Urban Arcadianism

The World Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen has launch a worldwide environment-protecting campaign again and start a new era of environmental protection. Facing the increasingly serious ecological crisis, an unprecedented urbanization movement has been carried out in China. If we do not summarise a series of theories and methods for urban planning and design, some urban problems, such as thousands of cities with one style, no specific characters, broken context and lost of regionalism, will recur, which will leads to the even worse urban diseases, such as resource starvation, environmental pollution and traffic congestions. At the same time, the existing Chinese villages which are rich of features is under threat.Under the above-mentioned background, this paper is trying to gain enlightenments from the nature, culture and engineering technics of the villages, and further improve ecological concepts, on the basis of summarizing the theories and practices of our predecessors. This paper has introduced "Arcadianism" design theory and applied it to urban practice, which is summarized as "Urban Arcadianism".In the first instance, this paper has discussed many concepts associated with Arcadianism, and discriminates relationships between each concept and Arcadianism, then putting forward the concept of Urban Arcadianism and its primary systems from both broad and narrow sense. Secondly, it expounds the evolution course of Urban Arcadianism, and the fact that Urban Arcadianism is a continuation of ecological ideology. This paper meanders from the modern urban plan ideology and analyzes the improvements of ecology ideology in different stages. It has analyzed various contemporary problems happened in the urban planning in our country and the the necessity of the promotion of Urban Arcadianism. Then, it sums up four aspects of Urban Arcadianism's connotations, Ecologism, regional Contextualism, new technical aesthetics and public participations, and set forth the measures taken by Urban Arcadianism in each aspects. Based on these, this paper sums up numerous features and general principles of Urban Arcadianism. Next, it analyzes and sums up the detailed approaches of Urban Arcadianism from the macro level, meso level and micro level respectively. Finally, it has explored the practise methods under the guiding ideology of Urban Arcadianism, taking the plan of northern Wuxi scenic belt, a practise project with the author's involvement, for example. Thus, this paper is aimed at enriching the connotation of Urban Arcadianism and improving the theoretical system. At the end of this paper, it advances some considerations and expectations of Urban Arcadianism.The theory of Urban Arcadianism is a new theoretical system. It is a theory summarized according to the current situation of China, and after the tutor's many years' teaching and practice. In this paper, the author has done some primary arrangements and discussion. Urban Arcadianism is an open theoretical system. The author wishes that it will initiate better ideas and warmly responses and discussions, which will constantly bring on complements and perfections in this field.