Emeritus Professor Ken Taylor AM is an Adjunct Professor in the Research School of Humanities & the Arts at The Australian National University. He was a Visiting Professor at Tongji University in October/November 2012, has been a speaker at China ICOMOS meetings and conferences in Beijing, Hangzhou and Guizhou. He has been asked to take part in a meeting in Guangzhou and to discuss on site conservation of historic towns around Guangzhou and to give an address at the plenary meeting ‘The Responsibility of Cultural Industries in the New-type of Urbanisation’ at a conference at the Communications University of China, Beijing.—The Editors
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China’s rapid urbanisation has generally meant the destruction of traditional neigbourhoods that are replaced with modern buildings and community spaces that are usually architecturally dull and unpleasant to inhabit. This problem is global: Zetter and Watson note in the Introduction to Designing Sustainable Cities in the Developing World that globalisation has dramatically impacted city design with two particular negative outcomes.[1] One is the accelerating destruction of the patrimony of indigenously designed and developed urban places and spaces, with culturally-rooted built environments eroding. The other is that the pressures are commodifying the place-identity of historic urban places spaces and places, detaching them from their local, spatial, and temporal continuity, whilst still representing them as preserved authentic artefacts for global cultural consumption.
West Lake, Hangzhou, 2007
This is sadly an accurate portrayal or the development of most Chinese cities, but a striking example of a successful Chinese attempt to address the negative outcomes is the case of the city of Hangzhou and adjacent West Lake. The area holds a special place in Chinese thinking on key aspects of its culture.[2] In 2011 an area designated as West Lake Cultural Landscape of Hangzhou was inscribed on the World Heritage List. It extends over West Lake and the hills surrounding its three sides; its beauty has inspired famous poets, scholars and artists since the 9th century era of the Tang Dynasty (618-907CE). It comprises numerous temples, pagodas, pavilions, gardens and ornamental trees, as well as causeways and artificial islands. These additions have been made to improve the landscape west of the city of Hangzhou to the south of the Yangtze river. The West Lake has influenced garden design in the rest of China as well as Japan and Korea over the centuries and bears an exceptional testimony to the cultural tradition of improving landscapes to create a series of vistas reflecting an idealised fusion between humans and nature. It is a landscape of immense tranquil beauty and cultural meaning for Chinese people, and marks, in my view, a high water mark in World Heritage thinking. It is immensely popular with Chinese visitors either taking a tranquil boat ride or walking through its park edges and along the causeways and islands. Of fundamental significance to its future is that management will be directed by constraints on the overall development of the city in relation to its potential impact on the West Lake landscape. These constraints are intended to ensure that there is no encroachment laterally of the city behind the hills that flank the lake. Modern high-rise developments of the central part of the city are visible at the head of the lake, although considerable tree planting along the lake edge helps to ameliorate visual impact. Hangzhou, ancient capital of the Southern Song Dynasty (1127-1279) is today a modern bustling industrial city; its juxtaposition next to the dreamy West Lake is an interesting example of how to manage urban change that shows respect for the landscape setting.
Zetter and Watson further point to the way literature on cities and urbanisation in the developing world has framed sustainability questions mainly in terms of the environmental agenda preoccupied with issues such as pollution, urban waste, energy, transport and the urban footprint.[3] However, urban areas in the developing world are more than this. Taking Chinese towns and cities we see, in spite of rapid modernisation, that they are vibrant, living entities where life on the streets and sense of living history are palpable. From this follows the argument that viable responses to the pressures of urban growth, deteriorating quality of urban life and homogenisation of urban form and design need to address and explore the resilience and adaptability of local urban traditions, technologies, place identities and cultural precepts under the rubric of cultural heritage conservation in urban design and development. In other words, there needs to be a focus on cultural sustainability.
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