Living heritage and place revitalisation: a study of place identity of Lili, a rural historic canal town in China
China is confronting intractable challenges during the process of urbanisation. The urban rural binary structure that has developed since 1958 has led to a gap in development between urban and rural China. Rapid urbanisation has exacerbated the gap between urban and rural areas and has caused the outflow of rural residents seeking employment in cities, which has led to 'hollowed villages' that is, with decreasing populations, in rural China. These issues have attracted much attention from the central Chinese government who have promulgated a series of policies to support rural development, especially economically. In recent decades, developers and governments have increased the economic profits from real estate and tourism economies in rural areas, so that historic cultural landscapes have, in some places, been replaced by modern residential apartments or pseudo historic districts in rural historic towns and villages. Under this situation, historic cultural landscapes with significant place identities, attachment and collective memories have been impacted, and the cultural and social values within these rural communities are gradually diminishing. In consideration of these issues in rural China, in 2018, Chinese President Xi Jinping proposed the 'Rural Revitalisation Strategy' for future rural redevelopment. This research examines how such strategies are unfolding in rural China taking Lili, a Chinese rural historic canal as an example. The motivation of this research is to devise principles and recommendations on how revitalisation in China can incorporate place identity and heritage management to achieve socially sustainable development in rural communities. The broad aim of the thesis is to establish a framework for analysing rural historic towns and villages in China, and beyond, within the context of rapid urbanisation and the need to respond to the threats to the social and physical fabric of Chinese rural places. To achieve this aim, Chapters 2 and 3 critically review the concepts of sustainable development, heritage and place in both the Western and the Chinese contexts to develop a research framework based on the three dimensions of place identity for research, namely physical characteristics, social place attachment and psychological place attachment. Chapter 4 outlines the methodology used in the thesis, explaining how the combination of digital technologies and qualitative methods are applied to obtain data about both the physical and social environments within Lili. Before the Lili based studies, Chapter 5 examines the broad relationship between urban and rural development in China and reviews the central government policies designed to support rural revitalisation. Chapter 6 analyses how Chinese architects have attempted to shape and sustain the place identity of rural historic towns and villages during rural revitalisation. This analysis leads to original term 'semi vernacular' differentiating designs or developments within which social as well as physical values are conserved, and establishing the advantage of semi vernacular over 'neo vernacular' approaches to village revitalisation. Based on the three dimensions, Chapter 7, 8 and 9 take Lili as a case to examine its place identity through fieldwork analysis, which includes recording the physical characteristics (at the urban and architectural scale) social and psychological place attachment. The data of physical characteristics are collected by digital technologies (e.g. 3D scanning and photogrammetry) and analysed by developing diagrams based on morphological and typological approaches. The data about social and psychological place attachment are collected by observation and semistructured interview and analysed by thematic analysis. In conclusion, this research innovatively incorporates sustainable community and place identity considerations in rural revitalisation and proposes an original Sustainable Community Model for the rural heritage setting in China. The Sustainable Community Model reveals that retaining the place identity and making the rural place as living heritage, helps to sustain the development of rural historic towns and villages. At the detailed level, this research gives recommendations and principles to guide the revitalisation of Lili; but more broadly, the Sustainable Community Model based on findings from Lili helps architects, urban designers and the decision makers to identify the significant factors in design and management to create sustainable communities for rural revitalisation in China. This model requires researchers to understand historic cultural landscapes comprehensively and suggests architects should also take non authorised heritage into consideration, such as locally meaningful objects, local social networks and personal memories, all of which contribute to the social and psychological place attachment that sustains communities. This is applicable to similar rural historic towns and villages in China and even other nations, facing similar challenges of declining rural populations and challenges to both historic built fabric and morphology, and rural ways of life. From the perspective of methodology, this research offers an original integrated application of digital technologies, including mobile 3D scanning and photogrammetry, in the study of the historic cultural landscape enabling both typological and morphological analysis, and demonstrates that it is a valuable approach for future research and management in rural revitalisation in China and elsewhere.