A Study On The Urban Texture And Its Renovation

Urban renewal is a double-edged sword which brings brand-new urban features andlead to a modern city life, while it tears traditional urban space into pieces, fragmentsurban context, wears away collective memory, and withers urban texture as a result. Thespeed of urban construction is getter faster and the destruction of urban texture with itsdeep-seated social problems are drawing more and more attention, since war trauma topost-war reconstruction and finally the30-years development after Reform and Openingin China.In contemporary cities, it is hard for us to feel the traditional human scale personallywith asphalt road and concrete jungle flooding our living space. Though remained urbanhistorical texture is controlled in the form of historical cultural districts or historicareas, fragmented texture environment can hardly extend the original spatial characters ofcities. The traditional texture symbols such as quadrangles in Beijing, Shikumen inShanghai, Li-fen in Wuhan and courtyards of the Shanxi merchants are gradually dyingaway in our daily life and becoming urban cultural luxuries sitting far away in purple linedrawn by the departments of cultural relics, which can be only seen rather thantouched. Urban texture is drowning in the shadow of skyscrapers and great mansionsand hardly into view.Based on fundamental study of texture and combining historical cultural preservationwork, this article systematically combs out the development of related theories of urbantexture. Texture is no longer a simple planar figure-ground relationship, but the externalappearance of continued movement of city--a complicated system. And the formation andevolvement of texture is a combined result of both natural process and social-culturalfactors. The preservation of urban texture is beneficial for extending urban cultural carrieras well as forming correct attitude when dealing with urban historical culture, and it is anembodiment of urban feature characters and urban memory, thus it is a vital mission with along way to go.This article takes the texture preservation and renovation project of NanhuamenHistorical Cultural District as an example, combines theory with practice, systematicallystates the formation and evolvement of urban texture and consummates technical methodsin urban texture renovation. It also brings forward pertinent analyzes and methodsconcerned with renovation work of Nanhuamen district from a practical point of view, andthese analyzes and methods can be popularized in other historical cultural districts’planning projects in China.