The Anchoring-layering Theory: For A Better Understanding And Conservation Of Historic Urban Landscape

It has already become a common sense for people in the recent years that a healthyhistoric city should be one with vitality, which suggests that physical changes areinevitable, and vitality is never limited to the tangible dimension. Affected by thecurrent background and ideological trend, three new concepts have come into being inthe World Cultural Heritage system since the publication of “Vienna Memorandum” inMay,2005, and these three are “Historic Urban Landscape”,“Urban Heritage” and“Setting”, sharing the same emphasis on integrity and dynamics, and have aroused quitea few international academic discussions. Framed by Historic Urban Landscape, thethree concepts are complementary to each other, and to certain extent have shifted theparadigm of understanding a historic city in a more integrated and dynamic way.However, although it helps to understand the current situation better, it still lacks thecapability of helping to understand how the current situation became like this. Thus, fora better quality of human environment, and guided by the epistemology of both TheThird Typology and Interpretive Anthropology, this paper introduces a new theoryabout historic cities, based on the “landmark-anonymous urban fabric” model which iscommonly used in city studies, and from the perspective of cultural heritageconservation. This “Anchoring-Layering” theory considers that “Urban Anchors” and“Layering Spaces” are the subjects of a historic city, and they have“Anchoring-Layering Effects” as mutual forces to each other, which contribute to thecircular and similar growing of space, forming today’s historic city. This new theory isfor a better understanding and conservation of the Historic Urban Landscape. The vagueword “Historic Urban Landscape” is also redefined as: An organism, with UrbanAnchors following certain time hierarchy and space structure as bones, and LayeringSpaces going through all different layering patterns till today as fleshes, always inchange for the reason of the mutual Anchoring-Layering Effects.During the construction of the Layering-Anchoring Theory, this paper usesmethods of literature research, field survey, typology, comparative study andsystematical analysis, to explain the meanings of Urban Anchors, LayeringSpaces, and the mutual Anchoring-Layering Effects. There has been some certain objective law in the history that one Historic Urban Landscape hasgrown to become what we experience today. This paper has taken the city ofCardiff in the United Kingdom as a main case study to point out that theAnchoring-Layering Effects can be divided into three phases, and that most ofthe historic cities today have stepped into the third phase, in which “settings”have become the most focused spaces of conflicts during this “reverseoverlapping under the urban regeneration background” situation. As theconservation systems in China concerning urban heritages and their settingshave been thoroughly studied, it is clear that although there are quite a fewconcepts under the setting scale conservation system, they have weak controlsand are not systematic. Using the UK`s related policies and laws for reference, itis suggested that more forces should be involved in the establishment of thesettings management system, to guarantee the Historic Urban Landscape acontinuous benignant change in the persistent Anchoring-Layering Effects infuture.