Abstract
Nowadays, it is becoming more acceptable that the city is developing with a new town constructed in its periphery area in order to protect the historic city. While adopting this mode may also leads to the deprivation of urban vitality, causing the disintegration of traditional urban form and activities, which are the most valuable heritage that should be treasured. Luoyang is one the four main ancient capital cities in China and the history of its historic city can be traced back to 3000 years ago. This paper takes the south area of the historic city in Luoyang as an example. It is an typical area suffering from urban decline while the buildings and traditional activities among the place are of great value. The paper first studies the evolution process (from the period of Qing Dynasty till now) of the historic city, focusing on the differentiation of space function. It finds the mechanism that the change of city's core function drives the change of urban form and urban vitality. And it concludes that old city should continue to take up vital important function to make active and positive effect on the conservation of the historic city under the process of massive city development. Then the paper studies the conservation work of historic city in China at the moment. In order to find a more scientific and effective way, it explores the issue of massive renovation and reconstruction work of historic city under the background of new-type urbanization by comparing different examples in China. It shows that today’s historic city is the culmination of urban evolution through hundreds or thousands of years. At the same time, the historic city is still in the process of changing in order to meet the demands of socio-economic development in the new age. It is suitable to consider the urban developing background and integrate the conservation work into the overall strategy of urban development. By doing this, the value of heritage and historic city could be showed out and the vitality could be improved. Next the paper takes a more specific view into the historic city of Luoyang. It introduces the current situation in the historic city and comes up with a system that shows the category of the carrier of various value. The value system is divided into three aspects: space quality, culture quality and social quality. It also introduces the current top-down way of action in conservation and construction work in historic city. According to the two main factor, the paper proposed a strategy that the conservation and renovation work should be based on the basic unit of residential courtyard, which comes from an traditional way of self construction work in the past thousands of years in Luoyang. Every residential courtyard is a fundamental working unit and it is conserved and renovated to keep its original function and being put into new function which better suits the current historic city. It hopes to acquire social-economic benefit encourage bottom-up process, driving residents to continue to live and work there and conserve their own buildings and activities. As a result, it hopes that both visible and invisible heritage could be conserved and a better developing mode could be acquired.
