Industrial Heritage Study based on Urban Morphology - the case of Shougang Industrial Field

Industrial heritage sites in cities are highly complex structures, they are fields that are still occupied by abandoned structures but already lost their original functions. Like an isolated island in the urban environment exists in the present urban environment but far away from the daily city life. Even through industrial heritages had been once treated as negative elements in cities, their positive meanings have been noticed with the growing knowledge of them. Industrial Archaeology, which originated in the 1950's in the UK, regards industrial heritage research as a comprehensive discipline and started to face its multifaceted value. While the understands of them has become more and more comprehensive with the development of research, the discussion on the protection of their value and the reuse of resources is a topic that has received more and more attention in recent years. This is also in line with the humanism prevailing culture and sustainable development concept that is popular in recent years. Urban morphology is a discipline that focuses on the transformation process from the birth of object forms, through a multidisciplinary analysis of the effects and influencing factors in the process to understand the intrinsic meaning of form and helps to guide the future development in a continue story. Urban morphology research could cover different levels from the whole city to the single construction elements, and observe the target field from many different directions of views. The application of it into industrial heritage research can adapt to the complexity of an industrial heritage field, contribute to find its story along the time coordinates, and its situation in urban environment. This paper explores the possibility of the application of urban morphology in industrial heritage studies. The first part is stating industrial heritage research and Urban morphology separately, and then taking Shougang Industrial Field in Beijing, China as an example by analyzing this abandoned industrial field from urban, plot and single element levels with morphological research method. While, the second part is firstly summarizing a general idea of current industrial heritage protection, and then trying to propose some guiding rules of the regeneration in Shougang Field based on the analysis result at the first part.