Typology,representation And Generation Of The Low-lying Builtscapes With Plan-units

Massive urbanization has disrupted the delicate relationship between the traditional settlements and the natural environments.Although scholars and designers agree that the self-organizing builtscapes should be preserved,the process adaptive to the environment is abandoned for it can not meet the requirements of the landuse intensification as well as modern life.Hence,a question arises: Is the incremental formation interacting with the natural environment designable? In this paper we unveiled the hidden rules that showed the arrangement of the low-lying settlement in coastal Tianjin using the shape grammar,and applied the rules in the dynamic procedures for redevelopment.By analysing the town-plan of low-lying builtscapes,we summarized six geometrical relations between two neighboring edges of homesteads.The complexity of the plot series was figured out by calculating the complexity between every two neighboring homesteads.Taking nine settlements as examples,we divided the low-lying town-plans into five types of plot series with different degrees of complexity.The results indicated that some town-plans included all the five types of plot series,whereas some others included less or only one type.Accordingly,we divided the low-lying builtscapes into two major types of plan-units – founded and created.The founded plan-units were further divided into four sub-types.We show that the complexity of plan-units is relevant to the morphological periods.Generally,the more complex the plan-unit was,the earlier it was built.By reading the historical satellite images from 1965-1976 and 2005,we interpreted the spatiotemporal structure of settlement plan through plan-divisions.We developed three main rules: 1)the homestead rule and the pathway rule to encode the typology of plot series associated with the composition within plan-divisions;2)the water-related rule to show how homesteads start growing from water,adapt themselves to water,and shape the water.The morphology of plan-unit with different degrees of environmental interaction was represented using the three rules.We chose Nanlibakou-village as an example.Based on the 1965 plan,the rules were applied to two scenarios: 1)light intervention to represent the current plan;2)self-organization to generate an assumed builtscapes continuing the way before 1970.Scenario 1 demonstrated a structured grid with the similar homestead sizes,few types of plot series,and less interaction with water;while Scenario 2 showed a deformed grid pattern with varied homestead sizes,diverse types of plot series,and noticeable interaction with water.Our method would improve the low-lying builtscapes within plan-units for the large-scale renewal.The method is applicable to similar settlements in case of data sparse and could be tested if the gaps were filled.