China

The Luoshan Community Service Centre is currently the only open style group house for elderly people in China, combining a service centre for youth with the service centre for elders. This creates an opportunity for the elders to communicate with people outside the house. The centre consists of four services: a Services Centre for the Elders, a Service Centre for Youth, a 999 Hotline and a Community Education Service Centre. It is run by the people of Luoshan community for themselves.

In China, society is changing rapidly and traditional administrative infrastructures are not easily adaptable to the needs of new communities. The Luoshan Community Service Centre works with a new type of community management, where people manage themselves, providing free or low cost services, and generating trust, responsibility and integration through community involvement. The centre is promoted by YMCA Shanghai (Shanghai Young Men's Christian Association), supported by street government but managed by people of the community themselves. The centre has been established for ten years and has had great success in guiding sustainable development in the social infrastructure through self-management and community involvement, and in shaping the direction of change for cities and communities.

Today, people in cities have more interest in rural life and slow food (although the Slow Food movement or philosophy is not known locally). With the industrialization of agriculture and environmental pollution, urban people are becoming more aware and eager to have more natural and healthy food. Since this is such a new trend, there are no related information platforms and no related credit system.

Ainonghui found farmers working with 'natural' agricultural produce (rice, vegetable and poultry), using traditional/local seeds and natural methods, and agreed on the bargaining of products and service. On the other side, they connected to urban people, activating their interest and getting them involved in the network for booking and buying the agricultural products and services. They have opened a showroom/store as a connection between suppliers and consumers. Community supporting agriculture will promote the sustainable agriculture, maintain species diversity  and decrease the passive influence on environment from modern agriculture such as chemical fertilizer. It promotes small-scale economy in the country, especially local agriculture trade and tourism to increase the income of farmers. It is a typical case of bottom-up system and self-management, where trust is recovered or sustained between farmers and urban people. The difficulty lies in the expansion of the network, since it will not be easy to sustain the trust links (in a larger network).

Ainonghui connects farmers, who prefer to farm in a traditional way, and communities who would like access to their products. It promotes sustainable agriculture and slow food, providing urban people with different and more healthy food, strengthening the social fabric, and increasing trust between people.

'The tree bury' is a new approach to funerals, where the issue of land use for cemetery plots is turned into an environmental benefit. It satisfies the need to provide a resting place for the deceased (and the families that have lost a beloved one) and at the same time, improves the existence of the living, through the environmental benefit of having a cemetery as a green park. The 'tree bury' proposes planting a tree as a form of both symbolic and actual burial, burying the ashes of the dead and planting a tree over it. The cemetery plot becomes a green park, helping both the environment and solving a social issue in an innovative way.

In China, land is at a premium and with an ageing population an increasing amount of land is used for burial every year. Tree bury is a social innovation to solve this problem of land shortage. It has been promoted in places like Peking, Tienjin, Shanghai, Nanking, Guangzhou, and is easy to promote since it is a symbolic way of continuing life. The tree is the symbol of the great universe. By spreading the ashes under a tree root, the person's life can continue in the tree, representing a 'return' to the great universe. 

Tree bury reduces the land use for graveyards and contributes to environmental regeneration with an increase in green park areas. It also avoids the increase of building related to graveyards (tombstone, towers, pavement, etc) and saves land for other purposes. With less spending on materials related to funeral and graveyard, (timber and stone materials), the expenses related to funeral and maintenance of graves (for the family and the state) is decreased, i.e. the tree bury costs between one tenth and one twentieth of the traditional graves maintenance.

The project has been supported and advertised by the government and has been receiving extremely positive feedbacks from society at large. It appears to have enormous potential for further development and spread.