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This chapter investigates the intricate relationship between traditional Chinese town forms and modern urban development, highlighting the pressures of urban renewal and tourism on historic settlements. It critiques the prevailing approaches to preservation and development, which often overlook the complex historical layers and cultural significance of traditional urban fabrics. The chapter presents a roundtable discussion featuring leading academics who share their methodologies and case studies, focusing on the morphological characteristics and typological invariants of Chinese towns. Key topics include the role of building types in shaping urban form, the concept of relative authenticity in heritage evaluation, and the importance of interpreting the latent structures within urban landscapes. The discussion underscores the need for a co-evolutionary approach to urban development, one that respects historical continuity while addressing contemporary needs. Through detailed analyses of towns like Fenghuang and Changting, the chapter illustrates how understanding the genealogical aspects of urban form can inform sustainable and culturally sensitive urban design strategies. The insights shared by the panelists offer a rich tapestry of ideas, challenging conventional wisdom and paving the way for innovative approaches to preserving and regenerating traditional Chinese towns.
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Abstract
This round table aims at the conceptual exploration of theories, tools and case studies for a comparative reading of Chinese Traditional Town Forms, focussing on how to interpret Chinese morphology and to view the relationship between Chinese traditional town forms and its building types. The main question of research epistemology and methodology is the contact point between analysis and design.
9.1 Introduction
China urbanization process is coming into a period of urban renewal, while traditional towns and villages are now threatened by the new processes of development and tourism consumption turning from the city to the countryside, creating pressure for settlements’ change. New development is generally indifferent to existing natural and cultural landscapes, erasing every topographical and morphological sign, while preservation is mostly focused on the reconstruction of the “original” and ideal types, insensitive to historical palimpsests and to the urban value of built heritage.
While the study of Chinese urban form has achieved prominence in recent decades, still little accurate, systematic and comparative fieldwork has been undertaken. Besides, most studies reflect a weak tradition of “reading” the built landscape in its syntactic and semantic relations among “built facts” and by ordering and interrelating the superposition of different historic traces, whether they configure a homogeneous accomplished town form or more often a composite broken one.
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This round table aims at the conceptual exploration of theories, tools and case studies for a comparative reading of Chinese Traditional Town Forms, focussing on how to interpret the morphology and how to view the relationship between Chinese traditional town forms and its building types.
The main question of research epistemology and methodology is the contact point between analysis and design.
9.2 The Round Table: The Gene of Chinese Urban Form and Its Implications for the Urban Project
Wowo Ding invited first Professor Zhao to share his views and Professor Pezzetti to share her reading methods, so as to support them with her research project on Changting as an evidence.
Chen Zhao (Nanjing University)
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Chen Zhao underlined that Chinese architects have approached the challenges of rapid urban development through Western theories. Reinterpreting architectural history and heritage through China’s traditions, Chinese tectonic culture is represented by “Tumu/Yingzao (土木/营造)”, a light and low-tech construction system above the ground, which entailed continuous reconstruction.
As “Chinese civilization did not lodge its history in buildings”, the logic of historical reconstruction of ancient Chinese towns followed either reconstruction in a different location, or overlaying and expanding on the original site.
Official or public buildings were reconstructed more frequently compared to the residential fabric that has now become a significant cultural heritage for Chinese traditional cities. The historical and traditional scales of geographic elements, street networks, housing quarters, and the boundary of land ownership (地界) should be recognised as the key formal element of the traditional urban fabric.
Therefore, the issues of architectural history and heritage in modern China remain to be fully discerned as the Western construction and academic systems were imported, altering the tradition of building and urban form and developing from cities with rapid urbanization eventually to the countryside.
However, this change is still going on, the contemporary construction system has completely merged with International and Western systems and the tradition of cities continuous reconstruction has to be terminated (Zhao 2007). Most architectural heritage nowadays is a hybrid cultural phenomenon so we need to consider a Relative Authenticity for the evaluation of architectural history and heritage in China (Fig. 9.1).
