Table Of ContentThe Urban Book Series
Yuting Xie
Restructuring Cultural
Landscapes in
Metropolitan Areas
Characterization, Typology and Design
Research
The Urban Book Series
Editorial Board
Margarita Angelidou, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Thessaloniki, Greece
Fatemeh Farnaz Arefian, The Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL, Silk
Cities, London, UK
Michael Batty, Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, UCL, London, UK
Simin Davoudi, Planning & Landscape Department GURU, Newcastle University,
Newcastle, UK
Geoffrey DeVerteuil, School of Planning and Geography, Cardiff University,
Cardiff, UK
Jesús M. González Pérez, Department of Geography, University of the Balearic
Islands, Palma (Mallorca), Spain
Daniel B. Hess , Department of Urban and Regional Planning, University at
Buffalo, State University, Buffalo, NY, USA
Paul Jones, School of Architecture, Design and Planning, University of Sydney,
Sydney, NSW, Australia
Andrew Karvonen, Division of Urban and Regional Studies, KTH Royal Institute
of Technology, Stockholm, Stockholms Län, Sweden
Andrew Kirby, New College, Arizona State University, Phoenix, AZ, USA
Karl Kropf, Department of Planning, Headington Campus, Oxford Brookes
University, Oxford, UK
Karen Lucas, Institute for Transport Studies, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK
Marco Maretto, DICATeA, Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering,
University of Parma, Parma, Italy
Ali Modarres, Tacoma Urban Studies, University of Washington Tacoma, Tacoma,
WA, USA
Fabian Neuhaus, Faculty of Environmental Design, University of Calgary, Calgary,
AB, Canada
Steffen Nijhuis, Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of
Technology, Delft, The Netherlands
Vitor Manuel Aráujo de Oliveira , Porto University, Porto, Portugal
Christopher Silver, College of Design, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL, USA
Giuseppe Strappa, Facoltà di Architettura, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome,
Roma, Italy
Igor Vojnovic, Department of Geography, Michigan State University, East Lansing,
MI, USA
Claudia Yamu, Department of Spatial Planning and Environment, University of
Groningen, Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands
Qunshan Zhao, School of Social and Political Sciences, University of Glasgow,
Glasgow, UK
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Yuting Xie
Restructuring Cultural
Landscapes in Metropolitan
Areas
Characterization, Typology and Design
Research
Yuting Xie
Institute of Landscape Architecture
College of Agriculture and Biotechnology
Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China
This work was supported by Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province
(LQ21E080016)
ISSN 2365-757X ISSN 2365-7588 (electronic)
The Urban Book Series
ISBN 978-981-19-0754-8 ISBN 978-981-19-0755-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-0755-5
Jointly published with Zhejiang University Press
The print edition is not for sale in China (Mainland). Customers from China (Mainland) please order the
print book from: Zhejiang University Press.
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Foreword by Kongjian Yu
This book, Restructuring Cultural Landscapes in Metropolitan Areas , offers an
overview of a decade-long design-driven research project in the context of the
Yangtze River Delta (YRD, China) based on international cooperative studies, design
workshops, a Ph.D. thesis, and concrete practice in China, Germany, and the Nether-
lands. The author, Dr. Yuting Xie, tested the European landscape characterization
methods in the Chinese context. It is interesting to note that she tells a story of
ancient Chinese land and water management, as embodied in cultural landscapes,
using a European language and narrative. Nevertheless, the common ground she
builds through her cross-cultural study offers new perspectives from which both
Chinese and international audiences can see and plan their everyday landscapes.
In the opening, Yuting sets the theoretical background through a cross-disciplinary
discussion of landscape architecture’s missing role in framing cultural landscapes,
particularly in the Chinese metropolitan context. In the main body of the book,
she develops a new landscape characterization and typology approach that integrates
research and design specifically for the YRD metropolises. She reviews the historical
evolution of polder systems and interrelated hydraulic development, and identifies a
shift from the centralized farming and hydraulic system promoted by ancient king-
doms to a decentralized, household-based one, and now back to a centralized water
management system dominated by large-scale gray infrastructure. The “deep forms”
rooted in the designed polder systems, which she calls permanent forms, are identi-
fied, and a typology of the principle rules of such spatial configurations is developed.
The retrospective reveals that the shift in polder sizes and morphologies correlates
to the relative ascendancy of centralized versus decentralized hydraulic techniques.
Furthermore, this book surprises us with its contribution to connecting research with
design via a typological approach rooted in Dutch thinking. Adaptive landscape and
water management strategies related to specific polder landscape types are identified
and tested in concrete projects. These findings offer promising new interpretations
of traditional low-tech and low-cost water management methods and provide a foun-
dation for rebuilding the connections between city and water and balancing natural
processes and cultural intervention.
v
vi ForewordbyKongjianYu
Toward the end, Yuting offers a new vision and reflection on the permanence
and resilience of vernacular cultural landscapes in the YRD as an alternative form
of blue-green infrastructure that can address the current identity and water crises
in metropolitan areas. Drawing on lessons from the ancient wisdom of integrated
farming and water management that adapts to natural processes and patterns, this
study enriches the discussion of nature-based solutions for flood management in
China’s growing ecological civilization and sponge city initiatives.
