Download or read book Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing written by Liangyong Wu and published by UBC Press. This book was released on 2011-11-01 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seventy years of revolution and turmoil have had a severe impact on the miraculous ancient urban form of Beijing, but economic growth since the early 1990s has threatened to deal the coup de grace. In Rehabilitating the Old City of Beijing, Wu Liangyong presents an impassioned plea to turn the tide of demolition and offers a new direction for the planning and development of China's capital. His project for the renewal of the Ju'er Hutong (Chrysanthemum Lane) neighbourhood in the heart of Beijing's Old City takes pride of place in this book. A thoughtful analysis of those aspects of the ancient capital's features, which the project aims to respect and conserve, is followed by a detailed account of the design and development process of the project itself.
Download or read book Courtyard Housing and Cultural Sustainability written by Donia Zhang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-13 with total page 396 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cultural sustainability is a very important aspect of the overall sustainability framework and is regarded as the fourth pillar alongside the other three: environmental, economic, and social sustainability. However, the concept is neither fully explored, nor widely accepted or recognized. This book elicits the interplay of nature-culture-architecture and theorizes the concept of cultural sustainability and culturally sustainable architecture. It identifies four key themes in Chinese philosophy: Harmony with Heaven, Harmony with Earth, Harmony with Humans, and Harmony with Self, along with Greek philosopher Aristotle’s physics: form, space, matter, and time, it sets them as criteria to evaluate the renewed and new courtyard housing projects constructed in China since the 1990s. Using an innovative architectural and social science approach, this book examines the political, economic, social, and spatial factors that affect cultural sustainability. Supported by a multiplicity of data including: field surveys, interviews with residents, architects, and planners, time diaries, drawings, photos, planning documents, observation notes, and real estate brochures, the book proposes new courtyard garden house design strategies that promote healthy communities and human care for one another, a concept that is universally applicable. The volume is a first opportunity to take a holistic view, to encompass eastern and western, tangible and intangible, cultures in the theorization of cultural sustainability and culturally sustainable architecture. It is a comprehensive contribution to architectural theory.
Download or read book China s Literary and Cultural Scenes at the Turn of the 21st Century written by Jie Lu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-18 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s literary and cultural production at the turn of the twenty-first century is marked by heterogeneity, plurality, and diversity. Given its complexity, the literary/cultural production of this period perhaps can be understood most productively as a response to a global modernity that has touched and transformed all aspects of contemporary Chinese reality. The eleven essays in this book offer an introduction to some of the most important works published at the turn of the twenty-first century. In combining textual analysis of specific works with theoretical insights, and in locating the texts in their sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts, the essays explore key theoretical issues and intellectual concerns of the time. They collectively draw a broad contour of new developments, major trends, and radical changes, capturing the intellectual and cultural Zeitgeist of the age. All in all, these essays offer new theoretical approaches to, and critical perspectives on, contemporary Chinese literature and culture.
Download or read book Urban Intensities written by Peter G. Rowe and published by Birkhäuser. This book was released on 2014-08-20 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Diversity and density in housing today Accomodation of diversity and the creation of urban density are a focus of world-wide building and planning activities today. This book combines the architectural and urban scales to demonstrate that it is a specific quality, urban intensity, which determines the success of housing. The authors provide a typology of housing according to the ways in which diversity and density are created. Comparisons with historical models and critical appraisals based on the authors’ unique standing give ample information on the pros and cons of major types of housing, their pitfalls and successful examples. Newly created sets of drawings, from floor plans to spectacular 3D aerial views of the buildings in their urban contexts, accompany each of the more than twenty case studies that are described and analyzed in detail. The approach taken here relates to many pressing issues in contemporary housing, including the avoidance of urban sprawl, the revival of city centers and the ongoing search for innovative housing types. A qualitative approach to diversity and density in housing A concept that unites architectural and urban design A wide range of original drawings of benchmark case studies
Download or read book Heritage Tourism and Cities in China written by Honggang Xu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-07-09 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China has surged into the 21st century as one of the most rapidly modernizing countries in the world. Its burgeoning cities reflect this extraordinary growth with a dazzling array of new architectural forms and designs. In its transformation, the 5000-year old heritage of its built civilization, embedded in its villages, towns and cities, has often been replaced. The Chinese Government, aware of the value of this heritage, has in recent years taken concrete steps to conserve and preserve not just national icons such as the Forbidden Palace in Beijing, the Great Wall of China and the Grey Goose Pagoda in Xian but also the more general historic fabric of its urban development over the centuries. The challenges are great, particularly as population growth and rural-urban drift have combined to place enormous pressure on city resources. The chapters in this book explore these challenges as well as analysing other institutional, cultural, social and economic issues related to urban heritage conservation and utilization, with a focus on the role of tourism in reinforcing conservation values by finding new uses for old buildings and districts. This book covers new areas of heritage tourism research in Chinese cities. The chapters were originally published in a special issue of the Journal of Heritage Tourism.
