A Study On Urban Toponymic Landscae

Macroscopicly, Chinese cities are losing their identity gradually. Development and renew lead city landscape to a homogenitation by duplicating similar modules of functional space, which erase original urban features from the earth.From a perspective of toponymic landscape, this study means to draw an new approach to the preservation of featured city cultural landscape, at the same time derive marrow of city from it. Toponymic landscape, a theory comes from toponymic-a branch of cultural geography, naturally associates with indigenous culture, and provides a convenience to systematic research by linguistic nature. This study extends the definition of toponymic landscape to a larger field, including characteristic of macroscopic city landscape related to placename, espect for its anthropologic content constrained by linguistic and historical region. New definition well applies to investigation to featured urban landscape scheme, connecting city culture and landscape feature.The study bases on a survey to Nanjing place name and urban landscape investigation. All place names in city region is categoried, evaluated, then compared to draw a picture of existing Nanjing toponymic landscape. With the help of tables and schemes, this study reinforces some sayings that widely accepted for long time and also get some new ideas. One half of Nanjing city landscape is featured by residential area, which have no clear local identiy or history. Mountain-river landscape and fort system characterize Nanjing by its long history and solid existence, as most people guesses; however they only occupy small area in city. As to retail toponymic landscape, which recalls many people’s memory when they were to destroyed in recent years, seen from a historical perspective, they have a growth cycle close to period people getting old. The nature pace it changes easily calls up the antipathy of people with the time. A sign of the existence of farmland, wasteland is detected in the study, which provides new path to urbanism strategy for future. Also study found toponymic landscape masses up in some area by the same age.Also by method of case study, innovation and development of toponymic landscape is speculated.