A Study on the Morphological Evolution of the Inner City Wall Area of Guangzhou (GuiDe Gate - XiaoNan Gate Section) and its Revitalizing Design

The word "Cheng Kuo" refers to the outline of a city, also as the city wall area. The city wall, as an important defensive facility for ancient cities to resist foreign invasion, formed the overall outline of the city. The city moat is the river that surrounds the city wall. Excavate the moat, the excavated soil can build the city wall. The development and evolution of them not only affected the material space form of the surrounding areas, but also was closely related to people's lives. The city gate is the most important node space in the city wall area. As the entrance of the city wall connecting the inner and outer spaces of the city, the city gate plays the role of organizing traffic, military defense, city flood control and symbol and so on, and is also the main place where a large number of crowd activities occur within the range of the city wall area. Studying the city gate node is an important entry point to discuss the change of the city wall area. The research scope of this dissertation is the eastern section of the inner city wall area of Guangzhou, located between the Inner city and the Southern City, including the former city wall from GuiDe Gate to XiaoNan Gate, the city moat YuDai Moat and the four city gate nodes, which belong to the core area of the old city of Guangzhou. The time span of the study is from the construction before Ming dynasties to the present, including the whole cycle of the inner city's establishment, development, demolition and disappearance. Guangzhou laid the basic spatial pattern in the Ming and Qing dynasties after the development of successive dynasties. During the Republican period, the city walls were demolished to build roads, and the city moats were gradually silted up and covered as streets. In the process of evolution, the inner city wall area has lost its own spatial characteristics, and it is difficult to identify the old city site space without historical relics. In recent years, most studies on the morphological evolution of Guangzhou's old city focus on specific historical districts and blocks. From the perspective of "typo-morphology", combined with historical documents and current situation investigation, this paper studies the historical morphological evolution of Guangzhou's inner city wall area(GuiDe Gate-XiaoNan Gate section) from the aspects of overall urban spatial form, street and road network, plan units and combination, and building types. According to the morphological changes of the inner city wall area in different historical stages, it is divided into five historical periods longitudinally, to analyze the transformation of the inner city wall area from closed to open and from single function to compound function Based on the evolution of the inner city wall area, this paper analyzes the type and form status quo of the two historical city gates, GuiDe Gate and WenMing Gate, as well as the existing problems in the block, and uses the method of type design to propose regeneration and optimization strategies suitable for the reconstruction of historical memory and future development, so as to reshape the spatial form pattern of Guangzhou's inner city wall area. Attaching importance to the renovation of the two city gate nodes, is not only the restoration of the historical form, but also the revitalization of the city's function and cultural value.