The making of the Chinese urban landscape: Exploring a framework for analysis

Abstract

Despite sociopolitical changes, urban landscape heritage has traditionally been valued in Chinese society. However, in the past two to three decades, intensifying pressures for urban redevelopment have created major challenges to urban landscape management. While the management of urban landscape change has focused on landscape-based conservation techniques, urban landscape characterization and assessment, and urban landscape planning, its theoretical and practical foundations remain to be clarified. In connection with the epistemological orientations of landscape in both China and the outside world, this article proposes a new conceptual framework comprising a triad of structural-correlative, morphogenetic-generative, and integrated perspectives for the study and management of urban landscape heritage in China.