Towards Everyday Life: Public Space Design Strategy of Guangzhou Racecourse, China

With the accelerated urbanization in China, public space has generally developed well. Still, there is also the problem of over-emphasizing structure and visuality by neglecting the essence of everyday life and abandoning the local characteristics. The public space, which should be vibrant and pleasant in scale, has been replaced by empty meanings and symbols, disconnected from everyday life. As a result, the spatial vitality is increasingly diminishing. Everyday life not only reflects the most essential needs of the residents but also is a local culture accumulated over time in the regional environment. The idea of public space design from the perspective of everyday life can not only reflect and continue the unique connotation of the city, promote the comprehensive development of urban public space in different directions, such as place, culture and time, but also it can meet the needs of individuals in everyday life, and create a healthy and attractive city. This will create a healthy and attractive urban life and bring continuous vitality to public space. Given this, this paper attempts to build a set of urban public space design strategies from the perspective of everyday life and apply them to the public space design of Guangzhou Racecourse. This paper studies the theories of everyday life at home and abroad to clarify its scope and characteristics. Combining its relationship with public space, the paper identifies the difference between everyday life and public space in Chinese and Western contexts in order to better develop the research in Guangzhou. At the same time, through the study of relevant cases, the author understands the transformation of everyday life in urban design from passive confrontation to dominantly guided to grasp the trend of its continuous development in the context of the times. Based on this theory and cases, taking into account the specific plot of Guangzhou Racecourse, this paper constructs a research framework in the temporal and spatial dimensions. On the one hand, on the urban scale, it explores the internal logic of the everyday life of Guangzhou residents in its historical development and the logic of the construction of the public space involved in it, and extracts the situations of everyday life with local characteristics to guide urban design; on the other hand, on the site scale, it observes the everyday life and public space of the residents in and around the racecourse, clarifies its historical value, the present problems to derive the orientation of its future public space. Based on the synthesis of relevant theories and research results, this paper proposes the principles and strategies of public space design from the perspective of everyday life and applies them to the public space design of the Guangzhou racecourse site. This paper is divided into four parts, including seven chapters. The first part is composed of the first chapter of the introduction. This part introduces the research background, purpose, and significance, the design and the scope of the research. And then this part clarifies the definition of relevant concepts and the status of research at home and abroad, and proposes the basic framework of this paper. The second part is composed of chapters 2 and 3, which are the study of relevant theories and practices. On the one hand, this part is based on the overview of the relevant theories of everyday life, the study of the multi-dimensional discussion of everyday life is launched and considered from different disciplines,