November 2021 Kongjian Yu
Doctor of Design
Professor and Dean
College of Architecture and Landscape
Architecture at Peking University
Founder and Design Principal
Turenscape
Beijing, China
Foreword by Sören Schöbel-Rutschmann
In this work on the transformation of cultural landscapes in rapidly growing
metropolitan regions, Yuting Xie first summarizes the existing geographical knowl-
edge in China on the historical development of a landscape in the Yangtze River Delta.
She adapted the British Landscape Character Assessments (LCA) as the primary
research framework, which provides a site- or region-specific, type-forming, and
conceptual landscape analysis. She combined the LCA method with the Historical
Cultural Landscape Elements (KHLE) inventory developed in the German research
area. Most importantly, she discussed this concrete development of a landscape for
the first time on the basis of the classic western theories on cultural landscape and
urbanization, especially the ones developed by J. B. Jackson, Henri Lefèbvre, and
André Corboz, and translated and compared the culturally different concepts and
understandings of landscape. Yuting Xie emphasizes that landscape in China, even in
the landscape architecture profession, is still predominantly understood as perceived
scenery and hardly as everyday living space. However, in view of the rapid urban-
ization in China, which can only be grasped with new terms such as mega-urban
landscape, the latter is a prerequisite for the creation of spatial and regional identity.
In this way, she has developed an entirely new view of landscape architecture tasks
for the preservation and development of cultural landscapes in China.
For this purpose, she compiled the positions of the profession of landscape archi-
tecture that are relevant to her field of research. On the one hand, these are rather
contextual-structuralist approaches, such as regionalism, i.e., regionally specific
forms of design, and our concept of a Critical Reconstruction of Cultural Land-
scape developed at the Technical University of Munich. On the other hand, there are
ecological-functional approaches, such as the international research on Water Sensi-
tive Urban Design (especially Australia), Sponge Cities (China), and Green-Blue
Infrastructure (the UK and NL), as well as the research on Polder Urbanization (NL
and US), related explicitly to metropolises in river deltas.
The Yangtze River Delta region is described in detail in its history as agriculturally
dominated marshes, polders, and, finally, highly urbanized metropolitan landscapes.
vii
viii ForewordbySörenSchöbel-Rutschmann
With a large number of graphically and scaled unified development maps and histor-
ical maps edited or created by the author, this book describes the spatial differentia-
tion of the drainages, administrative boundaries, formative landscape elements and
structures, and the settlements and urbanization of the region in temporal phases.
In addition to the regional scale, she examined the city of Suzhou in depth. It is
noteworthy that Suzhou has traditional landscapes that are particularly valued in the
Yangtze River Delta. Nevertheless, the work does not focus on the usual picture-
book sequences but the structure of everyday living space, making the suspension
of the traditional Chinese understanding of landscape particularly clear. Specifi-
cally, she classified and described the natural and artificial water systems of different
polder and canal landscapes according to their distinguishable structures, dimen-
sions, and textures. These mapping and illustrations show a consistent refinement of
the canal and polder structures over the centuries, followed by a standardization logic
in several hydraulic reforms, which led to an increase in the average polder size and
flood resilience. At the same time, road networks have become a new dominating
infrastructure. In the Taihu Basin, lake beds were also massively drained until the
ban in the 1980s. Overall, the former rural landscape has been transformed into a
mosaic of agriculture, settlement, industry, and infrastructure since the 1980s, which
increased flood risk considerably.
Xie summarized that chaotic and unplanned rapid changes characterize the
evolving metropolitan delta. The result is a mixture of “fragmented fields, degraded
canals, new gated residential areas, rural factories, and extensive transport infrastruc-
ture with limited accessible open spaces and public service facilities” (pp. 96–97).
Derived from this critical assessment, Yuting concluded that the historical polder
types should be seen as the result of a “co-evolution of water, polder, and urban
systems” (p. 97). These polder types represent the landscape individuals with similar
characteristics and demands, which could be protected, rediscovered, and reactivated
as permanent forms and blue-green infrastructure for urban planning. Because in this
way, the goals of regional identity and ecological resilience can be combined. The
landscape character, therefore, not only show typical vulnerabilities to change, from
which protection concepts and measures for the revitalization can be developed. They
can also be translated into development models that design settlements, agricultural
and industrial areas, and tourism based on historical landscape structures rather than
erasing existing canals, parcels, and settlement structures.
The work presented here by Yuting Xie is a report of extensive research that
extends to methodological questions, systematic field and map work, as well as
theoretical reflection. In historical landscape structures, Yuting Xie seeks no less
than material substances, social standards of value, and planning categories in order
to counter the loss of identity and flood risks associated with the breathtaking pace
of landscape changes in China, cultural permanence, and ecological resilience.
Given the large number of metropolitan regions located in river deltas world-
wide, the work is making an important contribution beyond China. But even
beyond “hydraulic” cultural landscapes, her work suggests critically questioning
the tendency toward standardized quantitative methods and instead concentrating on
qualitative, historical analyzes. Via these approaches, cultural landscapes could be
ForewordbySörenSchöbel-Rutschmann ix
preserved not only through a museum way, but also be transformed and reconstructed
via understanding their functional and structural transformations. Regarding China,
the work gives a critical orientation to the cautious but increasingly burgeoning
interest in more careful handling of historical cultural landscapes.
January 2022 Prof. Dr. Sören Schöbel-Rutschmann
Head of the Professorship of Landscape
Architecture and Regional Open Space
Department of Architecture at
Technical University of Munich
Munich, Germany
