THE ECONOMIC AND PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THE URBANISTIC PROCESS IN THE PEARL RIVER DELTA: The management system of the Urban Historic Conservation Area in the megalopolis.

The thesis THE ECONOMIC AND PHYSICAL ASPECTS OF THE URBANISTIC PROCESS IN THE PEARL RIVER DELTA: The management system of the Urban Historic Conservation Area in the megalopolis is based on the background of urbanistic development in Southern China in the last 30 years. China experiences reform and open policy since the beginning of 1980, comprehensive urbanization in the 1990s and the great change of the dualistic mechanism after 2000. It is the greatest urbanization process in the history of mankind. In the Pearl River Delta, the most active and developed region of southern China, the continuous urban developed and developing areas constitute the so-called megalopolis, which is transforming its mode of production and lifestyle, changing dramatically its social economic framework, spatial morphology, even individual psychology and collective consciousness. The thesis focuses on the megalopolis historic settlements that locate between the urban centers and the rural area, and include cultural links, commuting patterns and a contiguous regional configuration. But not as a simple continuous corridor, the unequal development and management here creates a massive non-linear continuity. These areas are full of energy and special characters but at the same time contain many uncertainties, complexities, contradictions and problems. Politically and geographically, they turn from villages to cities, economically they turn from agricultural structure to industrial and tertiary structure, sociologically they turn from traditional society to modern society. Through the study of contemporary history, the thesis tries to represent the top-down and bottom-up urban construction activities in the PRD in order to learn lessons for the future urbanization. In the last thirty years, because of the special social economic re-structuring in China, the megalopolis historic settlements become a spatial buffer for the huge gap of urban-rural dualistic mechanism. It decides the long-term co-existence of the megalopolis historic settlements and the consolidated urban built up areas. Many of the megalopolis historic settlements still have the unique characters of the villages on the water and a great number of tangible and intangible heritages. They will be controlled as the Urban Historic Conservation Areas in the current urban planning system. In the meantime, their complexity and symbiotic nature give them a natural advantage to be maintained as an Urban Historic Conservation Area for quite a long time. To explain clearly the change from the megalopolis historic settlements to the Urban Historic Conservation Area, from a theoretical point of view, the thesis analyses the evolution path of the urbanization in the megalopolis historic settlements. It establishes paradigms and inherent institutional framework to reveal the institutional background of the morphological issues generated in the urbanistic process, and emphasizes that the morphological issues are results of repeated games between top-down institutional change and bottom-up morphological transformation. It tries to discuss two important questions in the urban study: