Study on spatial characteristics of vernacular settlements in Hebei Jingxing

Jingxing, formed in the Ming and Qing dynasties, is located in the mountainous area bordering Hebei Province and Shanxi Province. This paper takes 3 villages of Jingxing as examples to analysis morphological data on four aspects: the reasons of settlement forming, the texture of streets and alleys, the courtyard space and residential building features, trying to sum up the general characteristics of local traditional settlement

Analyzing and visualizing dissemination patterns and emerging trends on typo-morphology studies in China

Beyond the long development history from Conzen's morphology to Muratori and Caniggia's typology in Europe, the attention on understanding the continuity of urban form from Chinese scholars are emerging noticeably. It is worth to mention that although there are several articles about the application of typo-morphology into the Chinese context, the work of the literature review is apparently waiting for a more comprehensive and objective study. Thus, a better collecting and demonstrating of the typo-morphology works of literature is urgently requested by tracing the evolution process and dissemination pattern in the Chinese academic community. This study establishes a quantitative study and visual survey by offering abundant visualized graphics about citations and authorship patterns, and relevant bibliography based on the database of Web of Science (WoS) and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) by utilizing Citespace. It provides an in-depth analysis of the current theoretical background aiming to inspire further typo-morphological research and practices in the Chinese context and beyond

A cultural perspective on the typo-morphological approach: A planning proposal for Hehua Tang, China.

Hehua Tang once was a lively historical dwelling settlement in the inner fringe belt area of Nanjing. For decades, it was ‘forgotten’ during the rapid urbanization of the city. Nowadays, streets in Hehua Tang, which act as the main collective space for residents, are facing the enormous threat of losing their precious vitality due to controversial conservation and restoration schemes driven by local government. This paper uses typo-morphology analysis to extract the characteristics of Hehua Tang. It also cat- egorically defines the streets in this area in terms of a setting of street culture, with traditional customs, historical inheritance. The study also covers the multifaceted reactions of urban planning policies, and awareness and requests of residents. The analysis details the current situation of street system and form at two urban scales: the neighborhood and block scale; building scale, includ- ing building types, facade continuity, height-width proportion, plan rhythm, distribution of living units, and density. This study not only provides a detailed graphical analysis, but also demonstrates a cultural per- spective for reading and understanding the Chinese street. In particular, it is of use in seeking possible strategies to balance the preservation of Hehua Tang’s street vitality and improvements of living-environment quality

Street Lives in Ancient Chinese Capital City. Based on the Painting of Along the River During the Qingming Festival

Street is a key public space in the city, representing and being influenced at the same time by different history and culture of a country, city or region. This research is inside the team of “Transitional Morphologies Research Unit” (Politecnico di Torino and Southeast University Nanjing), by introducing local languages and customs from the perspective of Chinese, tries to explain the effect to the streets in an ancient Chinese capital city by residents’ daily life, especially the conception and behaviour. Analyses are not only based on iconology, typology and morphology, but also cultural anthropology and ethnography, aiming to provide a different view of Chinese urban streets. Facing the contemporary identity crisis of Chinese traditional settlements, the work contributes to take the edge of cultural gaps in urban heritage and planning

Complex Social Value-Based Approach for Decision-Making and Valorization Process in Chinese World Cultural Heritage Site: The Case of Kulangsu (China)

China is undertaking effective actions to adhere to wider international standards with better consideration of the notion of authenticity, collective memory, identity, and the sense of belonging. Besides the traditional participatory management discussions, scholars are also interested in finding out how the ICTs can encourage and enable new forms of engagement with heritage in different cultural contexts. The article offers an innovative approach to understanding the value of community participation in order to obtain a more sustainable way for integrative approaches in cultural heritage management. It focuses on the identification of criteria for the evaluation of Digital Community Engagement (DCE) and proposes the multivariate evaluation model based on the online questionnaires and face-to-face interviews. The result shows that the transparency of the restoration process, the possibility of adopting bottom-up suggestions, and the coherency with the residents’ interests are the most important factors to influence the Willingness to Participate and the Willingness to Pay. The analysis based on theme-coding is essential to understand the opinions of various stakeholders with different educational and professional backgrounds. It concludes that multi-disciplinary and value-based methods should be encouraged as an exploratory way ofenhancing community engagement in the specified urban heritage contex

Social Media as a Medium to Promote Local Perception Expression in China’s World Heritage Sites

