The Urban Heritage As The Urban Design

The urban planning of our days includes two elemental parts: the comprehension of history, incarnating in the conservation of urban heritage; and the guidance of the future, which is materialized by urban design. This thesis illustrates the case of Rennes in France, a city reputed in its annals of urban planning, which begins from the reconstruction after the big city fire in the XVIII century, and then the Reconstruction after war, until the new adjustments in the works of urban design and conservation of urban heritage after the oil crisis. Its evolution shows the cooperation, friction, integration of the two systems of urban heritage conservation and urban design in France.The present thesis pays especial attention to the administrative system of urban planning in the last half of XX century; researcher estimates that these two parallel systems which originally belong to different departments, though they have efficaciously accelerated the Reconstruction post-war, they were also the responsibles for the grand dissolution in the last century.The research focuses on the Projet Urbain 2015 in Rennes and its pre-studies, which give many advices to the urban planning progress both in France and in China, mostly on the respect of the context, revaluate the urban heritage and the solidarization of the whole city's material environment.The study gives some proposals and reminds both the French and the Chinese researchers to promote the combination of the conservation of urban heritage and the urban design, for the challenge of the sustainable development of our cities. It also gives a abstract of the Projet Urbain in France, a hybrid of the urban strategy and the urban design "a la francaise".