A Research On Urban Morphological Transformation Of Lanzhou In Modern Times

In a context of today’s rapid urbanization, in order to achieve a model of intensive internal reconstruction and a balanced external space, a vast number of cities’traditional structure have been replaced by modern geometric roads. And the main historical scenes are filled with large numbers of pseudo antiques. More and more cities present a phenomenon of "Thousands of city side". Due to the lack of a systematic thinking of own historical culture, and being inexperienced in holistic city planning and spatial-temporal innovations, cities have been disconnected with their regional and blood relationships by harsh economic interest. Thus, the tendency and exploration of researching historical culture and sociological aspects of urban morphology brings significant meanings to various fields of modern city planning, such as urban historical-cultural space studies, complete urban historical valued systems, urban special space constructions, and guided development of urban space construction based on historical information. Meanwhile, due to the current related systematic studies about northwest typical cities are relatively weak, this paper chooses the city of Lanzhou as the main objective. The researcher sets the urban regional system, urban development and constructions, and urban morphology as breakthrough point, to deeply research on historical driving force and mechanism based on modem development planing and urban morphology in Lanzhou.The paper consist of four parts:the first chapter is Introduction, which is an analysis of research goals, meanings, contents, concepts and methods. The second part is from Chapter2 to Chapter4. It elaborates historical backgrounds and basic morphology of former urban Lanzhou, and developmental transformations of urban functions and nature in modern era. It also describes the development and construction of urban spatial morphology changes in modern Lanzhou. Therefore, this part is categorized as"historical research of individual cases" Chapter5 is a "comprehensive analysis of urban evolutionary morphology in modern Lanzhou based on morphology typology". And chapter6 consists of "the summery and induction of the influential factors, evolutionary logics of urban morphology in modern Lanzhou". Chapter 5 and 6 makes up the third and forth parts as the "conclusion and anticipation" as the conclusion part.The paper firstly do a systematic research on the urban morphology evolution in Lanzhou, including urban gartography and remapping, Urban morphology typology and urban social geography as well as social geography, which make up for the current lack of relevant studies and bring positive impacts on modern Chinese city cases study. The paper does a research on the representative cities images in the different periods of " urban gartography and remapping " method. So that at the time we get the dynamic and continuous evolution of urban morphology, we build the interactive contacts of urban space morphology and social factors. So then we concluded and summarized the regularity and reasons for Lanzhou’s urban morphology evolution in modern times; The paper has the following innovations:first, It builds multi-factors and the whole scale of modern research framework to analyze and reveal the typicality and specificity of Lanzhou’s modern urban development which based on the " urban gartography and remapping " approach; Second, It combines the urban space research and the analysis of the social structure in Lanzhou’s different periods, which not only adds the theory’s explaining abilities but also provides a new perspective for the evolution of urban space morphology in Lanzhou. So that it can true and clear restored the historical process of development and evolution clcarly;Third, It explores research method of constructing a network of urban historical and cultural space based on distinguishing urban historical and cultural stratum, which provide scientific support for the planning and management of Historic Preservation in Lanzhou. It has certain practical significance for the cognition, protection and planning of Lanzhou urban historical and cultural space.Therefore it provides realistic meanings for the recognition of Lanzhou’s history and culture as well as protection and planning. In addition, the paper also provides a new idea for the research of the typical cities in the northwest of China.