Inheritance And Transition

As an important historical remain in Suzhou city,Guanqian Street,a famous and prosperous commercial pedestrian street,represents variety and toleration of Suzhou city's cultures.Its characteristic spatial arrangement and commercial environment are important components of Suzhou city's cultural landscape.With the development of urban,especially the three-phase reconstruction project from 1999 to 2003,Guanqian Street have made significant progress forward and taken on huge changes.How will these changes influence the urban pattern of the ancient city in Suzhou?Will they cut off the missing of the old Guanqian Street and bring about elimination of urban characteristics?All these questions lead to a deeper question.What is the right attitude we must adopt towards a traditional and historical street during the current social transformation and how can we inherit and develop the fine traditions?The faster urban develops,the more urgent it is to consider such question.Suzhou has a history of several thousand years and is the first batch of the famous historical and cultural cities.Comparing with other cities,Suzhou is earlier to protect cultural heritages and preserving work is relatively better.Guanqian City is the representative and traditional street in Suzhou.With the renovations of the city,Guanqian Street has taken on huge changes.These renovations offer a typical case when studying inheritance and development of cultural heritages.This paper investigates and studies Guanqian Pedestrian Street from perspectives of spatial structure pattern,scale characteristic,public environment features,external form and layout of architecture,and explores the changes taking place on basis of traditional pedestrian streets,the linkage between changes and traditional cultures,the formation of new cultural vogue.Finally,this paper summarizes some experiences and rules to instruct how to preserve and renew traditional historical pedestrian streets under current conditions.Based on the above analysis this paper points out that the reconstruction of traditional pedestrian streets must be a living renovation to extend the theory of urban organic renewal,which means not only making the new environment accord with the trend of future development,but also keeping the flesh-and-blood ties with tradition. For the comprehensive fields involving historical pedestrian streets,this paper concentrates on illustrating the commercial environment from the angle of spatial pattern design and little about management and administration,which are the directions of further research.