Morphological Transformation of Historic City Center in Modernization based on Map Archive – Case Study of Hangzhou

Abstract

Historic city center is the place that preserves cultural heritage, collective memory, and local identity of the city. While in the process of modernization, many of them have been remodeled and reshaped irrevocably under the impact of western culture, with reference to morphological structures. It is quite difficult to recognize the original spatial pattern at present, which brings difficulty to urban regeneration. As a guide to this process, historical map archive could provide key information about the city’s past appearance and its evolution process. Aiming at the evolution of Hangzhou's old city from the late Qing dynasty to the early Republic of China (1840–1935), this research adopts historical map archive analysis assisted by interpretation from historical records, to display morphological transformation of historic city center in different epochs in detail. From a broader perspective, it focuses on the ‘phenomenon’ and ‘ideology’ in the modernization of Hangzhou, probing deeply into the mechanism of spatial change which remedies the blind area of event-oriented research in traditional modernization study. In the aspect of urban morphology, the paper embeds the method of diachronic study into the typological approach to investigate the evolution rules of different kinds of urban morphological elements in overall and regional scale. Findings in this research would reevaluate the impact of the early modernization of Hangzhou in terms of new morphological identities which would provide guidance or amendments for contemporary urban regeneration and heritage preservation.