- The Evaluation and Improvement Method of Waterfront Urban Landscape ——the case of urban landscape planning for West Lake in Hangzhou, China   click here to open paper content880 kb
by    Zhao, Ye & Wang, Jianguo | susan_dogbear@hotmail.com   click here to send an email to the auther(s) of this paper
Short Outline
This paper takes West Lake as example, tries to find out both ways of
adjustment from the respects of viewer and landscape, and proposes some
thoughts on the design method.
Abstract
Urban landscape usually contains two layers of meaning: landscape and
viewing, especially in waterfront zone. Traditional design focuses on
landscape design which purely improve the quality of objects in static,
passive way much more than noticing the initiative viewer as subject.
Actually, landscape and viewing are dialectic. Interactive design using
reasonable visual evaluation methods, integrated with “positive” human
activity optimization as well as “passive” landscape improvement, can be
helpful to enhance the quality and controllability.

West Lake in Hangzhou is the famous cultural heritage in China with
humanities and nature fitting each other perfectly, which also represents
the model of blending natural scenery and modern city. Through thousands of
years of constant construction, West Lake tends to be perfect. However,
nowadays, it faces some urgent problems in modern urban development: a
large number of high-rise buildings emerge continuously, moreover, most of
which lack reasonable height and feature control. The relationship between
West Lake and the city has become extremely uncoordinated, as it suffered
very serious “pressure” from the city.

This paper takes West Lake as example, basing on lots of survey, analyzes
the visual effect from every grid viewpoint on the lake (using GPS to
locate), and tries to find out the both way of adjustment from the respects
of viewer and landscape—avoiding bad viewpoints, altering the tour lines as
well as adjusting the urban space structure, changing the feature of
buildings—and finally proposes some thinking on the design method.
Keywords
Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2013: Frontiers of Planning - Evolving and declining models of city planning practice
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