Spacial Construction And Practice Of Everyday Life: Social Ecology And Its Change In The Inner City Of Hankou

Inner city is a distinct region of a city for its specific social ecology and significance, which has always been the very focus of western urban sociology studies. However, the academic circle in China has not attached enough importance to it. Not only in theory, but also in practice, what we know about the inner city is not adequate. Considering this situation, by carrying out a historical analysis and empirical investigation about Hualou Street—a famous one locating in the core district of the inner city of Hankou, this dissertation intends to explore and present the social ecology and its change of the inner city of Hankou during the process of modernization. Furthermore, it also provides a profound insight about the unique significance of inner city and the internal mechanism of its social transitions in Chinese circumstance.The dissertation builds a theoretical foundations on the concepts and theories of the sociology of space, while putting forward an analytical framework structured by "Time—Space—Everday life", which is applied to observe and to study the Hualou Street in the period of Qing Dynasty to nowadays from a micro perspective. On the one hand, the thesis tries to partly filling up the blank of inner city studies in China; on the other hand, it aims at theoretically questinging for a concrete and practical tactic of "Social Mutual-Construction", which is essential for us to inquire into how the practice of everyday life affects urban space.The dissertation comprises seven chapters and is divided into three sections. Section one (chapterⅠ) plays the role as an introduction that reviews the study of the inner city, spacial theory and everyday life. Moreover, the analytical framework, basic concepts, research method and inner logic of this thesis are also elucidated in this part.Section two, which is from chapterⅡto chapterⅥ, is the main body of the thesis. As a prelude to further detailed discussions, chapterⅡbriefly presents the emergence of the inner city of Hankou and the elementary spacial composition in its early stages.lt also summarizes the formation and historical development of Hualou Street as the object of research. Since that this study insists on the tight unity of the spatial methodology—space is defined as a triad composed of physical form, social utility and cognitive significance, chapterⅢto chapterⅥare arranged to expatiate every aspect of the practice of everyday life respectively according to this standpoint and its logical clue. Specifically speaking, chapterⅢ, corresponding to "Physical Space", discusses the spacial composition of the inner city, which is also the material base of the practice of everyday life. ChapterⅣandⅤ, corresponding to the "Utilizable Space" as a whole, analyzes and interprets the practice activities of everday life by inspecting social interactions happened in the inner city's neighborhoods as well as the way local people spend their leisure times in this area. ChapterⅥ, corresponding to "Cognitive Space", explores the perception and identity that the residences have from their spacial conditions and how space obtains its social significance in this process when we concern about everyday life experience of urban citizens. Therefore, based on the five chapters above, we could sketch the social ecology of the inner city of Hankou in silhouette.Section three (chapterⅦ) is the conclusion which sums up the key arguments of this paper. The study reaches main conclusions from the following two aspects. First, in terms of Chinese inner city, the research reveals the fact that the inner city of Hankou has been maintaining its prosperity and predominance in its own long-term history, manifesting that the western inference of "inner city recession" or "inner city revival" can't fully explain the reality of Chinese inner city's development. Moreover, the persistent prosperity of inner city is largely supported by the variety of everyday life given by the history and culture of its own. Therefore, its significance of inhabitation as well as the role in maintaining the history and culture is also considered as one of the greatest value owned by a paticular urban area; second, with regard to the relationship between spacial construction and the practice of everyday life, this research educes that the latter is not simply passively restrained by the former. The face is, it is able to breakthrough the limitation of spacial construction from different levels and multi-dimensions, and reshapes the spacial constructure in a flexible and positive way. Again, it is proven to be an indispensable force to motivate the development and social change in urban zones.