Suchergebnisse

This research is a historical study of urban life and the urban fabric of Tang-Song China and nineteenth-century England. The urban patterns of these two historical cases show opposite transformations: from zoning to mixed-use, and vice versa. The inquiry and analysis are structured into three key aspects urban fabric, legibility of architecture, and people s living trajectories, which are all centered on the research question: whether physical, land-use variety is inherently connected to social diversity? Each of the three pairs of chapters examines one aspect in detail and the paired chapters are presented as comparative case studies. Firstly, the development of the urban fabric is a process of social and cultural production. Inhabitants are the prime agent in creating urban forms. Determined by strong social, political, economic and cultural forces, urban forms in Song-era China and Victorian England exhibits different patterns, but, as this historical inquiry validates, both of them were uniquely fitted into their social and cultural contexts. Secondly, the efficacy of urban forms is circumstantial. The development of architectural forms in pre-modern China was static, while that of nineteenth-century England was diverse. The role of architecture in articulating social hierarchy and relationship has been well performed since ancient times. However, further extending the role of architecture as a social apparatus in instructing human perception and behaviour requires social acceptance and cultural capacity to assure its efficacy. Thirdly, people s living patterns, evidenced as their spatial experience, vary individually while at the same time they demonstrate certain affinity among similar social members. For social interaction, it should not be understood as a merely observable phenomenon at a certain physical locus. Social coherence too, is structured by social, economic, cultural, religious, and political forces, rather than by physical planning. If the modern planning discourse essentially lies in the ...

Embracing the legacy of historic urban streets -- Historical preservation, heritage conservation and urban regeneration -- Imperial Street: Southern Song Imperial Street, Hangzhou -- Residential street: Pingjiang Street, Suzhou -- Commercial Street: Tunxi Old Street, Huangshan -- The past and future of China's historic street districts -- Achieving an authentic historic urban street in China.

A current and universal challenge, particularly in developing nations, is the establishment of effective environmental regulation policies that protect the ecological environment without adversely affecting the international competitiveness of the domestic manufacturing industry. To deal with this dilemma, this study investigates the export competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry from the viewpoint of export value added. The Porter hypothesis is applied for an empirical investigation of the effect of environmental regulation on export competitiveness and to determine the presence of intra-industry heterogeneity. Furthermore, this study seeks to understand the mechanisms through which environmental regulation affects export competitiveness by exploring the two main approaches to technological innovation. The findings reveal that environmental regulation has a promotion effect of approximately 2% on the export competitiveness of China's manufacturing industry; however, this effect is non-linear and displays a "U-shaped" tendency, indicating that certain prerequisites must be fulfilled to validate the Porter hypothesis. In addition, the effect of environmental regulation displays significant intra-industry heterogeneity, which is evident primarily in heavily polluting sub-industries and to a lesser extent in moderately polluting sub-industries but insignificant in lightly polluting sub-industries. Environmental regulation also differs significantly in the mechanisms through which it affects different approaches to technological innovation. Independent research and development is affected by environmental regulation through the compliance cost effect, which limits export competitiveness, while technology introduction is affected by the innovation offset effect, which favors export competitiveness. These findings offer political implications for the sustainable development of the ecological environment and foreign trade.

In the context of current drives for the renewal and conservation of rural Chinese villages, socialist villages developed under Mao Zedong's tenure as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (1949-1976) seem have been marginalized. This research selects one of Mao's model villages, Qinyong village in Ningbo, Zhejiang Province, as a case study. Through historical and on-site research, this article articulates and analyses the transformation of the village landscape from the early socialist period to the latest renovation in 2014. Focusing in particular on the transformation of the village's housing from the 1970s to the 1990s, the article tries to identify historical conditions of social, political and economic organization embedded in their physical forms. By juxtaposing the recent planning and renovation of the village with its past, the discussion of the village's architectural heritage is intended to cast some light on key aspects of village preservation and revitalization in rural China.

The late twentieth and early twenty-first century has witnessed the unfortunate plight of demolition or irreparable damage for thousands of historic streets across China as a result of urbanization and redevelopment. A core of committed practitioners, academics and enlightened local governments have begun to recognize the important historical legacy of these streets and are undertaking conservation and revitalization projects. In Suzhou, approximately 100 km west of Shanghai, Pingjiang Street/district is an historical urban area that has recently undergone sensitive conservation and become one of the 'must-see' places in the city. This paper presents a historical account of the development, demise and resurrection of the houses, streets and waterways of Pingjiang district. The area's long history can be broadly structured into two critical and dialectical phases: the period of growth and incremental change during the Imperial period, and the pressures for change and development during the twentieth century. The paper will compare the socio-cultural factors that have shaped the layout of houses, streets and waterways and thus the whole street/district during these contrasting periods. These periods of transition will be followed by a critical review and assessment of urban conservation and revitalization of the area under the banner of 'heritage'.

Traditional thermodynamic models for military turbofans suffer from non-convergence and inaccuracy due to inaccuracy of the component maps and the instability of the iterative process. To address these problems, a thermodynamically oriented and neural network-based hybrid model for military turbofans is proposed. Different from iteration-based thermodynamic models, the proposed hybrid model transforms the iteration process into a multi-objective optimization and training process for a component-level neural network in order to improve convergence and modeling accuracy. The experiment shows that the accuracy of the proposed hybrid model can reach about 7%, 5% better than the map-fitting-based thermodynamic model and 8% better than the purely data-driven method, with a similar number of network neutrons, verifying its effectiveness. The contributions of this work mainly lie in the following aspects: a new component-level neural network structure is proposed to improve convergence and computational efficiency; a multi-objective loss function based on component co-working is proposed to direct the model to converge toward the physical thermodynamic process; a fusion training method of multiple data sources is established to train the model with good convergence and high computational accuracy.