With their disappearance in China for decades, our society has irretrievably lost some valuable things in spirit.
Block life is the soul of open community.
01.
The block is the living room of urban life.
It is very common for people to walk in the bustling old streets for leisure, while in a hurry in the cold new city.
An important task of the open community is to shape the spiritual life of the block.
Everyone can still remember the family members and neighbors of other students more than 40 years ago, and the scenes and stories in the alleys.
For purely technical problems, there have been some attempts to solve them.
Many theoretical studies of urban design abroad are comparing the failure of the construction of new towns after the Second World War and summarizing the characteristics of the charming historical blocks in the past.
(1) Most of the traditional streets and alleys are formed naturally.
For example, people in hutongs and courtyards in Beijing several decades ago are obviously different groups, with different characteristics in terms of language and behavior, and even divided into different gangs.
In such a limited space with a strong sense of domain, the interaction between neighbors is formed, and the intrusion of strangers is easily recognized.
So, what kind of space can produce dynamic street life? What kind of opening mode is more suitable for our national conditions? I think our open block should have the following elements.
For example, some residential areas in the south are overhead on the ground floor, and the gardens are set on the upper floor, trying to solve the problem of smooth urban traffic on the ground floor, but the residential areas on the upper floor still constitute a super large community; As for community resources, there will also be new forms of sharing in the era of the Internet of Things.
In view of the drawbacks of urban construction in the past two decades, the central government has put forward the policy of no longer building closed residential areas, but there are still different understandings about how to build open communities and what kind of open communities to build.
At present, problems such as urban traffic and resource sharing are more criticized.
Reconstructed block life is the source of open community.
The problems to be solved by the open community are the disadvantages brought by the walled community in the courtyard.
The first is the technical level.
In the construction of new residential areas, how to continue the spirit of urban blocks and reshape our local spiritual home, instead of just staying at the technical level to solve urban problems, we need to learn from the tradition.
Even the planned cities and towns have evolved into the most accessible routes after a long period of time.
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The division of courtyards hinders the opening and communication of society, and different courtyards tend to form different classes.
Neighborhood relations are indifferent, communication disappears, and people’s self-consciousness is often stronger than public awareness.
Some previously built open residential areas have also been symbolically surrounded by iron railings.
They are the most convenient routes connecting important nodes of cities and towns.
In the past two decades, along with the emerging real estate development, most of the newly built residential areas have been isolated from the outside world with walls and gates.
The problems to be solved are nothing more than two aspects: one is the technical level, the other is the social level.
Together with the old streets and alleys carrying nostalgia and nostalgia, such street life memories are the foundation and soul of a harmonious and stable society.
It is not enough to demolish the wall and solve the traffic problems in the technical level to build an open block, but also pay attention to the reconstruction of the block life and harmonious neighborhood in the spiritual level.
For example, the students in my middle school group and primary school group in WeChat are small friends who live in several adjacent alleys.
The Central Urban Working Conference pointed out that the city should not be a “besieged city” composed of a number of closed “courtyards” and “walls”.
Today’s closed block is bound to aggravate this differentiation trend, so reshaping the block life and building a harmonious society should be the core of the open block.
It is necessary to find security measures to adapt to modern management, try not to build closed residential areas as much as possible, and improve the city’s permeability and microcirculation capacity.
As the “first place” of the park city, Tianfu New Area has always believed that the urban blocks and roads should be human, not just for cars, but also for residents to ride and walk, shopping, catering and friends, leisure and entertainment, and form a comprehensive functional block.
So, how to build an open block, this paper puts forward ideas from the perspective of planning and architectural design.
But none of these can solve the social and spiritual problems.
The space system that maintains the life of the block.
This needs to start from the problems to be solved, and draw on the theory and practice of foreign community construction and our historical experience.
Our city is becoming isolated islands separated from each other.
New urbanism also advocates the implementation of the elements of the dynamic blocks of traditional towns in modern residential planning.
Ancient cities and towns around the world with profound historical deposits are still the spiritual home of modern people.
The traditional charm streets and alleys are still our teachers.
However, people living in the courtyard unit are hard to have that kind of close neighborhood life.
In those traditional streets and alleys, the elderly gather to chat and bask in the sun in the daytime, the men in the neighborhood drink tea and play cards in the evening, the women gather to talk about household work, and the children play shuttlecock on the side.
If today’s community opening does not shape the space and life of the block well, it will return to the previous extensive mode, which can be seen in many so-called open communities that are self-billed in response to the current situation.
Once the block size becomes smaller, the public resources in the original community will inevitably be open to the society.
03.
Dense road networks and narrow streets and alleys replace super-scale streets and alleys, which is a good way to solve the congestion and congestion of urban traffic capillaries.
Those living spaces that have been honed by years bear the civilization and tradition, harmony and order of a society.
02.
Many of the problems it brings have been analyzed in depth in many articles, and will not be discussed here.