Research On The Form And Evolution Of Urban Public Space In Guangzhou (1759~1949)

Generally, urban public space is the study object of urban design. Being different from normal urban space, urban public space characterizes publicity and presents certain cultural feature with complex spirit of place for its form. Thereby, the normal understanding about it must be based on special cultural environmental situation. Besides, the morphological research on urban space includes synchronic and diachronic aspects. All these above reasons make us take the urban public space of a particular city during a particular period as a case not only to study its historic form but to seek to draw some further conclusions about its existence and evolution process.Guangzhou city has a history of more than 2000 years, during which world trade was always the motive force of urban development. The trade policy of"unique trading port"beginning from 1759 resulted in the rapid expansion of urban public space to a larger area of Xiguan to the west of Guangzhou. The public space form of Guangzhou showed a typical characteristic of Lingnan area and its evolution process represented the change of Chinese society from 1759 to 1949, a 190-year history, which was the social cultural transition period. On the base of understanding the concept and connotation of urban public space, the methods of history, typology and structure are used to study the form of urban public space and its evolution process in Guangzhou. The urban public space here is recognized as a structure interrelated by several inner parts. Paying more attention to the spiritual meaning of the physical space and the feature of Chinese traditional city, connecting the local geological features of Guangzhou, the urban public space is categorized as natural hill and river, overall form, commercial street and space along river, etc. The building, space and block is analysed typologically. The research mainly includes the description and analysis of macro and micro, two-dimension and three-dimension form, which is the structure of Guangzhou urban public space, in order to reduce the real historic situation of the urban public space and the true meaning of it to the life of that time. And then, stressing the relationship between evolution and social cultural thought, the political and economic condition, the progressive evolution of urban public space of Guangzhou city is comprehensively studied and the profound cultural meaning and inner decisive factors of space form in transition time is revealed. At last, the historical formal feature and evolutional rule was sumerized as a conclusion. The formal description, typological analyses and profound meaning of public space was the creative idea, which lay a foundation for the further research on urban design.