Research On Physical Environment’s Adaptive Methods Of Urban Design In The Three Gorges Reservoir Area

The high-quality development of human settlements in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area is an important scientific and technological issue of urbanization process during the post Three Gorges period.As an effective technical tool to manage urban spatial form,improve physical environment’s quality and optimize human settlements’ landscape,urban design declares a special status and important role in reservoir’s construction.Meanwhile,compared with eastern plain area,the Three Gorges’ landform is quite complex and its ecological environment becomes fragile and sensitive,producing a kind of profound cultural and historical accumulation in regional surroundings.As a result,the human settlements conform to nature and continue to evolve in residents’ daily life,forming a regional model with harmonious coexistence between human and nature,which possesses high values of ecological,cultural and social development.However,in the process of Three Gorges’ special urbanization,constrained by limited land resources,analogous planning rules,outdated technologies and traditional social concepts,the urban design ignores the mountainous features and humanistic demands,alongwith lacking an integrated thinking of human settlements’ ecology,hommization and regionality.This situation has caused comprehensive serious problems such as spreading clusters,disorder structures and low-quality places.With field investigation,graphic analysis and quantitative evaluation,this paper puts forward current civic problems’ solutions according to the idea of physical environmental adaptation,which requires a breakthrough point of mountainous settlements’ behavioral selection model,to reveal the formation principles of physical environment in the Three Gorges.Furthermore,based on behaviors’ characteristics including destination-selecting,wayfinding and identity alongwith cognitive schemata of cluster,structure and place,the research discusses urban design’s adaptive methods in terms of physical environment.Then it uses adaptative mechanisms to derive the roadmap of “adaptation assessment-spatial types-design interventions” and deepens the explorations on cluster’s density,structural efficiency and place’s quality.With these efforts,it will form up the adaptative method framework and strategy context of urban design in Three Gorges Reservoir Area.(1)Demonstrating the core contradiction and its realistic representations of mountainous urban spaces in the Three Gorges and building the physical environmental adaptive urban design methods’ framework(the second and third chapters).On the basis of field investigation and planning materials’ analysis,the research orders the Three Gorges Reservior Area’s urban design’s development progress and theoretical contents,to reveal the relationship between its modernity and regionality.Consequentially the thesis points out that local design exploits the logic of abstract regionality to respond to the complex mountainous environment.This symbolized spatial model results in a contradiction between mountainous paradigm and humanistic value and it represents as a form of quality issue.Based on these analyses,the research is finally aware of the necessity and feasibility of physical environment and behaviors’ research under the comprehensive influence of complex mountainous environment and the settlement’s daily life.After that the research puts forward a selection model of mountainous settlements’ behaviors,and elaborates a logic context consisting of behavioral characteristics,cognition paragrams and constructing progress,to generate a basic understand of Three Gorges Reservior Area’s physical environment’s forming process.The core spatial cognitive behaviors conclude destination-selecting,wayfinding,identity and their concrete characteristics.More importantly,according to the adaptive research paradigm of “subject-object-process”,the urban design exploration expounds the spatial hierarchy of cluster,structure and place and adaptive dimensions of mountainous behaviors,which are coupled to organize adaptive mechanisms including cluster’s coordination,structure’s optimization and quality’s improvement,constructing the connotation and application model system of physical environmental adaptive urban design methods.(2)Exploring the cluster’s density coordination methods based on the site preference pattern(the forth chapter).According to the agglomeration and dispersion characteristics of cluster form of the Three Gorges Reservior Area’s cities,the paper promotes to coordinate the cluster pattern design and management through the idea of density.First of all,it takes the cluster’s adaptative mechanisms which consist of ecological pattern,natural landscape,location demands and open space perception as the foundation of evaluation system of cluster’s density adaptive index,while estimating the relationship between current and standard FAR by the application of GWR model.Secondly it recognizes the spatial characteristics and practical problems of urban density distribution in the Three Gorges Reservoir Area,confirming the correlation between mountain natural environment constraints and high-density construction model,and exploring the medium and high-rise building form’s high-quality adaptability in mountainous cluster composition.Thirdly,based on these researches,the paper constructs a cluster form design method named as “morphological deduction with density regulation”,which means the combining of main cluster pattern design and spatial elements’ auxiliary regulation.Simultaneously,the research extracts five kinds of cluster form’s types including homogeneous model,parallel model,intermixed model,etc.,to enrich the collection of forms and points out several regulatory methods such as protecting natural landscape,optimizing road net,mixing up public facilities with each other and so on,to improve the manage measures of urban cluster in the Three Gorges Reservior Area.(3)Analyzing the structure’s efficiency optimization methods based on mountainous wayfinding process(the fifth chapter).Considering the inferior adaptability of the mountainous organic form during the route distinguishing process,the paper points out the wayfinding problem’s presentations in the mountainous urban design,and utilizes wayfinding elements such as landmark,route and edge to build a structural semantic model which is labeled as LRE model.Meanwhile,the mechanisms of landmark’s anchorage,route’s connection and edges’ s restriction guide to build a structure’s wayfinding efficiency’s assessment system,judging the wayfinding performance and its distribution alongwith finding out the realistic problems of urban structure.The following cluster analysis and characteristics’ statistics discover that there exsists a dominant spatial sequence in an urban structure,which could coordinate the urban space and its wayfinding pattern in the form of structural semantic elements’ composition.Based on this conclusion,the essay points out the structural efficiency’s optimize and design methods which are defined as “spatial configuration and image enhancement”.It integrates wayfinding’s structure types planning and perceptual elements’ regulatory principles,and distills six dominant structural types including dispersed landmarks,aggregated nodes and organic sequence,etc.,with image enhancement approaches consist of buildings,streets,open spaces and waterfronts’ improving measures,to reveal the organic logic of the regional structure sequence of mountainous cities in the Three Gorges.(4)Advancing the place quality improving methods based on spatial identity(the sixth chapter).Focusing on the mountainous public spaces’ insufficient quality problem caused by the symbolized paradigm,the research makes a further exploration of the space adaptive mechanisms which contain mountainous multi-dimensional form,visual order,complex landscape elements and environmental quality.By the evaluation of quality index and its connection with real vitality distribution,this paper verifies the applicability of the place quality assessment model in the Three Gorges Reservior Area’s cities,explores their uniqueness in term of morphology and reveals the heterogeneity of place quality distribution,to form up the optimization ways of three dimensional public spaces which contain “place analysis and regulatory strategies”.The mountainous place types such as city axis,street,hillside building,plaza and stairway,are systematically summarized in term of space constitution,to develop the basic design methods of hillside places.At the same time,place regulation and optimization strategies,including characteristic spatial sequence’s construction,street quality’s improvement,composite architectural space,raising the diversity and environmental quality,are claimed to strengthen the spatial basis and strategy system of urban place design.In conclusion,the Three Gorges settlements’ “cluster-structure-place” form presents the unique adaptation to humanistic behaviors,and requires urban design to adopt environment-behavior adaptive design methods to guide the cities to overcome the limitations of abstract regionality and realize the high-quality human settlements’ vision by the integration of nature and humanistic life.These tentative researches on Three Gorges Reservior Area’s mountainous physical environment’s spatial composition,adaptation mechanisms,form types and design strategies,provide an array of operable urban design methods and integrated substantial ways for the construction of mountainous residential environment in the reservoir during the post Three Gorges period,and hopefully,it could be somehow helpful to supplement and expand the theoretical and practical value of Mountainous Human Settlements Sciences in the urban and rural construction of the Three Gorges Area.