The assessment of public participation is one of the most fundamental components of holistic and sustainable cultural heritage management. Since the beginning of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic became a catalyst for the transformation of participatory tools. Collaboration with stakeholders moved online due to the strict restrictions preventing on-site activities. This phenomenon provided an opportunity to formulate more comprehensive and reasonable urban heritage protection strategies. However, very few publications mentioned how social networking sites’ data could support humanity-centred heritage management and participatory evaluation. Taking five World Cultural Heritage Sites as research samples, the study provides a methodology to evaluate online participatory practices in China through Weibo, a Chinese-originated social media platform. The data obtained were analysed from three perspectives: the users’ information, the content of texts, and the attached images. As shown in the results section, individuals’ information is described by gender, geo-location, celebrities, and Key Opinion Leaders. To a greater extent, participatory behaviour emerges at the relatively primary levels, that being “informing and consulting”. According to the label detection of Google Vision, residents paid more attention to buildings, facades, and temples in the cultural heritage sites. The research concludes that using social media platforms to unveil interplays between digital and physical heritage conservation is feasible and should be widely encouraged

GIS-Based Analysis of the Spatial Distribution and Influencing Factors of Traditional Villages in Hebei Province, China

Traditional villages are a valuable cultural asset that occupy an important position in Chinese traditional culture. This study focuses on 206 traditional villages in Hebei Province, and aims to explore their spatial distribution characteristics and influencing factors using ArcGIS spatial analysis. The analysis shows that traditional villages in Hebei Province were distributed in clus-ters during different historical periods, and eventually formed three core clusters in Shijiazhuang, Zhangjiakou and Xingtai-Handan after different historical periods. Moreover, the overall dis-tribution of traditional villages in Hebei Province is very uneven, with clear regional differences, and most of them are concentrated in the eastern foothills of the Taihang Mountains. To identify the factors influencing traditional villages, natural environmental factors, socio-economic factors, and historical and cultural factors are considered. The study finds that socio-economic and nat-ural environmental factors alternate in the spatial distribution of traditional villages in Hebei Province. The influence of the interaction of these factors increases significantly, and so-cio-economic factors have a stronger influence on the spatial distribution. Specifically, the spatial distribution of traditional villages in Hebei Province is influenced by natural environmental fac-tors, while socio-economic factors act as drivers of spatial distribution. Historical and cultural factors act as catalysts of spatial distribution, and policy directions are external forces of spatial distribution. Overall, this study provides valuable insights into the spatial distribution charac-teristics and influencing factors of traditional villages in Hebei Province, which can be used to develop effective strategies for rural revitalisation in China

Public engagement in urban innovation: towards the concept of inclusive mobility

In the process towards smart city, the concept of public transportation has evolved as a set of socio-material entanglements by highlighting the social impacts. This research offers a community-based approach to identify criteria for the design towards inclusive mobility by setting a validation model to measure and extract collected stakeholders’ data. The study provides a thematization of optimizing strategies to address mobility in future smart city actions towards sustainable community development, aiming to inspire further research in Italy and beyond

Multi-level Gated Bayesian Recurrent Neural Network for State Estimation

The optimality of Bayesian filtering relies on the completeness of prior models, while deep learning holds a distinct advantage in learning models from offline data. Nevertheless, the current fusion of these two methodologies remains largely ad hoc, lacking a theoretical foundation. This paper presents a novel solution, namely a multi-level gated Bayesian recurrent neural network specifically designed to state estimation under model mismatches. Firstly, we transform the non-Markov state-space model into an equivalent first-order Markov model with memory. It is a generalized transformation that overcomes the limitations of the first-order Markov property and enables recursive filtering. Secondly, by deriving a data-assisted joint state-memory-mismatch Bayesian filtering, we design a Bayesian multi-level gated framework that includes a memory update gate for capturing the temporal regularities in state evolution, a state prediction gate with the evolution mismatch compensation, and a state update gate with the observation mismatch compensation. The Gaussian approximation implementation of the filtering process within the gated framework is derived, taking into account the computational efficiency. Finally, the corresponding internal neural network structures and end-to-end training methods are designed. The Bayesian filtering theory enhances the interpretability of the proposed gated network, enabling the effective integration of offline data and prior models within functionally explicit gated units. In comprehensive experiments, including simulations and real-world datasets, the proposed gated network demonstrates superior estimation performance compared to benchmark filters and state-of-the-art deep learning filtering methods