Locality and Adaptability of the Built Environment
The artificial built environment is in a complex adaptive system, which interacts with the natural environment and forms local characteristics and regional differences, namely, locality. Globalization has severely weakened locality. How to maintain and develop locality is a difficult problem and a persistent hot topic in the background of urbanization, which is related to the retention of memories and even national cultural security. Man and nature are parts of the living community, of which the built environment is an organic component. At present, the research on locality in the built environment mainly focuses on the spatial form of individual buildings and towns. Thus, it is necessary to explore the mechanism behind locality from a more holistic spatial-temporal perspective to achieve the sustainable development of the living community.
As for “sustainable cities and communities”, there is a need to find a balance between the built environment and the natural ecological environment, and to regard the two as the components of “the living community” that interact with each other. Based on the premise of improving the efficiency of resource utilization and protecting the ecological environment, the livable, entrepreneur-able and tourist-friendly living environment should be created. At the regional scale, active links among the economic, social and environmental systems should be established between cities and between urban and rural areas to achieve integrated urban and rural development; At the urban scale, we should enhance the city's capability to withstand disasters, build safe and barrier-free public spaces, improve transportation and service systems, and create environment with distinctive regional and cultural features. At the architectural scale, it is necessary to build healthy, green, energy-efficient houses that are climate-resilient, in order to reduce per-capita negative environmental impacts, and build human settlements planning and management systems with participatory and emergency mechanisms.
Based on the “man-nature” living community, I have been exploring “the locality and adaptation in urban and rural human settlements in response to environment” and the sustainable development of “human-land” system from the perspective of multi-scale and long temporal sequence for many years. Focuses are as follow:
(1) Scale effect of locality: extending the focus from architecture and site to urban and rural areas and regions, extracting the nature-human coupling relationship of built environment, and conducting systematic research on local urban and rural landscape as an overall phenomenon to cope with social transformation, climate change and other practical challenges;
(2) Types and features of locality: focusing on urban and rural diverse development and cultural memory inheritance, revealing the stability and adaptability of urban and rural ecosystems, and summarizing their types and models, so as to explain the evolution process and dynamic mechanism of urban and rural landscapes, and to cope with the realistic dilemmas such as the phenomenon of the similarity of thousands cities and the loss of urban and rural memory;
(3) Evolution pattern of locality: confronting the landscape fragmentation and future environmental risks, generalizing the evolution model of built environment and constructing the optimization prediction model, proposing the built environment optimization and development strategy, reconstructing the locality within the “human-land” relationship and the social ecology and urban system, exploring and optimizing the regional urban and rural landscape pattern, and promoting the urban-rural dynamic development.
Under the theme of “Urbanization and Localization”, I have published seven books in Springer Nature. (1) Following the interest of the natural and cultural adaptation of Architecture, I visited 103 “Geo-Architecture” in various provinces of China for 8 years, and completed the 4-volume Geo-Architecture and Landscape in China's Geographic and Historic Context Series. (2) Focusing on the contradictions of “human-land” relationship at different stages of urbanization in China and Germany, studying environmental response patterns of local landscape and exploring solutions and measures, I published Urbanization and Locality: Strengthening Identity and Sustainability by Site-Specific Planning and Design with Prof. Martin Prominski at Leibniz University Hannover; then, aiming at the issues of water environment and water resources in the process of urbanization, we published Water-Related Urbanization and Locality: Protecting, Planning and Designing Urban Water Environments in a Sustainable Way, to explore sustainable design strategies rooted in natural and cultural environments. (3) Discussing the preservation of urban memory in the context of social changes, taking the old city of Beijing as the research object, I published a monograph named Beijing Urban Memory: Historic buildings and Historic areas, central axes and city walls.
In the future, based on the complex adaptive system, the built environment should be regarded as a dynamic balancing process driven by the social and economic system and constantly affected by natural resources, and environmental adaptability should be discussed from the following aspects: (1) Exploring the response mode and tactics of the built environment. Based on the overall characteristics of the locality, providing a structured understanding of the adaptability of the built environment in the process of evolution, exploring the law of urban development, and predicting its development trend. (2) Exploring the technology of built environment pattern analysis and optimization. Breaking through the conventional linear method, realizing the systematic and dynamic analysis of the evolution of built environment on the technical level, establishing the interactive evolution network, and making quantitative measurement and evaluation. (3) Exploring the locality urban planning mode. Setting different policy scenarios and nature scenarios, calculating social, economic and cultural parameters under corresponding constraints, conducting dynamic simulation and testing with ecological data and artificial construction factors, and proposing classification, zoning and step-by-step reference for the sustainable development of cities and human settlements.
Biography : Fang Wang
Dr. Fang Wang, Ph.D., is a Professor at the College of Architecture and Landscape, Peking University, the Chinese director of the NSFC-DFG Sino-German Cooperation Group on Urbanization and Locality (UAL), a registered urban planner, and an Associate Editor of Indoor and Built Environment.