Download or read book The Concrete Dragon written by Thomas J. Campanella and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2012-03-20 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China is the most rapidly urbanizing nation in the world, with an urban population that may well reach one billion within a generation. Over the past 25 years, surging economic growth has propelled a construction boom unlike anything the world has ever seen, radically transforming both city and countryside in its wake. The speed and scale of China's urban revolution challenges nearly all our expectations about architecture, urbanism and city planning. China's ambition to be a major player on the global stage is written on the skylines of every major city. This is a nation on the rise, and it is building for the record books. China is now home to some of the world's tallest skyscrapers and biggest shopping malls; the longest bridges and largest airport; the most expansive theme parks and gated communities and even the world's largest skateboard park. And by 2020 China's national network of expressways will exceed in length even the American interstate highway system. China's construction industry, employing a workforce equal to the population of California, has been erecting billions of square feet of housing and office space every year. But such extensive development has also meant demolition on a scale unprecedented in the peacetime history of the world. Nearly all of Beijing's centuries-old cityscape has been bulldozed in recent years, and redevelopment in Shanghai has displaced more families than 30 years of urban renewal in the United States. China's cities are also rapidly sprawling across the landscape, churning precious farmland into a landscape of superblock housing estates and single-family subdivisions laced with highways and big-box malls. In a mere generation, China's cities have undergone a metamorphosis that took 150 years to complete in the United States. The Concrete Dragon: China's Urban Revolution and What it Means for the World sheds light on this extraordinary chapter in world urban history. The book surveys the driving forces behind the great Chinese building boom, traces the historical precedents and global flows of ideas and information that are fusing to create a bold new Chinese cityscape, and considers the social and environmental impacts of China's urban future. The Concrete Dragon provides a critical overview of contemporary Chinese urbanization in light of both China's past as well as earlier episodes of rapid urban development elsewhere in the world--especially that of the United States, a nation that itself once set global records for the speed and scale of its urban ambitions.
Download or read book Beijing Record A Physical And Political History Of Planning Modern Beijing written by Jun Wang and published by World Scientific. This book was released on 2011-01-03 with total page 537 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beijing Record, the result of ten years of research on the urban transformation of Beijing in the last fifty years, brings to an extended Western audience the inside story on the key decisions that led to Beijing's present urban fragmentation and its loss of memory and history in the form of bulldozing its architectural heritage. Wang's publication presents a survey of the main developments and government-level (both central and municipal) decisions, devoting a lot of attention to the 1950s and 1960s, when Beijing experienced a critical wave of transformative events.Shortly after its original Chinese bestseller edition was published by SDX joint Publishing Company House in October 2003, it ignited a firestorm of debate and discussion in a country where public interaction over such a sensitive subject rarely surfaces. The Chinese edition is in its 11th print run and was translated into Japanese in 2008. This newly-translated English version has the latest update on the author's findings in the area. As the only edition printed in full color with nearly 300 illustrations, the English version powerfully showcases the stunning architecture, culture, and history of China's Dynamic Capital, Beijing.Home to more than 15 million people, this ancient capital city — not surprisingly — has a controversial, complicated history of planning and politics, development and demolition. The publication raises a number of unsettling questions: Why have a valuable historical architectural heritage such as city ramparts, gateways, old temples, memorial archways and the urban fabric of hutongs (traditional alleyways) and siheyuan (courtyard houses) been visibly disappearing for decades? Why are so many houses being demolished at a time of economic growth? Is no one prepared to stand up for the preservation of the city?For his research, Wang went through innumerable archives, read diaries and collected an unprecedented quantity of data, accessing firsthand materials and unearthing photographs that clearly document the city's relentless, unprecedented physical makeover. In addition, he conducted more than 50 in-person interviews with officials, planners, scholars and other experts. Many illustrations are published here for the first time, compiled in the 1990s when archival public access was reformulated.
