Study On The Built Environment Of Leizhou Peninsula’s Traditional Rural Settlements In View Of Sustainability

This research studied on 13 traditional rural settlements on Leizhou Peninsula in view of sustainability, which defined the characters of such settlements whilst explored its future of sustainble development. The planning principles, methods and supporing infrastructures are distilled, and strategies for their future sustainable development are proposed, which are all based on the understanding of these settlements’ history, evolution and reasons of changes.Through site survey, literature review of historic records and existing researh, and secondary data collection, this study summarises the built environment of Leizhou Peninsula’s traditional rural settlements as four levels: “Landscape space, human behaviour, artificial space, and social space”. The development and evolution of Leizhou Peninsula’s natural environment, culture and history are analysed on the above four levels and through both the time axis and space axis. This distilled the motivations of development and orderlines of evolution.On the time axis, the discussion focuses on the current situation, but with reflection of the past and the foresee of future. Through the detabe of population and land use, buidling form and functions, settlemetn cultural characters, health and wellbeing, energy and resources, the strength and weaknesses of Leizhou Peninsula’s traditional rural settlements are summarised quatitatively. Moreover, with the simulation of settlment scale and buidling forms by modelling tool, the physical characters of its landscape space and artificial space are explored, which both reveal the eco wisdom of ancient settlemetn design and problems faced by future development.On the space axis, the study scale the research objectives by individual settlement, settlement groups and region, and distract the settlments systems on the Peninsular as “spotflock-network”. The most important finding in this are is the concepts of “coexistence space” and ”appropriate scale”, which shared in the planning and construction of the settlements and still valuable to today and tomorrow’s devleopment. Finally, focusing on tackling the abandoned rural dwelling problems, the study exlpored the possible innovation and retrofitting strategies by modelling. It is proved that on the ‘spot’ scale, there are many possible and feasible strategeis which can promote positive changes.Based on all the above studies, this research made progress than existing ones on the understanding of the built environment of Leizhou Peninsula’s traditional rural settlements, and the distillation of traditional planning principles and methods, supporting infrastructions, rules of evolution in the past, population and land use. The qualitative and quantitative study methods to explore the settlements’ physical characters in view of sustainability fill in the blank of research on this topic. The research results not only point out the direction of future development, but also build up research capability of Lingnan Han Ethical group rural settlements’ future sustainble development. The digital simulation introduced in this research is a new research tool in this area, which enhance the value of this research in both academic and prectical area. The review and summary of the historic literature, maps, survey results, and local chronicles are systematic and thorough, which enrich this research’s historic value, and build up a solid fundation for further study on this topic.