Integrated Examination of Urban Form: Historicity and Socio-economic Vibrancy

This chapter presents the selected Chinese city—Nanjing as a case study to demonstrate the integrated methodological framework to evaluate the character and strength of urban form in terms of its historicity and spatial potentials for generating socio-economic vibrancy. The historical quarter of Nanjing—Old Chengnan District is mainly focused on. Through combining the analytical results of landscape units and spatial potentials, this framework is able to identify not only which parts of landscape units exhibit both distinguished historic character and good spatial potential that have comparative advantage for conservation, and which parts confront deteriorated historical expressiveness and poor spatial potential that may need physical improvement for future redevelopment. In addition, it could also provide an understanding of how different landscape units are spatially and socially connected, and how changes to one may affect another. This integrated framework provides a finer-grain and cross-scale evaluation of landscape units, which has implications for the management of historical urban landscape in view of what to change and what to maintain.