城市更新与社会治理

北京老城内前海和后海间由一座形似银锭的小桥衔接，天气好的时候，站在桥上向西凭栏远眺，近处水波翠柳，远处西山如黛，“燕京小八景”之一的“银锭观山”因此得名，更是老城内唯一展现山–水–城相融的景观视廊。从前走上银锭桥，有一栋积水潭医院高层建筑横插在山水之间，如今这栋楼地上层已拆除，又得“银锭桥横夕照间，依然晴翠送遥山”景致。北京正通过有序疏解来重现老城舒朗壮美的空间秩序，让城市留住记忆。

城市的魅力是在历史语境中得以张扬，并通过城与人、古与今、观与思的关系中表现出来的。但城市更新并不是要建造看起来古老的城市，而是以自然、发展、历史和对现有模式的评估为依据，处理好城市历史感与现代感的统一，以及物态性保护与人居环境、文化情境的统一。

亚里士多德说“人们来到城市，是为了生活，人们居留于城市，是为了生活得更好。”这意味着城市不仅是一个物器，更是迭代时间维度中，人文历史与自然环境时刻经历着剥茧蝶变过程的场所。城市形态是不断回应人们需求而动态变化的，更新是促进城市“新陈代谢”的重要手段。当我们面对城市建设日益饱和的情况时，不能再大拆大建，而是通过逐步更新，最大化地利用现有结构，引入新的业态与社会组成，注入时代发展的活力，满足当前和未来的需求。在更新过程中如何见微知著，见端知末，以空间形态为主要抓手，通过开放、多元、合作的城市治理模式，协调城市建设与居民生活的关系，实现城市空间价值重塑，为市民生活和城市发展注入深沉持久的动力，正是当代城市可持续发展的关键。

2016年“联合国第三次住房和城市可持续发展大会”通过了《新城市议程》，提出 “人人共享城市”的核心愿景，“共建共治共享”成为解决城市更新中利益协调问题的根本行动指南。因此，对于居民来说，了解所生活的城市是如何变化发展的尤为重要，这种意识的提高往往要从基础开始，需要规划师扎根社区一线并参与其中，把市民实际诉求通过借助专业团队力量来进行统筹、凝结，发展共识，付诸共同行动，最终完成规划设计语言的转译，推动生活环境的创新设计，才能实现共同缔造。例如建立街道规划师等制度，鼓励更多的设计师、专家学者等专业人员服务城市更新，引导社会力量投资基础设施及营造公共空间，完善多方合作机制。同时，利用互联网、人工智能、大数据等信息技术搭建公众参与平台，结合社区自主管理组织活动、专题展示、融媒体多种宣传形式拓宽公众参与城市更新的途径，增强群众对城市的认同感、归属感和自豪感，推动形成人人参与共治的格局。

通过近年的实践，深入社区广泛开展社区微更新共治共享活动，得到非常多积极反馈。一个主要原因是社区更新描绘的是现代生活，与我们当下所处的时代相符。人们也许会对古代城市的美与诗意无限向往，但对于身边日常生活场景更有真真切切的感悟，也更有发言权，不需要经过专门训练就能参与到设计改造中来，这样丰富了公众参与城市更新的过程和领域，突出了居民作为“激发城市发展动力”主体地位的作用。

如今，时代赋予了城市更新更高的使命，进入由增量向存量、由速度向质量转化的时期。风景园林作为人居环境建设的重要手段需要直面社会问题，从城市的多元化需求出发去促进社会共识的达成，包括人和人、人和空间、人和自然的关系，整合自上而下与自下而上的力量，通过社会资源的重组链接和活力再造，将空间关怀真正落实到社区治理和人的需求层面，助力公共空间的可持续发展，打造更具温度、更有情怀的城市人文环境，逐步构建“融合自然的城市更新与共享”新模式。

Urban Renewal and Social Governance

In the old city of Beijing, there is a small bridge in the shape of silver ingot that connects Qianhai and Houhai Lakes. If you stand on the bridge on clear days and look into the West, you can see water waves and emerald willows nearby and West Hills in the distance. That’s how the “Silver Ingot Bridge Capturing Mountain View”, one of the “Eight Scenes in Yanjing”, is named.It is the only landscape corridor in the old city that presents the integration of mountain, water and city. Before that, if you walk on the Silver Ingot Bridge, you can see a high-rise building of Jishuitan Hospital right between the hilly area and the lake. Now the over-ground floors of the building have been put down, and the scenery of “Silver Ingot Bridge crossing in the sunset, facing the green mountain in the distance” has been formed. Beijing is currently trying to restore the comfortable and magnificent spatial order of the old city through orderly relief, so as to retain the memory of the old city.

