AN ALTERNATIVE MODEL FOR URBAN RENEWAL: A GENERATIVE APPROACH TO THE (RE)-DEVELOPMENT OF XIAN VILLAGE LING KIT CHEUNG1, ZHITAO XU2, PEI CHEN3 and MOHAMMED MAKKI4 1,2,3,4 University of Technology Sydney. 1 lingkit.cheung-1@student.uts.edu.au, 0000-0001-5040-8686 2 Zhitao.Xu@student.uts.edu.au, 0000-0002-0541-6780 3 Pei.Chen-1@student.uts.edu.au, 0000-0003-2677-3565 4 Mohammed.Makki@uts.edu.au, 0000-0002-8338-6134 Abstract. The impact of urban renewal, specifically in countries experiencing rapid urbanisation due to population growth, has resulted in the erasure of urban culture and heritage in favour of repetitive homogeneity that has been synonymous with 20th century modernist planning models. One such region experiencing this rapid urban renewal is the Guangzhou region in southern China. The presented experiments examine Xian Village in Guangzhou, a culturally rich urban tissue currently experiencing redevelopment, and proposes an alternative model for urban renewal, employing a bottom-up approach to urban growth through the use of a multi-objective evolutionary model; presenting a model that integrates historic and existing urban characteristics adapted to future development plans. Keywords. China, Guangzhou; Xian Village; Village in the City; Urban Renewal; Cultural and Heritage Preservation; Multi-Objective Evolutionary Algorithm (MOEA); SDG 10; SDG 11; SDG 13.
1. Introduction The complexity of urban form, coupled with a rapidly changing climate and an exponentially growing population, has highlighted the demand of understanding this complexity through bottom-up approaches rather than top-down systems (Batty, 2008), in which the rationalisation of the urban fabric is achieved through local rules in favour of global order (Weinstock, 2010). Culture and heritage plays a vital role when examining this urban complexity, a relationship discussed by many throughout the 20th century; from Gustavo Giovannoni, who equated the value of urban heritage to that of urban development (Giovannoni, 1913), to Patrick Geddes, who emphasised the understanding of the city in both its growth and life (Geddes, 1915), to Lewis Mumford, who emphasised the relationship between people and the city (Mumford, 1935), and to Jane Jacobs, who was one of the first voices against the ‘city as a machine’ (Jacobs, 1961). However, environmental changes, specifically related to population growth in countries experiencing rapid urbanisation (e.g. China, India and POST-CARBON, Proceedings of the 27th International Conference of the Association for ComputerAided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA) 2022, Volume 1, 181-190. © 2022 and published by the Association for Computer-Aided Architectural Design Research in Asia (CAADRIA), Hong Kong.