A Study On The Urban Forms And Their Morphological Mechanisms Of The Small Business Along Streets

In contemporary Chinese cities, it is a common and interesting phenomenon that small business spontaneously thrives along streets. The morphology of small business system typically represents one of the practice logic in the production of urban space, that is the bottom-up or spontaneous spatial logic. This system provides an ideal sample to explore this kind of spontaneous urban phenomena.The spontaneous everyday phenomena have become a research topic in urban research field recently. Some researchers focused on the informality of these phenomena from a sociology perspective. Others supported by the everyday theories from Henri Lefebvre and Michel de Certeau, explore the topic from a social critical view. Researches from architecture discipline, more concern about the formal aesthetics, which are affected by the'vernacular architecture' academic tradition, and are more manifestos than analyses. Different from above, a material and objective perspective is chosen in this research which always focuses on the question about physical forms and their morphological mechanisms, how microscale emerges as macroscale. This basic question was used to be neglected compared with the aesthetic, ideology or sociology issues. This research would endeavor to contribute to the question, so as to make a reliable foundation for the profound issues such as aesthetics, ideology and et al.The research question of this paper is the physical forms and their morphological mechanisms of small business system, which is constituted by 3 related questions and parts.Firstly, the distribution form of small business in the cities is unknown yet. The classical central places theory is hard to match the reality of the system. Surveys and mappings on the reality are made in this paper to presents the distribution forms of small business which is called as 'the macro-form'in this paper. Through this work, a new knowledge about the macro-form of the system is founded.The second question is about the mechanism of the macro-form, how could the micro emerges as the macro spontaneously? This paper apples the systematic modeling technique to study the morphological mechanism of the system and then validates it. The model we built describes the bottom-up mechanism of the system explicitly, and demonstrates that the appearance of the macro-form is not aroused by the so-called invisible God hand, or the sum of individual parts, but the emergence based on the local inter-behaviors. Because of the feedback mechanism, the form of the system is not static, but a dynamic one, which would adapt itself to changes. The theoretical model also shows the explicit connections between some morphological qualities and certain environment factors, which would hardly be identified in the real world, and discloses the evolutional dynamics lurking in the mechanism of the system. As a theory on the morphological mechanism of small business system, the theoretical model not only describes the mechanism of normative states, but also uncovers the potentially evolutionary relationship between small business and large-scale commercial centers, despite the apparently morphological difference between them.Changing research scale form macro to micro and local, the third part is about an extended issue, which focuses on the expression of the macro-forms:the morphological characters and mechanisms of the commercial facades, and its connection with the macro-scale. In this part, the factors and mechanisms affect the forms of facades are disclosed, and a connection is built between the macro-forms and its micro-expressions. Compared with the second part, the mechanisms of commercial facades are less formalized, and are described qualitatively. However, they are validated in a positive way.As the summary and conclusion of the above researches, the overall bottom-up practice logic of small business system is proposed based on a synthetic analysis from macro-to micro-scales in the last chapter. The synthesis manifests that the bottom-up logic is not a one-dimension logic which is from local to global, but one emerging in the time. It originates from individual parts which exist in micro and local level and gradually gather into an agglomeration with global meanings, and then turns from up to down with global meanings affecting local parts, and then recycles with feedback. With this feedback logic, the whole is able to adapt to changes from environment and itself, at the same time, new meaning and content is becoming. It is the charm of the spontaneous phenomena that giving birth to 'new'. The logic of becoming new is precisely the logic of emergence.The study on the morphological mechanisms of spontaneous urban forms in this paper, on the one hand, would be meaningful to the governance to this kind of phenomena, and on the other hand, stimulate critical thinking to the main stream top-down practice. That would be the practical meaning of this research.