3. URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND REHABILITATION IN
XI’AN
Xi’an has a history of more than 3,000 years as a city and had
functioned as China’s capital(Since the Zhou dynasty (1046 B.C.-771 B.C.). The inner city of Xi’an,
also called Xi’an Walled City, is located inside contemporary city of
Xi’an where the former city of Han Chang’an and Tang Chang’an once
stood in Han dynasty (202 B.C.- 220 ) and Tang Dynasty (618-907))
and it was the announced on the first batch list of “National
Historical and Cultural City”(NHCC) in 1982, indeed because of it’s
numerous historical milieus in the city. Even a city with such
historical context has experienced extensive and fast constructions and
demolitions. Along with infrastructure development, real estate and
housing has been the growth generating sector in China after the land
and national housing reforms in the mid-1980s\cite{Wang_1999}. (Fig.5) We must noted that for an historical city
center, it not only the monuments that make the city historical, but
among of all, the residential architecture is apparently the decisive
factor for the urban morphology and fabric. Italian scholar Alvise
Cornaro said: ”Venice is not only composed of great monuments, it
is a myriad of housing and residential architectures which make the city
of Venice.” The spatial typology and distribution in the historical
center determines the urban fabric of the old city core, which needs to
be carefully and thoroughly studied. As Peter Row writes: There are
three important issues in the contemporary modernize and rehabilitation
inner city\cite{Heikkila_2001}\cite{Liangyong_1991}First, the adequate provision of dwellings for urban inhabitants is no
longer simply a matter of housing but, rather, of the much more
complicated task of community development and ultimately of building
coherent, useful, and pleasant pieces of a city in which to live, work
and play. Second, the manners in which older parts of well-established
cities are to be regarded as being either more or less useful in their
present state. Today, in most part of the world, it is clear that
traditional urban patterns of settlement are to be valued not only for
their strict historical significance, but also for their aura. Last,
there is what types of urban strategy to employ within a broad
rehabilitation project. It’s urgent to develop reliable strategies to
guide city regeneration especially the rehabilitation of the residential
housing projects which has most impact on the urban fabric. As Wu
Liangyong asserts, “Compared with public buildings, I’m more concerned
with dwellings because human habitation is the core of architecture.”
Unfortunately, we didn’t have the chance to apply these ideas.
Property-led regeneration in the early 1990s which was driven by the
economic profits has dominated the urban development in Xi’an after the
economical boom period. Many low-rise, densely populated inner city
neighborhoods have been transformed into high-rise residential, or
collective homogeneous compounds with standard design code in
Xi’an.(Fig.4)