How Do Cities Define Themselves?

A domestic architect once told reporters that he was afraid that modern cities would be trapped in two "deliberate" planning tendencies. One was the so-called CBD style. The skyscrapers seemed to be the only mode of competition, and the other was the patchwork of modern style and traditional elements. Such cities were often lost in the simple imitation of neither fish nor fowl.

How to locate the city itself? The checkerboard "square lattice" of Barcelona in World Expo, Shanghai, has attracted wide attention. The compact urban planning always gives different charm to the harmonious coexistence of new urban areas and ancient buildings.

Another Spanish city, Bilbao, tells the story of a museum extending to visitors. Outstanding architecture and planning enhance the cultural taste of the city and change the fate of the city.

"Sometimes cities are like chess, things like chess, life is like chess."

On the side of the case Hall of the Spanish Barcelona in World Expo, Shanghai, this very philosophical discourse reveals the unique thinking of the city in planning.

When the city is running fast, it can not lose its original charm. This requires the city planning to find its own cultural identity in the exploration of aesthetics.

It is found that there are many cases of urban pmission of this idea in this World Expo.

City is culture.

"Fang Ge Zi" is the appellation of Barcelona best practice area to its own city planning.

In today's Barcelona, the old urban area basically maintains the overall structure of the old historical buildings and old cities, and has a strong European ancient civilization. The construction style of the new urban area is a modern architecture which combines European traditional forms with various decorative methods.

On the urban road system, the new town has planned a chessboard road network which is completely different from the old city. It connects the old city center with the old city center formed by history, and makes the new and old two cities showing a harmonious atmosphere of harmony.

In the exhibition, the reporters found that the cultural charm brought by the ancient times is always passing through Barcelona's urban development.

An unkind person can not evade the greatness of architecture and art in Barcelona. It has the best modern architecture in Europe. This street is not only the street lamps and chairs, but also the chapel and private residence of Spanish upper class in the late nineteenth Century, and the mark left by Anthony Gaudi, the greatest architect of west slope, can be seen everywhere.

17 works of Gaudi's life have been carefully preserved, just as the city's slogan is: "city is culture, culture is city."

The rapid development of cities has made many ancient buildings and historic cities not only be eroded by nature, but also more destroyed by human beings.

Dieter Hassenpflug, Professor of architecture at Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany, told reporters that while the city is reflecting on modernization, historical memory and traditional spirit will help us find answers to the future.

From the perspective of planning, cities can make rational use of old cities, old areas and old buildings, so that they can adapt to new needs and maintain the cultural characteristics of cities and the continuity of local culture.

In World Expo, Shanghai, the "Decheng press" in the Macao case museum also conveys such ideas.

"De Cheng Zhi" was the largest pawn shop in Macao, which once evolved into a house. Finally, it became an industry museum through cooperation between the government and the private sector.

The pawn shop in the past century has been protected, and its unique cultural connotation has become a positive part of today's urban life.

Suit your own style.

Far away from the environment and background, lack of understanding of the city and context, and the pursuit of maximizing business profits, if the reshaping of the city is equivalent to planning and pformation on a blank sheet of paper, this unlimited freedom will destroy the original "self" of the city.

A city needs its own planning and style.

If you encounter a city that reinventing bottlenecks, you might as well search for inspiration from the case of Bilbao, Spain, World Expo.

Bilbao, once an important European steel and shipbuilding center, decided to develop tourism for the revitalization of the city. The museum has become a key part of the whole urban renewal plan.

In 1991, the municipal government and the Guggenheim foundation decided to invite the American architect Frank Gary to design the Guggenheim Museum for the city.

So a masterpiece of architecture changed the fate of a city.

As the most spectacular Deconstruction Architecture in the world, Guggenheim Museum has quickly become the most prestigious architectural sanctuary and palace of art in Europe, which has promoted the cultural taste of Bilbao.

After that, Bilbao invited many famous architects from the world to design various landmark buildings for them.

Today, walking on the streets of Bilbao is like walking into an open architecture museum, with the Spanish architect Arata Isozaki Santiago's "White Bridge" and the tower of the Japanese architect.

Guggenheim Museum symbolizes the rebirth of Bilbao, but the great change in the city is the result of a series of urban construction, economic and social measures.

Bilbao's pformation in the past 25 years has been condensed into 25 projects. They have jointly created a new look of the city.

Old city pformation, port expansion, industrial zone relocation, new and old bridges connecting cities, urban subway in all directions, airport connection, technology development park, emerging hotels and large venues, new trams, ancient buildings are youthful, new city buildings, urban art...

Looking closely at these 25 projects and reconstructing the "equation" of the city seem strange, but the "Museum" planning is not universal.

Future ecological feelings

The Japanese pavilion in World Expo tells a story about the future city's ecological feelings with a story of Zhu Zhu. The old man who reconstructed the mountain village, Mr. Morita recently painted a picture with forests and white clouds. After the painting was finished, there was always something missing. When Morita's grandson was playing with a group of children in the mountain forest, he felt what he saw. A photographer who liked to photograph captured a scene that surprised her by making a long distance zoom camera.

The ties that connect these characters are actually a plumage of the Crested Ibis.

At the end of the story, Morita finally completed his own painting: flying over the mountain forest is Zhu Zhu.

Urban development shapes the myth of economic growth, but destroys the balance between city and nature. When high energy consumption industrial activities encircle and pollute cities, people begin to review and reflect whether urban planning is necessarily against economic goals.

Ando Tadao, a famous Japanese architect, said that when it comes to urban creativity, building a sustainable society is truly creative in terms of the global environment.

The concept of environmental protection seems to be conservative, which seems to conflict with creativity. However, this is not the case. Every city should create a society where human beings are symbiotic with other species.

Turkey's third largest city, Izmir City Museum, shows the city's largest polluted bay by the "urban ditch reconstruction".

Before, tens of thousands of household and industrial wastewater discharged into the Gulf, causing serious pollution. The animals and plants and ecosystems in and around the Gulf have been seriously affected.

The water supply and sewage administration of Izmir has constructed a 4150 km long sewage collection pipeline through the implementation of a large channel project, and has used 2 main pumping stations to draw waste water into the wastewater treatment plant and a series of comprehensive management measures, thus reconstructing the natural environment of Izmir Bay and further enhancing the cultural connotation of the whole city.

Similarly, the "zero carbon Pavilion" in London's best practices area in World Expo and the riparian reconstruction project in Madrid case show the exploration of "pollution from pollution" to urban development.

In order to follow the principles of sustainable development and environmental protection, cities in the future should provide attractive and convenient urban areas in the city, enabling people to live and work in it, encourage urban land and building regeneration, and make use of the abandoned and polluted land after being repaired, developed or opened as an open space, and maintain ecological diversity.