3. URBAN DEVELOPMENT AND REHABILITATION IN XI’AN

Xi’an has a history of more than 3,000 years as a city and had functioned as China’s capital(Since the Zhou dynasty (1046 B.C.-771 B.C.). The inner city of Xi’an, also called Xi’an Walled City, is located inside contemporary city of Xi’an where the former city of Han Chang’an and Tang Chang’an once stood in Han dynasty (202 B.C.- 220 ) and Tang Dynasty (618-907)) and it was the announced on the first batch list of “National Historical and Cultural City”(NHCC) in 1982, indeed because of it’s numerous historical milieus in the city. Even a city with such historical context has experienced extensive and fast constructions and demolitions. Along with infrastructure development, real estate and housing has been the growth generating sector in China after the land and national housing reforms in the mid-1980s\cite{Wang_1999}. (Fig.5) We must noted that for an historical city center, it not only the monuments that make the city historical, but among of all, the residential architecture is apparently the decisive factor for the urban morphology and fabric. Italian scholar Alvise Cornaro said: ”Venice is not only composed of great monuments, it is a myriad of housing and residential architectures which make the city of Venice.” The spatial typology and distribution in the historical center determines the urban fabric of the old city core, which needs to be carefully and thoroughly studied. As Peter Row writes: There are three important issues in the contemporary modernize and rehabilitation inner city\cite{Heikkila_2001}\cite{Liangyong_1991}First, the adequate provision of dwellings for urban inhabitants is no longer simply a matter of housing but, rather, of the much more complicated task of community development and ultimately of building coherent, useful, and pleasant pieces of a city in which to live, work and play. Second, the manners in which older parts of well-established cities are to be regarded as being either more or less useful in their present state. Today, in most part of the world, it is clear that traditional urban patterns of settlement are to be valued not only for their strict historical significance, but also for their aura. Last, there is what types of urban strategy to employ within a broad rehabilitation project. It’s urgent to develop reliable strategies to guide city regeneration especially the rehabilitation of the residential housing projects which has most impact on the urban fabric. As Wu Liangyong asserts, “Compared with public buildings, I’m more concerned with dwellings because human habitation is the core of architecture.” Unfortunately, we didn’t have the chance to apply these ideas. Property-led regeneration in the early 1990s which was driven by the economic profits has dominated the urban development in Xi’an after the economical boom period. Many low-rise, densely populated inner city neighborhoods have been transformed into high-rise residential, or collective homogeneous compounds with standard design code in Xi’an.(Fig.4)