Initial Research On The Reginalism Of The Square In Cities

In the past few decades, with the change of social life, the design of urban publicspace in terms of functional forms and aesthetic landscape have been experiencing adramatic modernization transformation in China. Even today, the transformation stillgoes ahead. A wide range of large-scale and imposing city squares is underconstruction, and is still being planned and designed to be built in cities of all sizes inChina. However, behind this spectacular and busy scene, we need to realize that therapid development of city squares in China today has exposed many of the flaws thatoccurred in the process of urbanization. Behind these gorgeously decorated andmagnificent city squares, what we often see are these: scattered and tiny figures of thepublic in the square; the un-attracted and tedious shaped planting altar and lawn; theempty and cold pavement contrasting its non-humanized scale; contra to the harmonyof “Di Qi”, the use of imported plants and costly stones can not improve its intrinsicquality but rather make it all seemed vulgar. All of these made the vast urban publicspaces often being forgotten and these squares became the corner of the lost space inthe city. Had the urban population not been so dense in China, people would havelong lost their interest in spaces which are lack of human support like these ones. Oneprominent view was found in a recent evaluation about the city square that the designand planning of city square in our cities is sinking into a rigid program ofmisunderstanding. In recent years, with the rapid development of domestic city square,we have seen that almost every city has different scales of city squares. However,under the big context of urban modernization and globalization, urban squarelandscape appear to have convergence characteristics, the geographical and ethniccharacteristics of these squares are gradually weakening and disappearing. It isbecoming a pressing issue that the designers need to solve as how to maintain theregionalism characteristics and national culture.This article sets from a regionalism perspective, discusses the landscape designof urban square and comprehensively descript the regionalism, city square and itsrelated concepts, classification characteristics, and the factors of regionalismexpression. With sustainable development and people-oriented ideological astheoretical support, on the basis of the influencing factors of the regional expression,this article explores the principles and strategies of the regional urban square design.It then leads to a further discussion on the design methods and measures of theregionalism urban square, and the strive to create a culturally and ecologicallysustainable development of square landscape with regionalism characteristics. Thisarticle is set on the background of China’s urbanization process, with the regionalismurban square being the object of the study, tracing the course of the evolution of urbansquare, using the theory of design, psychology and behavioral needs, summarized thegeneral design principles of regionalism urban square and strategies of design. Finally,combined with the civil square design practices in high-tech industrial park in Mengxi, Ordos, Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, and with the in-depth analysis of designof regionalism urban square process, the author intends to summarize the principlesand methods of the creation of regional urban square, which can be useful for betterserving regionalism design in the future.