Download or read book Urban Paleontology written by Ming Tang and published by Universal-Publishers. This book was released on 2008 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than ten years ago, when I first read Mario Gandelsonas book The Urban Context, the beautiful abstract diagrams that the book presented -the street network of Chicago- fascinated me with the profound historical and cultural background that they suggested. Without knowing how this would direct me, I started to draw something related with the street network of Beijing. That is the beginning of this book. Among tons of the diagrams that I have created, most of them have not been incorporated into this book, while they have directed me into this fascinating research area which focuses on the "mineralized skeleton," rather than the "soft tissue" of urban forms. It was not until the recent five years when Yang and I came across some theories and approaches in paleontology that we started to integrate them into the street network study in Beijing and Savannah. Paleontology methods lay the foundation and provide a systematic and scientific platform for our research. Then urban paleontology, as a new framework for urban form study, unfolds itself more and more apparently in front of us. It explores the evolution of "urban species" based on their remains- "urban fossils," which describe distinct urban forms with imprints of their street networks. Just as how a biological fossil serves as a factual documentation of certain life forms, an urban fossil provides clues of the existence and transformation of urban forms. The study of urban paleontology inevitably directs us to further exploration in the fields of biology, anatomy, archeology, geology, and the application of computer aided design in the excavation of urban sites. Upon finishing this book, we realize that our work is too inadequate to possibly incorporate all the influence that other disciplines may have on architecture and urban design. What it has suggested is that architecture presents such a wide array of connections with other disciplines and becomes more and more towards an interdisciplinary study. We hope this book has illustrated the diversity of problems that invite further study and can serve as a start point for architects to conceive the total spectrum. -Ming Tang"
Download or read book Rebuilding the City Image written by Dihua Yang and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Chang an Avenue and the Modernization of Chinese Architecture written by Shuishan Yu and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2013-01-23 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this interdisciplinary narrative, the never-ending "completion" of China's most important street offers a broad view of the relationship between art and ideology in modern China. Chang'an Avenue, named after China's ancient capital (whose name means "Eternal Peace"), is supremely symbolic. Running east-west through the centuries-old heart of Beijing, it intersects the powerful north-south axis that links the traditional centers of political and spiritual legitimacy (the imperial Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven). Among its best-known features are Tiananmen Square and the Great Hall of the People, as well as numerous other monuments and prominent political, cultural, financial, and travel-related institutions. Drawing on Chang'an Avenue's historic ties and modern transformations, this study explores the deep structure of the Chinese modernization project, providing both a big picture of Beijing's urban texture alteration and details in the design process of individual buildings. Political winds shift, architectural styles change, and technological innovations influence waves of demolition and reconstruction in this analysis of Chang'an Avenue's metamorphosis. During collective design processes, architects, urban planners, and politicians argue about form, function, and theory, and about Chinese vs. Western and traditional vs. modern style. Every decision is fraught with political significance, from the 1950s debate over whether Tiananmen Square should be open or partially closed; to the 1970s discussion of the proper location, scale, and design of the Mao Memorial/Mausoleum; to the more recent controversy over whether the egg-shaped National Theater, designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, is an affront to Chinese national pride. For more information: http://arthistorypi.org/books/chang-an
Download or read book China s Emerging Cities written by Fulong Wu and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-11-13 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With urbanism becoming the key driver of socio-economic change in China, this book provides much needed up-to-date material and covers key topics on Chinese urban development.
