Bottleneck of Chinese Ancient Capitals Landscape Conservation and Way out: a case study of Xi'an, an ancient capital with 3100 years history

Ref.: 277
Domaine thématique: 03 Intégrité visuelle des paysages urbains historiques
Date de réception: 16/11/2008

AUTEURS (*Auteur principal)

YAN, Zhao * (Chine) - Xi´an University of Architecture & Technology

RÉSUMÉ

China is an ancient Eastern country with 5000 years' history. Chinese civilization influenced the whole Asia and even other parts of the world. As the essence of 5000 years culture and history, Chinese historic urban landscapes represent the highest achievement of philosophy, art, ritual system, geography, ecology, topography, architecture etc (Nianhai Shi 1989), and hence have outstanding universal value.
In the history of Chinese civilization, although there are nearly 100 ancient capitals (Shuqian Jiao 1996), in which Xi'an was praised as one of the four ancient capitals in the world juxtaposing Rome, Cairo and Athens. Unfortunately, however, almost all the historic capitals are facing a fact that the old city centers and historic architectures are demolished in some extent due to inevitable causes being responsible for damages in aspects of "historical values" (Zuqun Zhang, Wenliang Qun 2005), "usage of traditional building structures and materials" and "social background of urban expansion with covering-style development" (Wei Chen 2006), respectively. It seems that the construction entity matching the outstanding value in the history of those cities is still not found out, so there is a bottleneck for conservation and self-value representation of those historic cities.
This paper reveals that the bottleneck probably comes from incomplete recognition of the Chinese ancient capitals landscape system. To explore such a system, three levels should be considered, which are macro-background level associating with ecology, geography, philosophy etc; mid-level of structure and layout relating to ritual system, topography, view system etc; and micro-level of construction of city block fabric, architecture relationship etc. The first two aspects are the fundament and framework of a city. And all of the three perspectives together form the core value of ancient capitals landscape. Nevertheless, the first two levels are very often ignored or given up for some reasons.
For further illustration, a case study of Xi'an, the Chinese historic city which experienced 3100 years' urban development and has a 1200 years' history as a capital city, is introduced in this paper with the system formation of its historic urban landscape and review of development experiences described. In terms of this example, it is point out that though the micro-level of Xi'an city was destroyed to a certain extent, the macro-background and mid-level structure of the city are still full of vitality based on its rich connotation and therefore survives after thousands years changes, which could bring both opportunities and challenges to this city.
According to all the analyses, the author believes that in addition to ensuring the safety of relics at micro-level, another urgent and feasible approach is to protect ecology safety, geography integrity, and philosophy presentation etc at macro-background level; to protect structure integrity, ritual system representation, topography utility and view system etc at mid-level; and to evaluate the core values of ancient capital cities from three aspects as a whole; which means the complete conservation of historic ancient capitals landscapes could only be ensured as a result of a sound conservation framework taking all the three levels into account. Moreover, suggestions are proposed considering conservation framework, urban planning control, and interdisciplinary cooperation etc.

BIBLIOGRAPHIE