Sustainable production of public space in small historic cities in China

Public space has been an essential part of Chinese cities in various types and forms throughout history. However, the turbulent 20th century has broken the long tradition of public space in urban China, bringing in new types, transforming existing types, and eliminating some old types. In contemporary Chinese cities, public spaces are facing problems, especially in small historic cities with valuable historic urban landscapes and typo-morphological characteristics but lacking sufficient funding and adequate professional design. They are more likely subject to damage by problematic public spaces. Now the production of public spaces in small historic cities is dominated by capital and policy powers. Capital power, especially the tourism capital, is over-exploiting such cities for more profit, and tends to reduce the unique historical characteristic to simple stylistic elements, without paying due attention to the real authentic historical urban morphology and identity. Policy power, on the other hand, is aggravating the situation by cooperating with capital power to produce large, “modernized”, and symbolic public spaces as city marketing tools, which are not always suited to the urban context and the residents’ real demand on public life. Such an unsustainable way of producing public spaces is sabotaging the unique historic urban landscape of these small historic cities while costing a huge amount of funding. This thesis intends to contribute to the effort of addressing these problems in the public spaces in small historic cities. The objective is to propose a possibility of reaching a balance among cultural heritage preservation, public life, and economic growth. The research started with an overview of the public spaces in the history of urban China, in order to figure out what inspirations they may offer to contemporary interventions, and lay a basic research framework for the following work. Then in the second phase, the research introduced the main case study, the city of Zhengding, and analyzed its typo-morphological characteristics both of the whole city and of the public spaces within the city. Next, the contemporary problems in public spaces in small historic cities were closely examined to find their causes and impacts so as to better tackle them. In the last part of the research, several principles and strategies were proposed as attempts to reach the balance mentioned above, by learning from the history and taking the city of Zhengding as the main case study.