Download or read book Cross Cultural Design Interaction Design Across Cultures written by Pei-Luen Patrick Rau and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-16 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The four-volume set LNCS 13311 - 13314 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Cross-Cultural Design, CCD 2022, which was held as part of HCI International 2022 and took place virtually during June 26 - July 1, 2022. The papers included in the HCII-CCD volume set were organized in topical sections as follows: Part I: Cross-Cultural Interaction Design; Collaborative and Participatory Cross-Cultural Design; Cross-Cultural Differences and HCI; Aspects of Intercultural Design Part II: Cross-Cultural Learning, Training, and Education; Cross-Cultural Design in Arts and Music; Creative Industries and Cultural Heritage under a Cross-Cultural Perspective; Cross-Cultural Virtual Reality and Games Part III: Intercultural Business Communication; Intercultural Business Communication; HCI and the Global Social Change Imposed by COVID-19; Intercultural Design for Well-being and Inclusiveness Part IV: Cross-Cultural Product and Service Design; Cross-Cultural Mobility and Automotive UX Design; Design and Culture in Social Development and Digital Transformation of Cities and Urban Areas; Cross-Cultural Design in Intelligent Environments.
Download or read book Cities Surround The Countryside written by Robin Visser and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2010-04-12 with total page 375 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Denounced as parasitical under Chairman Mao and devalued by the norms of traditional Chinese ethics, the city now functions as a site of individual and collective identity in China. Cities envelop the countryside, not only geographically and demographically but also in terms of cultural impact. Robin Visser illuminates the cultural dynamics of three decades of radical urban development in China. Interpreting fiction, cinema, visual art, architecture, and urban design, she analyzes how the aesthetics of the urban environment have shaped the emotions and behavior of people and cultures, and how individual and collective images of and practices in the city have produced urban aesthetics. By relating the built environment to culture, Visser situates postsocialist Chinese urban aesthetics within local and global economic and intellectual trends. In the 1980s, writers, filmmakers, and artists began to probe the contradictions in China’s urbanization policies and rhetoric. Powerful neorealist fiction, cinema, documentaries, paintings, photographs, performances, and installations contrasted forms of glittering urban renewal with the government’s inattention to a livable urban infrastructure. Narratives and images depicting the melancholy urban subject came to illustrate ethical quandaries raised by urban life. Visser relates her analysis of this art to major transformations in urban planning under global neoliberalism, to the development of cultural studies in the Chinese academy, and to ways that specific cities, particularly Beijing and Shanghai, figure in the cultural imagination. Despite the environmental and cultural destruction caused by China’s neoliberal policies, Visser argues for the emergence of a new urban self-awareness, one that offers creative resolutions for the dilemmas of urbanism through new forms of intellectual engagement in society and nascent forms of civic governance.
Download or read book The Palgrave Handbook of Urban Ethnography written by Italo Pardo and published by Springer. This book was released on 2017-11-14 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These ethnographically-based studies of diverse urban experiences across the world present cutting edge research and stimulate an empirically-grounded theoretical reconceptualization. The essays identify ethnography as a powerful tool for making sense of life in our rapidly changing, complex cities. They stress the point that while there is no need to fetishize fieldwork—or to view it as an end in itself —its unique value cannot be overstated. These active, engaged researchers have produced essays that avoid abstractions and generalities while engaging with the analytical complexities of ethnographic evidence. Together, they prove the great value of knowledge produced by long-term fieldwork to mainstream academic debates and, more broadly, to society.
