Ancient city protection and urban renewal development in QI county: Selected examples

Abstract

Shanxi Province, in northern China, is rich in cultural heritage resources, because it was, historically, an important section of the ancient tea road. Many of its heritage towns have been meticulously protected. However, there exist some small historical towns whose precious heritages have not been protected and adaptively reused due to the local government’s shortage of funds and technical resources. With respect to this situation, international cooperation is an effective way to solve such problems. “Demonstration Project in Ancient City Protection and Urban Renewal Development in Qi County” is a representative example of such projects. The Qi County government is collaborating with the French Development Agency to undertake this project to embrace the Qi County ancient city as a source for regional sustainable development. This paper discusses the historical evolution of this ancient city, the local features of its cultural heritage, the orientation of its development and the integration of its regional resources, etc. Three example projects have been analysed in this paper. The first is the protection and restoration of the “Qujia Courtyard”. The second is the renewal of the “Cross Street”, which encompasses the commercial streets in the centre of the ancient town. The third example is the “Changyuan River National Wetland Park”, which is an important natural landscape in the Qi County region. Moreover, this paper focuses on how the local government uses the loans and technical support provided by the French Development Agency. The two sides solve a series of problems in the process of this demonstration project, such as concept conflict, positioning deviation and design accuracy. They finally achieve sustainability not only in the domain of heritage protection, restoration and adaptive reuse but also in urban public space transformation. Finally, this paper proposes a method for heritage protection with cultural localisation, value localisation, protection localisation and management localisation. Furthermore, it analyses the advantages which can result from international cooperation mode in the protection and inheritance of cultural heritage and natural heritage.