Improvement Strategy For Public Space In Urban High-density District

Along with the economic globalization trend, the economic elements like industry, information, energy, capital and manpower have been regionally concentrated. The high concentration of resources effectively enhances the rapid development of cities in turn. This process unavoidably causes the high-density exploration in the central areas of cities, as well as many contradictions between values and social cognitions, such as contradictions between economy and culture, between development and sustainability, and between society and humanity. The urban design in the high-density district thereafter becomes more particular, especially for the public space design, which is very important but is always ignored. This thesis hence aimed to propose an improvement strategy for public space in the urban high-density district.This thesis first discussed the connotation content of its subject and elaborated the four important roles of public space in the urban high-density district, i.e. more critical psychological balance, more frequent space usage, more centralized urban context, and more important eco-landscape adjustment.Macau peninsula, as the high-density district of Macau with unique urban features, was selected as the case study. Four existing problems of its public space include the small quantity of eco-landscapes, the weak linkage among pedestrian spaces, the severe obstruction of sight lines, and the low quality of space environment. Accordingly, from the four perspectives of function, space, urban context and detail, this thesis suggested four improvement strategies, namely integration, network, localization and humanization. In light of these strategies and the specific situations of Macau peninsula, this thesis integrated the resources of public spaces with more attention on the pedestrian spaces, zoned different featured areas and optimized sight lines so as to reflect the characteristics of public spaces. All these were combined to form an improvement system for public space in the urban high-density district. This thesis provided a review and an outlook of the development of public space in the urban high-density district in mainland cities. It was found that there are many problems in the urban design. The core concept of the findings in this thesis could be a possible solution, i.e. to utilize the integration of public spaces as the principal method to maintain the high-density district, and to achieve the maximum effect by executing the minimum intervention with respect to current high-density status.