| As urbanization in china is growing fast, the public space of city is now impacting the society a lot and being broadly concerned. The quality of public space directly effects on not only daily life of people but also stabilization and development of the city. Then, what is the standard which evaluates the public space of a city? Christopher Alexander said in his 《A Pattern Language》: If the edge fails,then the space never becomes lively.Aristoteles also said that place just was edge to define the relationship of inside and outside. Nowadays, as city landscaping is highly produced in China, we find that, instead of giving full attention to edge space, many concepts or built projects are concentrated more on the site central. They have no further study on the relation between the site and surroundings and also the relations among elements within the site. Thus resulted in the inconvenience and confusion of use and hidden dangers of security. Therefore, quality of the edge space is one of the determinants to decide whether the space is successful or not. Beyond doubts, to study making use of and modeling the edge space of city landscaping, is very important and realistic.Instead of denying the positive meaning of other factors that impact the space, the article gives analysis, conclusions and summaries to edge space principle, edge theory of different fields, edge space of different scales, and different elements in the edge space, and treatments for landscape details in the points of environmental ethology, .landscaping ecology, psychology, urban design and art, and gets success on 3 aspects:1. It systemically introduces edge theory from all fields.2. It further analyses the importance and impacts of the edge space in city.3. It impersonally analyses and discusses the edge space by different scale, different element sorts on the basis of normal places in urban landscape, and forms general principle of edge space design. |
