城市更新與社會治理

北京老城內前海和后海間由一座形似銀錠的小橋銜接，天氣好的時候，站在橋上向西憑欄遠眺，近處水波翠柳，遠處西山如黛，“燕京小八景”之一的“銀錠觀山”因此得名，更是老城內唯一展現山–水–城相融的景觀視廊。從前走上銀錠橋，有一棟積水潭醫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，并通過城與人、古與今、觀與思的關系中表現出來的。但城市更新并不是要建造看起來古老的城市，而是以自然、發展、歷史和對現有模式的評估為依據，處理好城市歷史感與現代感的統一，以及物態性保護與人居環境、文化情境的統一。

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。”這意味著城市不僅是一個物器，更是迭代時間維度中，人文歷史與自然環境時刻經歷著剝繭蝶變過程的場所。城市形態是不斷回應人們需求而動態變化的，更新是促進城市“新陳代謝”的重要手段。當我們面對城市建設日益飽和的情況時，不能再大拆大建，而是通過逐步更新，最大化地利用現有結構，引入新的業態與社會組成，注入時代發展的活力，滿足當前和未來的需求。在更新過程中如何見微知著，見端知末，以空間形態為主要抓手，通過開放、多元、合作的城市治理模式，協調城市建設與居民生活的關系，實現城市空間價值重塑，為市民生活和城市發展注入深沉持久的動力，正是當代城市可持續發展的關鍵。

2016年“聯合國第三次住房和城市可持續發展大會”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調問題的根本行動指南。因此，對于居民來說，了解所生活的城市是如何變化發展的尤為重要，這種意識的提高往往要從基礎開始，需要規劃師扎根社區一線并參與其中，把市民實際訴求通過借助專業團隊力量來進行統籌、凝結，發展共識，付諸共同行動，最終完成規劃設計語言的轉譯，推動生活環境的創新設計，才能實現共同締造。例如建立街道規劃師等制度，鼓勵更多的設計師、專家學者等專業人員服務城市更新，引導社會力量投資基礎設施及營造公共空間，完善多方合作機制。同時，利用互聯網、人工智能、大數據等信息技術搭建公眾參與平臺，結合社區自主管理組織活動、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，增強群眾對城市的認同感、歸屬感和自豪感，推動形成人人參與共治的格局。

通過近年的實踐，深入社區廣泛開展社區微更新共治共享活動，得到非常多積極反饋。一個主要原因是社區更新描繪的是現代生活，與我們當下所處的時代相符。人們也許會對古代城市的美與詩意無限向往，但對于身邊日常生活場景更有真真切切的感悟，也更有發言權，不需要經過專門訓練就能參與到設計改造中來，這樣豐富了公眾參與城市更新的過程和領域，突出了居民作為“激發城市發展動力”主體地位的作用。

如今，時代賦予了城市更新更高的使命，進入由增量向存量、由速度向質量轉化的時期。風景園林作為人居環境建設的重要手段需要直面社會問題，從城市的多元化需求出發去促進社會共識的達成，包括人和人、人和空間、人和自然的關系，整合自上而下與自下而上的力量，通過社會資源的重組鏈接和活力再造，將空間關懷真正落實到社區治理和人的需求層面，助力公共空間的可持續發展，打造更具溫度、更有情懷的城市人文環境，逐步構建“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