Resilience as a Space Enhancement Strategy in the the Xixing Historic and Cultural Area, Hangzhou City, China

Historic and cultural areas are important carriers of a city's cultural heritage and regional characteristics because of their unique historical and artistic values. The enhancement of the spatial resilience of old historic and cultural areas is an active exploration of how China's old historic and cultural areas can cope with the impact of urbanization, and a positive response to the great importance currently attached to the regeneration of historic and cultural areas in China. At present, the relatively fragile physical and social spaces of most historic and cultural areas in China are unable to cope with the demands of modern lifestyles, which has led to problems of ageing infrastructure, population loss, declining landscape and cultural heritage, resulting in great uncertainty about the development of the community. Therefore, it is urgent to explore ways to help old historic and cultural areas to cope with the disturbances of urbanization and to transform their development. Resilience theory offers new ideas and approaches to the transformation of historic and cultural areas in a new era. A review of the literature reveals that research on resilience theory has expanded from the traditional natural disaster perspective to a comprehensive perspective, exploring the adaptive and transformative capacity of communities in the context of social structural change. However, because the research interest only started in recent years, the existing research on resilient community spaces in China only covers a single area, mainly new communities and ordinary old communities, and no systematic design strategy for resilient spaces has been constructed to guide future design practices in the old historic and cultural area. Therefore, this study translates the abstract "resilience theory" into concrete "resilient space characteristics" and finally supports the further revitalization and development of the historic and cultural area by reorganizing and integrating various elements inside, and also breaking the rigid structure of the original part to give it spatial resilience. There are two research results in this dissertation: firstly, the development lineage and existing problems of the historic and cultural area of Xixing; Secondly, the strategy system of spatial resilience enhancement of the historic and cultural area of Xixing.