Innovative Mode and Application of Flipped Classroom in City Design Course

The city planning quick topic design is a part of the city design course in many urban planning colleges.It can help stimulate the students’off-handed creativity and image expression ability.So it is necessary to explore the teaching mode which can adapt to it and stimulate students’learning enthusiasm and creative ability.In the context of promoting the"classroom revolution"of higher education in China,the flipped classroom has received widespread attention in the higher education community.Based on this,after three years of teaching practice,the author adaptively adjusted and innovatively modified the basic model of flip classroom in the quick topic design teaching of the city design course,and has found a variant model applicable to this course,namely OCTIAS(objective-case exploration-trial and error-instructional video-activities-summary and promotion).Firstly,insert two sections before the video learning,including"case travel exploration"and"trial and error(in order to accumulate beneficial failures)".Secondly,in the classroom activities,sort out the problems reflected by the students,and organize the students to make self-evaluation,mutual evaluation and revise the trial and error plan before the class.Finally,think about the problems that may occur in the cities in the future and their spatial organization responses.The practice showed that compared with the traditional teaching mode,the OCTIAS model could make the city design course more interesting,and help the students to improve in the solidity of theoretical knowledge learning,the flexibility of practical operation,the initiative to think about realistic problems,and the ability of critical thinking and expression.

The Change of Designated Cities in China before and after 1949

The reform and opening-up of the economy has made a contribution to the rapid growthof designated cities in China over the last 17 years. It is worth while to note three new trends: the emergence of mega-urbanization regions; the rebuilding of a closer tie between the Chinese urban systemand the global one through the development of the global cities; and the polarized development in hinterlands and peripheries around advanced economic regions. However, the research literature onChinese urbanization in English has shown the scarcity of good databanks and the analysis results areincomplete. Using the most complete and latest data, this paper reviews the change of China’s designated cities before and after 1949. This paper also seeks to examine the various policies and explorethe underlying factors that have affected the growth of the new cities.

A Critical Regionalism in the Golf Architecture:A Masdar’s‘Eco-city Project’

This article echoes Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism to address maintaining the values of the past into the present.For Frampton,architecture design is regionally infused due to essentially dealing with“specificity and locality”,however,remains reluctant to adopt a“universal technology”.A Masdar City’s design represents a valuable case due to casting light on the complexity embedded in intertwining the modernist technologies and a regional architecture.The case study’s analyses cited here suggest that the design of the present evolves from this complexity witnessing a deviation from a“universal technology”and a local architecture.A vernacular style of architecture has been blamed because it stitches together the“globe”and the“local”.A universal technology has been also witnessed here which yields support for the vernacular approaches embedded in a traditional architecture.What Frampton’s critical regionalism appears to overlook are the vernacular approaches that in the analysis of this article embrace a model of the design principles for the“tectonics”to be realised.The key argument brought forward in this article concerns Frampton’s critical regionalism that yet lacks a realistic approach to produce a sense within a local context,thereby needing in its theory to neatly twist the vernacular approaches with a critical regionalism’s synthesis.

Analysis of the Development of the Commercial Space Around Metro Stations in Urban Core Areas Based on Place Making: A Case Study of Chunxi Road Metro Station in Chengdu

The metro is the most efficient and convenient public transport system in modern cities. For urban core areas in China, in which the metro was built later, there was more consideration for meeting the traffic needs of cities. However, there are few studies of collaborative planning for metro stations and their surrounding space. Thus, there is an urgent need to conduct research on collaborative planning for metro stations and their surrounding commercial space in urban core areas. Unlike conventional methods of integrated design of stations and cities, this paper, based on the theory of place spirit, took Chunxi Road Metro Station in Chengdu and its surrounding commercial space for example. It explored the pattern and characteristics of the place in the commercial space around the metro station, analyzed the strategies of cultural and commercial integration, as well as architecture, street, landscape and other aspects of the design method in the space, and explored the strategies of place-making and infiltration, providing a reference point for the development and place-making of the commercial space around metro stations in urban core areas.

Ecological Ways to Design the Tropical Coastal Cities

Design with ecology has been a newtrend of design in the world due to the globalenvironmental issues.Tropical coastal cities need to bedesigned according to ecological principles thanks totheir high visual and ecological sensitivity.Ecological de-sign requires designers to respect environmental limita-tion and advantages and to create a diversity of habitat,and hence of opportunities for the coexistence of di-verse organisms (including man himself).This paper ex-pounds the characteristics of the approach,shows sometechniques and suggests the difficulties and some possi-ble ways for designing with ecology in China.

Artificiality and Naturalness:Semi-underground Houses and Their Role in the Construction of a Sustainable Urban Landscape

The contemporary interest,on one hand for a renewed relationship between city and natural landscape,on the other for settlement typologies intrinsically efficient from an energy standpoint took back the attention on the design of the dug city,or rather,almost completely excavated.This is an emblematic model of the requirement that deals with the factors of its environment,like sun,wind,ground,shadow and flora,forcing some designers to migrate from usual design methodologies,indifferent to these design parameters,and they are careful only to the“laws of form”,in search of criteria and fine calculation tools to optimize the configuration and the structure of buildings,in order to ensure that they can be managed as“passively”as possible.What it means,with the minimum contribution of plants to ensure the best satisfaction of comfort and psychological needs of users:not only lighting,sunbathing,ventilation,thermal comfort in summer and winter,acoustic comfort,but also view characteristics,quality of lighting and sociological aspects.In general dialectic between artifice and nature,the theme of dug architecture today is faced not only as one of the most interesting and rich suggestions,but also as one of those,in which the reflection on objectives,methodologies and tools is longer necessary,to the identification of a new way of urban living and effective solutions against energy consumption.

Strive to Raise the Level of China's City Planning and Design to Suit the Needs of Development in the New Historical Stage

ⅠKeeping step with the economic re-structuring and the policy of opening tothe outside world,marked progress hasbeen made in China’s urban constructionand great strides have been taken in cityplanning during the ten years and more re-cently.This is manifested in the following5 respects.A.Thanks to the

My Great City:A Record of Nanjing Week at the London Design Festival

Editor’s Note:From Sept 19 to25,Nanjing Week—part of the London Design Festival 2016—was held in London.The program,hosted by the Nanjing Municipal People’s Government and the UK Consulate General in Shanghai,was the second time for the city’s cultural innovation industry to go abroad.The first was Nanjing Week at Expo 2015,which was held in Milan.

Measuring Resilience in the Assumed City

The malleable nature of both the idea of a city and the idea of resilience raises an important question—why measure?Resilience is assumed to be located in the physical infrastructure of specific places or as a quality of the people located there.For disasters,we are often trying to conceptualize,measure,or render legible resilience in physical structures.But what is it that we are trying to measure,and is the idea of a city reflected in these measurements?If cities are organized around something other than resilience,is resilience their natural by-product?What is necessitating the need for increased—and measured—resilience?Using interpretive policy analysis,we explored five well known disaster resilience frameworks(UNDRR's Making Cities Resilient Campaign,UN-Habitat's City Resilience Profiling Programme,The World Bank and GFDRR's Resilient Cities Program,Arup and The Rockefeller Foundation's City Resilience Index,and The Rockefeller Foundation's 100 Resilient Cities)to identify the working definition of‘‘city''and of‘‘resilience.''We conclude that if the demand for cities to become more resilient is an acknowledgment of the risk produced by globalized urbanization,then the call itself is an indictment of the current state of our cities.