Changing Urban Form, With Chinese Characteristics

摘要

Before reading this book, the broadly worded title led me to expect a comprehensive examination of the changes in China's urban form in the last half a century. To me, urban form refers primarily to the physical, morphological, visual and tangible aspects of a city's built environment which include, among other things, how city space is organized and defined in terms of paths, edges, districts and nodes which together would give one a sense of the whole, as suggested by Kevin Lynch nearly 50 years ago, and how the various physical elements in the cities, including buildings of different kinds, have come into being and undergone transformations in different time periods. But the content of the book is not so broad. Instead, author Duanfang Lu focuses on the evolution and changes of only three physical elements of the Chinese city: micro-districts, work units and walls. But while limited in scope, the book does address the important issues of China's quest for modernity in the socialist and Third World contexts and of China's perpetual resource scarcity which together, the author argues, have affected the formation of the three physical elements of the Chinese city.