The charm of a city is revealed in its historical context and expressed through the relationships between the city and its people, between the ancient and the modern, and between the appearance and the idea. Urban renewal is not to build a city that looks ancient, but to, on the basis of nature, development, history and the evaluation of the existing mode, deal with the unity of the sense of history and modernity and the unity of physical state protection, living environment and cultural context.

As Aristotle said, “people come to cities for a life, and live there for a better one,” which means that a city is not only a physical object, but also a place where human history and natural environment are always undergoing material changes in the iteration of time. The urban form is changing dynamically in response to people’s needs, and urban renewal is one of the important means to promote its “metabolism”. When urban construction is increasingly saturated, large-scale demolition and construction are no longer feasible. We need to gradually update, make full use of the existing structure, introduce new business forms and social compositions, and inject the vitality of the development of the times to meet the current and future needs. Therefore, in the process of urban renewal, the key to the sustainable development of contemporary cities is to see how things will develop from one small clue, to see the beginning and figure out the prospect, to take the spatial form as the main starting point, to coordinate the relationship between urban construction and residents’ life through the open, multi-based and cooperative urban governance mode, to reconstruct the urban spatial value, and to inject deep and long-lasting power into citizens’ life and urban development.

In 2016, the United Nations Conference Housing and Sustainable Urban Development (Habitat III) passed theNew Urban Agendawhich put forward the core vision of “City for All”, and “co-construction, co-governance and sharing” became a fundamental action guide for solving interest coordination problems in urban renewal. Therefore, it is particularly important for residents to understand how their cities change and develop. To improve this awareness, we often need to start from the foundation.Planners need to take root in the community, coordinate the actual demands of citizens and condense them into development consensus with the help of professional teams. After that, they need to put the development consensus into the joint action and finally complete the translation of the planning and design language. Only by pushing the innovative design of the living environment can we achieve joint creation. For example, we can set up a community planner system, encourage more professionals including designers,experts, and scholars to serve urban renewal, attract social forces to invest in the infrastructure and create public space, and improve the multi-party cooperation mechanism. At the same time, we can use the Internet, artificial intelligence, big data and other information technologies to build a public participation platform, and provide more means for the public to participate in urban renewal, enhance their sense of identity, sense of belonging and sense of pride in the city, and promote the formation of a pattern of “everyone participates in city governance” through various publicity forms such as community independent management and organization activities, special exhibitions and media.

In recent years, many practitioners went deep into communities and carried out series of community micro renewal,co-governance and community sharing activities, and received a lot of positive feedback. One of the major reasons is that community renewal depicts the modern life, which is consistent with the time we are facing with. People may yearn for the beauty and poetry of ancient cities, but they have more real feelings of and more to say about the daily life scenes. They don’t need special training to participate in the urban design and reconstruction, which not only enriches the process and field of public participation in urban renewal but also highlights the role of residents as the main body to “stimulate the driving force of urban development”.

Nowadays, the times has given urban renewal a greater mission to step forward into the period of transformation from increment to inventory and from speed to quality. As an important means of human settlements construction, landscape architecture not only needs to face social problems directly,but also needs to promote the reaching of a social consensus from the diversified needs of the city, covering the relationships between man and man, man and space, and man and nature.Actions are needs to integrate the top-down and bottomup forces, reorganize social resources, and revitalize the inner vitality to truly implement space care at community governance and human needs. Besides, it is also worth focused to assist the sustainable development of public space, create a warm and caring urban environment, thus gradually build a new mode of“nature-integrated urban renewal and sharing”.

Editor-in-Chief: Professor ZHENG Xi

August 25, 2021