| Residential Historic District is the kind of cultural heritage that takes the place of residents’ daily life as its main body.Its value as a cultural heritage not only comes from the rich tangible and intangible historical and cultural elements,but also roots in the long-term accumulation and combination of both elements,which together constitute the spatial structure and place spirit of the cultural identity of local society.However,under the rapid socio-economic progress,cultural commodification wave,as well as the generally gentrified urban development strategy of contemporary era,most residential historic districts are becoming less and less suitable for citizens’ daily life.Even those districts that avoided large-scale material renewal are still trapped in a vicious cycle,which usually started with physical decay and the loss of some original residents,followed by the invasion of tourism commerce and the shrinking of living space,and finally a continued draining away of local population.Exploring the main cause,traditional conservation planning takes spacial intervention as its main means,while the provision of social development policies to deal with the rise and fall cycles of living heritage are in serious shortage.Facing such a vast number of dilapidated old dwellings and the aged and poor population,it is impossible to reverse the overall declining trend of local society only by the “external inputs” of limited conservation funds.How to provide necessary supports for the restoration and reinforcement of the “internal hematopoietic” ability of local society,by virtue of the construction of heritage management and standard system in a social perspective for conservation intervention,is a subject that needs to be carried out urgently for the safeguarding of residential historic districts in China.Draw on the social investigation,analysis and exploration of the internal law of local society development of 10 comprehensive cases,the methodology of Social Impact Assessment(SIA)was introduced and modified in order to support the safeguarding of Chinese residential historic districts.Meanwhile,an in-depth case study was conducted to testify the efficiency of this assessment system.This not only concerns the “monitoring,analyzing and management”of the social impacts during planning implementation,but also covers the regular indicator monitoring and management of social development.Finally,by building a “full life-cycle”safeguarding mechanism for local society,it is expected to reconstruct a long-term reciprocity mechanism among social development,heritage conservation,and economic growth,with the attempt to achieve a comprehensive and sustainable development of residential historic districts.To be more specific:(1)In the section of theoretical research: Firstly,the theories of social space was introduced to extract the five major elements of the place for residents’ daily life,including“population,house,facility,industry and relationship”.Secondly,the typological character of each element was studied,while the evolutional law of them were also explored on the basis on relative life-cycle theories.Finally,under the background of social and economic development in eastern China,a “four-period” life-cycle theory was proposed.Also,the general life course was described,and a “socio-spacial” life-cycle evolution model was built concerning its character as an opening and small human habitat system.(2)In the section of system construction: Firstly,the investigation of social problems in10 cases,the design of social sustainable development targets,both problem-led & targetoriented conservation strategies,and the external constraint conditions for social development in a protected area have been combined together to create the “SIA Framework” that is constructed in “conservation intervention & social results”.Secondly,based on the experiences of existing SIA indicators,the application of planning terminologies,and the investigation of local residents’ needs,we designed the “SIA Indicator Matrix”,“SIA Indicator Summary Table”and the “SIA Indicator Detailed Table”.They respectively correspondent to the “examination once a year,evaluation every five years”,and a “checklist” for planning implementation evaluation;Finally,the general procedure of SIA was combined with the general process of conservation planning,along with detailed contents for each assessment step,and the participants and mechanisms of SIA for residential historic districts conservation were analyzed.In the meantime,a full range of literature review on applicable methodologies was conducted,which came out with a full list of SIA technologies for the conservation of Chinese residential historic districts.Additionally,based on the discussion about the value orientation of different group of methods,the fundamental methods of “scenario planning” and “cost-benefit” analysis were selected to be modified to satisfy the practical need of Chinese conservation planning.(3)In the section of empirical study,the above constructed system of SIA has been applied to the case of Pingjiang Historic Conservation Area,in terms of pre-implementation “Scheme Evaluation” and post-implementation “Performance Evaluation”.Firstly,in Scheme Evaluation,the research subject has been focused on the impacts of different facility layout schemes and tourists’ pedestrian traffic on neighborhood calming,in the background of tourism development.To be more specific,we applied the scenario planning method,big data crawling,GIS and an Agent-based simulation software,to simulate the facility layout and through traffic of alternatives,in order to assist the selection of an optimal scheme.Also,it was suggested to take planning measures of activity zoning,cultural interaction and traffic calming strategies through spacial design.Secondly,in Performance Evaluation,the research subject has been focused on the impacts of historic conservation on residential mobility.To be more specific,the research framework divided into “relocation behavior” and “relocation desire” was applied,the methods of qualitative analysis,indicator assessment and multi-variate regression analysis were integrally used to explore the decisive factors of residents’ relocation behavior and the prominent factors of residents’ relocation desire.Then,the “cost” and “benefits” of local government and residents were analyzed,with the conclusion that local residents have lost their“opportunity cost” to improve their living conditions rapidly through market-led urban reneal mechanism.In the end,the life-cycle theory has been used again to discuss the causes of losing house repair motivation,the blocking of population and capital element flow,the solidication of path dependence,due to the long existing institutional barrier of property rights.To solve these problems,it was proposed to introduce new housing property rights policy,to evacuate overcrowded population while attracting relatively advantaged social group,as well as a specific action plan,implementation policies and design scheme based on the delineation of“renewal units”.(4)In the section of conclusion and prospect: Firstly,the comprehensive social effects of Chinese residential historic districts’ conservation was summarized,and the internal and external mechanisms of the happening of major social impacts,as well as the social development strategies to solve these social problems.Secondly,the innovation points of this dissertation includes: exploring the social spatial elements and life cycle laws of them in residential historic districts;constructing a special SIA system for Chinese residential historic districts conservation;and applying this SIA system to the Scheme Evaluation and Performance Evaluation of typical cases,in order to prove the validity of this methodological system.In the end,it was proposed to fill in more research objects,to improve the technical methods and to broaden the research contents,while to conduct a follow-up study on typical cases,with the attempt to complete in-depth case studies on the basis of both cross-sectional researches and diachronic researches. |
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