Research On Heritage Conservation Based On Local Community In The Context Of Inner-city Redevelopment

Since the mid-late 1990s,the marketization reform of land and housing supply in China has been rapidly propelled.Insomuch as the exchange value of space has over-whelmed the use value,major cities throughout the country have been carrying out property-led spatial restructuring.Along with the physical environment,industrial structure and social class of old inner-cities are getting all-round upgraded,a large amount of time-honoured traditional neighbourhoods have been severely destructed.Historic urban areas are not only the physical records of the city development trajectory,but also the home on which the local people's everyday life depends,satisfying their material,spiritual,emotional and social needs.According to the humanistic thoughts of heritage conservation,the rationalistic urban restructuring dominated by capital could damage not only the historic fabrics,but also the local communities who carry the cul-ture and memories of these places,saturating them with emotions and meanings.Such dynamic,iterative and embodied interconnection between a historic environment and its local community reflects the social value of cultural heritage.From the perspective of space justice,the production and distribution mechanism of urban space inconsistent with the community's well-being reveals the profound contradiction between capital expansion and social equity,while protecting the community's right to subsistence and development is the precondition of the realization of this social value.Tianjin is an old city with a history of more than 600 years,while it is also a pio-neering city in implementing market reforms.It thus has been confronting multiple conflicts between economic growth,heritage conservation and community needs dur-ing the past 20 years of urban construction progress.Taking Tianjin as the case study area,based on the community investigations in 12 historic neighbourhoods in the inner-city(collecting data through site observation,interview and questionnaire survey),this dissertation focuses on the relationship between historic environment and its local com-munity,aiming at providing realistic references for striking a balance between the con-tinuation of historic environment,the community's well-being and the comprehensive urban development when promoting the agenda of renewal and conservation of the his-toric urban areas.This balance is conducive for them as cultural heritage to better play their social value in contemporary life.With all its chapters linked by the theme of the people-place relationship,this dis-sertation can be divided into three major parts:the first part establishes a theory system centering on the people-place relationship in historic urban area from the perspective of different research fields(2^nd chapter);the second part elucidates the manifestation and agent of the destruction of people-place relationship in contemporary urban based on empirical study(3^rd and 4^th chapter);and the third part reveals that different people-place relationships can exert different influences on heritage conservation based on em-pirical study(5^th and 6^th chapter).The summaries of these chapters are as follows:the2^nd chapter clarifies the community-centered issues in the context of the redevelopment and conservation of historic urban area and establishes the theory system consisting of three dimensions which involve community's cultural right,psychological feelings and right to the city;the 3^rd chapter analyzes the general threat of neoliberal ideology to the people-place relationship and its negative consequences at the community scale,then takes Xigu South as the case study to reveal the destructive effects of urban spatial reconstruction on the people-place bonding;the 4^th chapter analyzes the dynamic mech-anism of this threat to the people-place bonding under the specific economic,social and political circumstances of China and Tianjin;the 5^th chapter takes Zhaofeng Road com-munity as the case study to reveal that under the interference of housing needs and realistic interests,the deterioration of people-place relationship could result in the re-sistance to heritage conservation by the local community;the 6^th chapter shows the positive role of the people-place bonding in promoting heritage conservation and the persistence of the social value of heritage it reflects by investigating the local residents'spontaneous actions for rescuing the old city culture after the demolition of the old Tianjin city.From the perspective of people-place bonding,this dissertation shifts its focus from the physical objects of urban heritage to the social groups it contains,and com-prehensively expound the humanistic thought of social value from two aspects of af-fectivity and justice.Through the microscopic study of the local communities,the rel-atively invisible cultural,psychological and daily life aspects of these historic urban areas can be explored.Therefore,the demolition/conservation dispute over heritage during the inner-city redevelopment is expanded from the value tradeoff between ar-chitectural culture and spatial economy to the social factors.Furthermore,in the context of the most controversial phenomenon of dilapidated house transformation in Chinese cities,this paper conducts localized analyses of a set of internationally concerned issues,such as the social value of heritage,right to the city,gentrification and displacement.