This book introduces a ten-year-long design research project in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), China, based on international cooperation studios, design workshops, a Ph.D. thesis, and concrete practice in China, Germany, and the Netherlands. This research adapts the existing methods of Landscape Character Assessment (UK), Historic Cultural Landscape Elements (Germany), and Dutch Polder Typology to mapping, describing, and classifying landscape character areas and types at the three scales of regional, municipal, and local. Furthermore, to connect research with design, we developed a typological approach of generating specific measures for the networked polder landscape. This research bridges the gap of a missing landscape characterization method for the conservation, transformation, and critical reconstruction of historic cultural landscapes in a metropolitan context. The book is intended for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners interested in the topics of cultural landscape in transition, methods for landscape characterization and typology, and a research-by-design approach in interdisciplinary projects of landscape architecture, urbanism, and regional planning.

Places are locations of value where psychological and cultural needs are satisfied. Human relationships with particular environments play a key role in motivating, developing, and nurturing the life of societies. Undifferentiated space becomes ‘place’ as we understand it better and its built and natural forms become endowed with value. However, misunderstanding the critical importance of heritage locations, particularly based on rejection of local and regional distinctiveness, has often led to their destruction. Featuring essays from across central Europe and beyond, and aimed at practitioners, decision makers and concerned citizens alike, this book raises awareness about the responsibility that we bear for every action taken that modifies the formal and socio-cultural context. Potentially, these actions can negatively impact the cultural landscape. Learning to recognize the essential value of heritage to the ‘place-ness’ of our cities and landscapes is vital in helping us to preserve and enjoy their intrinsic beauty and cultural importance.

Through the lens of the city of Suzhou, this edited volume presents views on the complex interaction between the central state, market agents, local governments and individuals who have shaped the development of Chinese cities and urban life. Featuring a range of disciplinary perspectives, contributors to this volume have all undertaken research in one municipality – Suzhou – to consider how history and culture have evolved during the modernisation of Chinese cities and the transformation of urban space, as well as shifting rural–urban relations and urban life during the reform era. The volume is underscored by a complex dynamic system consisting of three interlocked mechanisms through which the central and local state interact: history and culture, social and economic life, and administration and governance. As such, chapters analyse responses both from the state and society as driving forces of local development, with an interplay between tradition and heritage on the one hand and China’s economic and social development on the other. Suzhou in Transition will appeal to students and scholars of Chinese and urban studies, as well as urban sociology and geography.

The cultural landscapes of Central European cities reflect over half a century of socialism and are marked by the Marxists' vision of a utopian landscape. Architecture, urban planning and the visual arts were considered to be powerful means of expressing the 'people's power'. However, since the velvet revolutions of 1989, this urban scenery has been radically transformed by new forces and trends, infused by the free market, democracy and liberalization. This has led to 'landscape cleansing' and 'recycling', as these former communist nations used new architectural, functional and social forms to transform their urbanscapes, their meanings and uses. Comparing case studies from different post-socialist cities, this book examines the culturally conditional variations between local powers and structures despite the similarities in the general processes and systems. It considers the contemporary cultural landscapes of these post-socialist cities as a dynamic fusion of the old communist forms and new free-market meanings, features and democratic practices, of global influences and local icons. The book assesses whether these urbanscapes clearly reflect the social, cultural and political conditions and aspirations of these transitional countries and so a critical analysis of them provides important insights.