Download or read book Integrated Architecture written by Liangyong Wu and published by Edizioni Nuova Cultura. This book was released on 2013-12-01 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Integrated Architecture is both a historical and contemporary work. The book was fi rst published in 1989 by Wu Liangyong, one of contemporary China’s most infl uential architects and theoreticians with the title A General Theory on Architecture. His eminence is also recognised by the international architectural community, above all, the group of architectural and urban planning theoreticians battling for a more decisive reform to the concepts, methodologies and practices presiding over the construction and requalifi cation of the contemporary metropolis. I fi rst met professor Wu Liangyong in 2005 at the Faculty of Architecture at the Tsinghua University of Beijing; his Faculty. Wu Liangyong founded the school in 1949 – at the age of 24 – together with Liang Sicheng, the father of modern Chinese architectural studies. From this moment – more than sixty-seven years ago – professor Liangyong has remained a central fi gure in Beijing’s academic community. He remains a constant source of inspiration, not only national, to education reforms and, above all, theoretical, methodological and operative research into architecture, the city and the territory. He is a rare fi gure, present throughout a lengthy historical period witness the world over to tumultuous upheavals in society and its cities. A period whose most dramatic and exalting manifestations were perhaps to be found in China; a period of war, of hope, of revolutions, of great leaps forward, of presumptions, horrors, errors, new leaps forward and incomprehensible economic growth; of irreversible social and cultural metamorphoses and – what interests us most as architects – of staggering urban growth and territorial transformations. The intellect of this minute and genteel fi gure held fast against the storms of history. The observation of events and the humanist and scientifi c principles of his personal culture continuously nourished an increasingly more effective refl ection on the meaning of architecture in today’s world. He also clearly saw its inextricable ties to the substance of the city and the impossibility to substitute the fi gure of the architect – scientist, humanist and artist. A few years after our meeting, having absorbed direct lessons from Wu’s work as an architect and theoretician, I proposed an Italian translation of an anthology of his writings. The material was to be drawn from his many books and essays on architecture and the city published continuously over the course of his incomparable career. Professor Wu Liangyong responded with a challenge: in lieu of this anthology of texts he proposed a full translation, in Italian and English, of a book published twenty years ago: 1989’s A General Theory on Architecture. Given the pace of cultural debate it would not have been out of place to imagine a book fi rmly sedimented in history. I understood, instead, that it was a milestone in the expression of Wu Liangyong’s ideas; a benchmark that, in all likelihood, served as the starting point for his later theories, even the most recent. Published in other fundamental essays, they range across the vast fi eld of human settlements, touching on all components of the man-made environment (Lucio Valerio Barbera).
Download or read book Remaking China s Great Cities written by Samuel Y. Liang and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-25 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: China’s rapid urbanization has restructured the great socialist cities Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou into mega cities that embrace global capitalism. This book focuses on the urban transformations of these three cities: Beijing is the nation’s political and cultural capital; Shanghai is the economic and financial powerhouse; and Guangzhou is the capital of Guangdong Province and the regional center of south China. All are historical cities with rich imperial, colonial, and regional heritages, and all have been drastically transformed in the last six decades. This book examines the cities’ continuous urban legacies since 1949 in relation to state governance, economic reforms, and cultural production. By adopting local historical perspectives, it offers more nuanced accounts of the current urban change than the modernization/globalization paradigm and conceptualizes the change in the context of the cities’ socialist, colonial, and imperial legacies. Specifically, Samuel Y. Liang offers an overview of the urban planning and territorial expansion of the great cities since 1949; explores the production and consumption of urban housing, its spatial forms, media representations, and socio-political implications; and examines the state-led redevelopment of old urban cores and residential neighborhoods, and the urban conservation movement. Remaking China’s Great Cities will be of great interest to students and scholars working across a range of fields including Chinese studies, Chinese culture and society, urban studies and architecture.
Download or read book In the Images of Development written by Tridib Banerjee and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The urban legacy of the Global South since the colonial era and how sustainable development and environmental and social justice can be achieved. Remarkably little of the expansive literature on development and globalization considers actual urban form and the physical design of cities as outcomes of these phenomena. The development that has shaped historic transformations in urban form and urbanism—and the consequent human experiences—remains largely unexplored. In this book, Tridib Banerjee fills this void by linking the idea of development with those of urbanism, urban form, and urban design, focusing primarily on the contemporary cities in the developing world—the Global South—and their intrinsic prospects in city design. Further, he examines the endogenous possibilities for the future design of these cities that may address growing inequality and the environmental crisis. Banerjee deftly traces the urban legacy of the Global South from the beginning of the colonial era, closely examining the economic, political, and ideological forces that influenced colonial and postcolonial development, drawing from relevant experiences of different cities in the developing world and discussing the arguments for the historic parity of these cities with their Western counterparts. Finally, Banerjee considers essential notions of future city design that are grounded in the critical challenges of sustainable development, equity, environmental and social justice, and diversity, and how such outcomes can be achieved. This book serves as the opening of a long overdue conversation among design, development, and planning scholars and practitioners, and those interested in the urban development of the Global South.