Fig. 9.1
Nanjing South Town, analysis of urban fabric plots
Laura A. Pezzetti emphasised that the authenticity of historic sites should not be confined to the integrity of “original” built structures but should also encompass a framework for evaluating their coevolutionary layering. Sites contain also imprints, fragile traces, crop marks, hidden substrata, fragments, incongruous alterations and significant debris. Signs that signify the “intelligence” of Built Facts and traces that hint to different times of towns.
Pezzetti highlighted the need of transforming analysis into interpretative reading and Interpretative Maps, advancing the concept of Latent Structure (Pezzetti 2019) to reveal both tangible and intangible meaning of Urban Form. Her research on Fenghuang Historic Town exemplifies three essential principles, which call for integrating conservation and regeneration:
1.
the combined structural and formal interaction between the geomorphology of the river meander and the form of the settlement;
2.
the biunivocal relationship between type and morphology where the Invariant courtyard type gave shape to an original radial Morphotype, extending the matou gable walls into walled vegetable gardens. In diachronic maps, the morphotype shades an architectural light to the “plot” and reveal diverse settlement forms, i.e morphotypes;
3.
the Latent Structure, that is, the triple relationship between type-morphotype-farmlandpatterns and provides the hidden matrix of urban form. This structure can be deciphered only through synchronic maps.
The Latent Structure also revealed the iconism of the “whole” urban form as Territorial Figure, transcending the mere aggregation process of plots and types. This architectural “mise en forme” even provides a describable urban form and topographical figure to the traditional principles of Feng Shui and Shan Shui. This figure expresses the triple relationship between the typological invariant, the morphotype and the topographical figure, offering a coherent matrix for any urban action (Figs. 9.2, 9.3, 9.4 and 9.5).
Fig. 9.2
Fenghuang (Shaanxi), correlation between urban structure and Feng Sui “mise en forme”
If Chinese sites begin to be understood as a tabula plena, design can no longer be considered as a self-referential colonisation of a void but rather a new writing on an existing text—often a composite one—that requires to be red, interpreted and consistently continued or instead critically transformed by thel act of design.
Wowo Ding (Nanjing University)
Wowo Ding supported Pezzetti’s methodology of reading the Chinese typo-morphology by applying it in a research on the courtyard house type in Changting, typical of western Fujian, with two to three courtyards for ordinary families, four to five courtyards for large families, and up to seven courtyards for a few large families.
The entire courtyard occupies the entire land boundary of the house, and only the front door of the courtyard is rarely indented, leaving a little space for the entrance to stay. The entrance has a beautiful gate as a symbol of the family and the compound are separated from the neighbouring compounds by a higher sidewall. The front gates of residential compounds generally spread along both sides of the main street, usually with an alleyway between every 5 and 6 compounds, which serves as a link between the main streets.
As the characteristics of this building type influence the town form and its structure, Ding assumed the building type as a key to read the morphological characteristics of the town (Ding 2021). For instance, the gable wall of the courtyard building clearly reflects the property plot of the building site, and the sizes of the block depended on the number of courtyard composition (Fig. 9.6).
Pezzetti gave the floor to Professors Han and Li to discuss case studies and interpretations.
Dongqing Han (Southeast University)
Han Dongqing discussed critically plot and plot pattern as one of the important concepts in the typo-morphological study, and relevant transformation links between city and architecture. As the basic unit of urban form structure and the dominant expression of property right, the plot has the dual attributes of physical space and social economy.
In the conservation and regeneration of Xiaoxihu Historic Area, the research and application of these dual attributes have played an important role. In response to the complexity of physical space and property rights relationship, a “property typological map” was developed to graphically present and record the ownership of each plot, building and even room as well as the owner’s willingness, so as to adjust the planning scheme dynamically (Han 2022). Besides, a two-level planning management and control system was finally established, and the micro-regeneration guidelines of 127 units were prepared as the basic management tool for “small-scale and progressive” dynamic regeneration (Figs. 9.7, 9.8, 9.9 and 9.10).
