Urban Identity Crisis And The Self-organized Mechanism Of Urban Architectural Scene

Urban identity is a highly concerned topic in recent years. This dissertation examines the convergency of urban architectural scene on the basis of globalization, with broad reference to the achievements of contemporary Sociology, Economics, System Science, Self-organization Theory and the relevant urban researches. The author proposes that the systematic reason of urban identity crisis is a set of self-organized mechanism based on urban construction system driven by real estate market. Thereon, a case study of Beijing is carried on to analyse the dynamics of this mechanism. Introducing the Self-Organized Criticality theory, the existence of self-organized mechanism is testified. The dynamics within this mechanism is described as interaction of commercial operation, public thinking and information media. Furthermore, the author gives some strategic advises correspond to the shortages detected in the actual macroscopical mechanism.The dissertation consists of three parts. The first part analyses the picture of urban identity crisis. After clarifying some basic concepts, the author points out that urban identity is being demolished by polynary convergency trend in the current global network society. The second part argues that the essence of this global culture crisis is a process of informational entropy decrease in exchange with structural entropy increase. The author supposes that self-organized mechanism counteracting the entropy increase trend might exist within urban systems, and proposes two possibilities of the mechanism. The third part examines one of the two possibilities by a case study. The existence of such mechanism in urban construction system driven by real estate is proved. The mechanism is a "double-edged sword". When dynamics inside the system is off balance as now, it causes global polynary convergency; but if the localizing factors can be strengthened in the dynamics, it should be possible to achieve integrity of urban architectural scene via the same mechanism, thus benefits urban identity. This requires urban planning and administrative departments to take the function of consummating the macroscopical mechanism and piloting the market.