Research On Classified Protection Of Traditional Villages In Suzhou

With the rapid process of urbanization and integration of urban-rural regions,traditional villages are disappearing at an alarming rate. It is becoming extremelyimportant and urgent to come up with scientific and efficient ways to protect them.Compared with ancient village, traditional village don’t get enough preservation on itspattern, scale as well as its style and as a result, people pay less attention to carrying outresearches on traditional village. This paper aims to present the economic, social, culturaland ecological values of traditional villages, appealing for strict protection based ondifferent value dimensions along with classified management and diversified use.Traditional villages in Suzhou have following features: large in number, widelydistributed, rich in cultural heritage and historical information. However, due to changes ofproduction methods and social environment, impact of policies as well as lack oftechnology, these traditional villages have undergone great transformation in theirtraditional styles. What’s more, they are becoming more and more depressed, which willeventually result in their ending up as ‘forgotten gutter’ and getting demolished. This paperthoroughly analyzes the general features and values of traditional village based on the3-month in-depth research on a large numbers of villages in Suzhou. Second, this papertries to construct Suzhou traditional village value evaluation system and classificationmodel. According to this system, villages in Suzhou can be divided into four kindsincluding traditional farming villages, historical and cultural villages, idyllic villages andintegrated villages. Third, this paper discusses differentiated needs of these four kindsduring protection, which lead to further discussion about protection patterns fromperspectives of direction, content and methods. In this paper, Sanyang Village, ZhitangCommunity, Kaixiangong Village and Sanjiashi village are selected as typical cases oftraditional villages that can help carry out empirical research in order to verify thefeasibility and practical value of this approach.