An Approach To The Application Of History Context In Urban Waterfront Landscape Design

Judged from the history of waterfront cities, the waterfront area is considered as a starting point for a city to develop, and it embodies a historical reflection of urban development as well as the developmental process of human civilization. In recent years as our national economy expands, people are no longer satisfied with their own household necessities. Instead, they become more concerned with the landscape outdoors, with a great need to improve the living surroundings of the cities where they live. In order to meet the public needs to catch up with the steps of development, the waterfront cities in China begin to undertake the constructions of urban waterfronts drastically. With an influence of the globalization and a consideration of our country still as a developing nation, however, it is inevitable to worship and imitate blindly while in the construction of waterfront landscapes, which usually leads to the same pattern or a similarity. In this case, there always exist a neglect of thinking about the history, culture and local characteristics, as well as the deeper connotation and innovation of landscape design, which causes an unscientific usage of the historical elements of waterfront landscapes.Bearing this situation in minds, domestic designers have started to reflect over the shortcomings to waterfront landscape construction brought about by the globalization. Instead, the combination of protection of historical culture and local characteristics with the waterfront landscape design has emerged as the focus of designers.With this background, this thesis explores the application of history context in urban waterfront design with a knowledge of related theories and general situation of waterfront design development. Considering the variety and values of historical culture and local characteristics, we attempt to analyze the underlying philosophy of history context in urban waterfront design in order to stress its importance and great value. On the basis of previous academic results, in this thesis, we have adopted research methods such as induction and deduction from both micro- and macro- perspectives.