Weaving as an urban design analogy: the potential of urban leftover spaces

Cities always carry the wealth of human beings during the dynamic development. Containing the material elements and the spiritual ones, cities provide human beings with a good and comfortable living environment, a convenient and accessible transportation network, sufficient job opportunities, diversified and rich recreational activities to the greatest extent. In addition, Urban space always records the history of human society, contain the concentrated memory of the times, and describe the unique humanistic color. Urban land resources are precious, with the vacancy of urban development, the change of urban functions, the omission of urban space management, the complexity of land ownership and other issues, China's urbanization process has gradually shifted from incremental development to stock development. Under this background, the development of urban leftover spaces is imperative. How to improve the urban leftover spaces with new urban functions, how to better integrate the urban context and social life into the urban leftover spaces, and how to retain its historical memory while activating its potential and rejuvenating its vitality are topics to be discussed urgently. So far, many theories have been put forward. The “Weaving” concept emphasizes the integrality, coordination, pluralism, dynamics and context of the city. The scope of it has expanded from urban spatial field which mainly focuses on the historical urban area and block to the scope of the overall urban system. Therefore, its universality has gradually improved. The “Weaving” of urban leftover space is one of the ways to redevelop urban space. Taking urban leftover space as the research object, this paper explores the “fragmentation” of urban leftover spaces from different perspectives. Under the concept of the “Weaving”, combined with relevant methods and theories, applying with multi-level research, comprehensive analysis, literature collection, field investigation, quantitative and qualitative analysis and other methods, this paper discusses the coupling relationship between the “Weaving” and urban leftover space, injects the core design principles of the “Weaving” including coordination, diversity, dynamic, gradualism, Contextualism and humanism, into the updating of urban leftover space, summarizes and refines the urban design methodology of “supplement - connection - growing – fusion” for urban leftover space, so as to stimulate the space potential and guide their growth, providing new ideas for urban design. With the help of GIS technology, based on field investigation and other methods, this paper carries out quantitative or qualitative analyses on the Guangzhou Racecourse, and applies the theoretical research to it. In the research, the function, traffic system, open space, green space, spatial form, building status and context are analyzed at the hierarchical level, the potentials of different urban leftover spaces are evaluated, and different spatial reuse modes are applied, then the problems are extracted and the opportunities and challenges are analyzed. Finally, the orientation, goals and the weaving strategies of the racecourse are formulated. The purpose is to improve the integrality between the racecourse plot and the city, link the initial racecourse memory, the change and the future functional orientation, revive its vitality and continue its context.