城市更新與社會(huì)治理

北京老城內(nèi)前海和后海間由一座形似銀錠的小橋銜接，天氣好的時(shí)候，站在橋上向西憑欄遠(yuǎn)眺，近處水波翠柳，遠(yuǎn)處西山如黛，“燕京小八景”之一的“銀錠觀山”因此得名，更是老城內(nèi)唯一展現(xiàn)山–水–城相融的景觀視廊。從前走上銀錠橋，有一棟積水潭醫(yī)院高層建筑橫插在山水之間，如今這棟樓地上層已拆除，又得“銀錠橋橫夕照間，依然晴翠送遙山”景致。北京正通過有序疏解來重現(xiàn)老城舒朗壯美的空間秩序，讓城市留住記憶。

城市的魅力是在歷史語境中得以張揚(yáng)，并通過城與人、古與今、觀與思的關(guān)系中表現(xiàn)出來的。但城市更新并不是要建造看起來古老的城市，而是以自然、發(fā)展、歷史和對(duì)現(xiàn)有模式的評(píng)估為依據(jù)，處理好城市歷史感與現(xiàn)代感的統(tǒng)一，以及物態(tài)性保護(hù)與人居環(huán)境、文化情境的統(tǒng)一。

亞里士多德說“人們來到城市，是為了生活，人們居留于城市，是為了生活得更好?！边@意味著城市不僅是一個(gè)物器，更是迭代時(shí)間維度中，人文歷史與自然環(huán)境時(shí)刻經(jīng)歷著剝繭蝶變過程的場(chǎng)所。城市形態(tài)是不斷回應(yīng)人們需求而動(dòng)態(tài)變化的，更新是促進(jìn)城市“新陳代謝”的重要手段。當(dāng)我們面對(duì)城市建設(shè)日益飽和的情況時(shí)，不能再大拆大建，而是通過逐步更新，最大化地利用現(xiàn)有結(jié)構(gòu)，引入新的業(yè)態(tài)與社會(huì)組成，注入時(shí)代發(fā)展的活力，滿足當(dāng)前和未來的需求。在更新過程中如何見微知著，見端知末，以空間形態(tài)為主要抓手，通過開放、多元、合作的城市治理模式，協(xié)調(diào)城市建設(shè)與居民生活的關(guān)系，實(shí)現(xiàn)城市空間價(jià)值重塑，為市民生活和城市發(fā)展注入深沉持久的動(dòng)力，正是當(dāng)代城市可持續(xù)發(fā)展的關(guān)鍵。

2016年“聯(lián)合國第三次住房和城市可持續(xù)發(fā)展大會(huì)”通過了《新城市議程》，提出 “人人共享城市”的核心愿景，“共建共治共享”成為解決城市更新中利益協(xié)調(diào)問題的根本行動(dòng)指南。因此，對(duì)于居民來說，了解所生活的城市是如何變化發(fā)展的尤為重要，這種意識(shí)的提高往往要從基礎(chǔ)開始，需要規(guī)劃師扎根社區(qū)一線并參與其中，把市民實(shí)際訴求通過借助專業(yè)團(tuán)隊(duì)力量來進(jìn)行統(tǒng)籌、凝結(jié)，發(fā)展共識(shí)，付諸共同行動(dòng)，最終完成規(guī)劃設(shè)計(jì)語言的轉(zhuǎn)譯，推動(dòng)生活環(huán)境的創(chuàng)新設(shè)計(jì)，才能實(shí)現(xiàn)共同締造。例如建立街道規(guī)劃師等制度，鼓勵(lì)更多的設(shè)計(jì)師、專家學(xué)者等專業(yè)人員服務(wù)城市更新，引導(dǎo)社會(huì)力量投資基礎(chǔ)設(shè)施及營造公共空間，完善多方合作機(jī)制。同時(shí)，利用互聯(lián)網(wǎng)、人工智能、大數(shù)據(jù)等信息技術(shù)搭建公眾參與平臺(tái)，結(jié)合社區(qū)自主管理組織活動(dòng)、專題展示、融媒體多種宣傳形式拓寬公眾參與城市更新的途徑，增強(qiáng)群眾對(duì)城市的認(rèn)同感、歸屬感和自豪感，推動(dòng)形成人人參與共治的格局。

通過近年的實(shí)踐，深入社區(qū)廣泛開展社區(qū)微更新共治共享活動(dòng)，得到非常多積極反饋。一個(gè)主要原因是社區(qū)更新描繪的是現(xiàn)代生活，與我們當(dāng)下所處的時(shí)代相符。人們也許會(huì)對(duì)古代城市的美與詩意無限向往，但對(duì)于身邊日常生活場(chǎng)景更有真真切切的感悟，也更有發(fā)言權(quán)，不需要經(jīng)過專門訓(xùn)練就能參與到設(shè)計(jì)改造中來，這樣豐富了公眾參與城市更新的過程和領(lǐng)域，突出了居民作為“激發(fā)城市發(fā)展動(dòng)力”主體地位的作用。

如今，時(shí)代賦予了城市更新更高的使命，進(jìn)入由增量向存量、由速度向質(zhì)量轉(zhuǎn)化的時(shí)期。風(fēng)景園林作為人居環(huán)境建設(shè)的重要手段需要直面社會(huì)問題，從城市的多元化需求出發(fā)去促進(jìn)社會(huì)共識(shí)的達(dá)成，包括人和人、人和空間、人和自然的關(guān)系，整合自上而下與自下而上的力量，通過社會(huì)資源的重組鏈接和活力再造，將空間關(guān)懷真正落實(shí)到社區(qū)治理和人的需求層面，助力公共空間的可持續(xù)發(fā)展，打造更具溫度、更有情懷的城市人文環(huán)境，逐步構(gòu)建“融合自然的城市更新與共享”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