Innovative strategy in planning for the historic city of Luoyang, China

Abstract

Nowadays, in China, many cities are developing with new towns constructed in their periphery area. They build traditional style buildings after removing real heritage to preserve its historic cities. While adopting this mode may lead to the deprivation of urban vitality and disintegration of traditional urban form, this paper highlights the south area of Luoyang historic city as an example to find a sustainable renewal method. It first studies the evolution process of historic city and finds the mechanism that the change of city's core function drives the change of urban form and vitality. It shows that historic cities should continue to take up their vital important functions to achieve sustainability. It then introduces the current top-down way of urban renewal in China by comparing different examples of historic cities. It concludes that it is sustainable to consider the urban developing background and integrate its renewal into the overall strategy of urban development by showing the traditional bottom-up method of urban renewal in Luoyang. Next, it introduces a value mechanism (includes space quality, culture quality and social quality) to classify and illustrate the current situation. According to the research, the paper proposes a strategy that the urban renewal work should be based on the basic unit of residential courtyard, which comes from the traditional way of self-construction work that has existed in the past thousands of years in Luoyang. It hopes to acquire a social-economic benefit in conservation and renovation work.