However, although the property boundary of plots was clearly defined in the planning stage, the used boundary was flexibly adjusted in the architectural design. In the case of Xu’s Family Self-renewal, the plot plays a relatively strong key role in the conservation and control of the overall urban form, while in the cases of Blossom Hill Hotel and Integrated Control Centre, the final built form clearly exceeded planning expectations. Han concluded that the constraints of the plot are important and effective, but cannot determine the design mechanically and rigidly.
Li Bao reflected that in urban studies the typo-morphological approach may have two different (maybe opposite) “souls”: the taxonomic soul and the dynamic soul. According to the idea of type as a classificatory tool born in Western World, the morphologic thought is useful to put in order objects and create families based on analogies, similarities, vocations.
According to Bao, the taxonomic soul has a synchronic point of view on reality: all the special and ordinary buildings, the urban spaces, the adopted design solutions are in front of our eyes at the same time, without any idea of development or degeneration. On the contrary, the dynamic soul follows the timeline of a diachronic point of view which focuses more on the process (either development’s or degeneration’s processes). The order of things and its structure, in one word the reciprocal positions of urban object in morphological hierarchy, is obviously relevant, but what is mostly important is the continuous changes of that structure in time, the restless metamorphosis of urban objects and spaces, in the essential interplay of tradition and innovation.
In order to read and understand (and even in order to design) contemporary urban spaces and neighborhoods, a new paradigm of “transitional morphologies” upon spatial–temporal approach can become really fruitful in the context of fast developing countries like China, where the urban form is less subject to permanence and fast changing, with an uncertain hierarchy of spaces and buildings (Trisciuoglio and Bao 2019). Through it, the traditional instruments of typo-morphological analysis can be applied to the Chinese cities in their past and present formal consistency, even trying to figure out their future (Figs. 9.11, 9.12 and 9.13).
Fig. 9.11
Urban Project on Hehua Tang Traditional Block, Nanjing
(Source Bao L., group work by SEU-PoliTo Joint Design Studio, 2021)
Finally, Marco Maretto joined the final round table discussion reconnecting to an idea of typological continuity between the historic and the contemporary city.
Marco Maretto (Parma University)
Marco Maretto recalled the concept of Typo-morphological Heritage in urban design, allowing a “structural” and “non-formalist” approach to the project, respecting history in the awareness of contemporary needs. He assumed that this concept goes beyond material evidence by placing the historical-morphological stratification of the Anthropocene in direct contact with the project of the contemporary city.
“Typological Congruence” and “Typological Preservation” are linked to it and contribute to the definition of that pattern, as result of a certain number of diachronic layers, on which any urban design strategy can be set.
In the broader concept of the City, there is no conceptual difference between the historic and the contemporary city.
9.3 Conclusions
By sharing a first archive of the historic towns surveyed, investigated and decoded by the panellists, the discussion enlightened the gene of Chinese Traditional Town Form, stressing its constitutive laws and potential in the perspective of co-evolutionary and culturally sustainable development. The integration of historic-structural studies and typo-morphological research on Chinese Towns promises to shed light on the wider significance of concepts and methods developed in Western schools while, symmetrically, contributing to stir new interpretative concepts for Western contexts as well.
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Ding W (2021) Morphology and typology: a village as a cultural and environmental process. In: Oliveira V (ed) Morphological research in planning, urban design and architecture. Springer, pp 117–139
Han D (2022) ‘Plot’ in the conservation and regeneration of xiaoxihu historic area. In: Urban redevelopment and revitalisation: a multidisciplinary perspective. In: XXIX international seminar on urban form ISUF2022
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Trisciuoglio M, Bao L (2019) Transitional morphologies. A joint research unit between China and Italy. In: Charalambous N, Camiz A, Geddes I (eds) Cities as assemblage. Proceedings of the XXVI international seminar on urban form, vol 1. Tab Edizioni, Rome, pp. 191–202
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