Reflection On The Value Of Traditional Rural Settlements For Contemporary Human Settlements

During a period of hundreds of years, Chinese traditional rural settlements, which have varied from incipiency to flourish, and eventually to obsoleteness, provides a conspectus of rural settlements in Chinese history. Fortunately, many old villages are preserved very well even having experienced the vicissitudes for such a long history. These villages are all self-feeding systems which are functioning perfect in themselves. Moreover, the relationship between those villages and their environment is very harmony. Then what is the key of the perfect balance between these villages and their environment? This dissertation maybe can find the answer.But what can we learn if we get the key of keeping harmonious balance in those small villages? After all, human settlements especially those big cities seem not to be the same as small villages.Embracing another method, we can find much more ideas which do make sense of helping us in sketching our blueprint, even in some urban plan. First of all, in the reaction of driving power to planning in rural settlements is more flexible than it in cities, and this flexibility is what city planning needs nowadays. Secondly, the seemingly trivial, narrow open spaces in rural settlements are different from contemporary prevailing open space style, but these"earthy"spaces own frequent communicative activities, which are advocated in today's open spaces. Thirdly, the rural settlements have a self-adjusting system to inhibit itself developing into excessive population and construction obesity, which are disturbing cities today. The three aspects have just suggest a main line of this dissertation. In fact, the purpose of this dissertation is to discover the rules hiding in the rural settlements'developing history, and the more important is, to find some suggestion for contemporary human settlements from these rules.