricultural production in the US, they hold profound potential in helping Chinese agriculture avoid the failures of the twentieth century. Toward that end, this publication presents an alternative model for agricultural modernization and new-town planning in China. This model is derived from a close reading of Chinese agricultural history and village life in support of the vital economic, environmental, and societal reforms currently underway. The project is informed by the extraordinary wealth of culinary diversity and heritage crops found across China, The most significant of these, the fifty most cherished and most vulnerable to loss, shape our proposal. Building upon the 'one town, one crop' model of economic integration, our proposal imagines fifty small-scale agricultural new-towns across China. Each of these towns is conceived in relation to a single, specific heritage crop and associated agroecological system deemed to be of great culinary and cultural value. The lived experience, landscape identity, and economic viability of each new-town are defined by the specific cultural meaning of these heritage crops. These crops also shape the spatial structure of the town's urban order and that of the surrounding agricultural landscape. This mode of the 'species-town' is deeply indebted to the innovative work of Dr. Kongjian Yu...".--P. ix-x.