To Act or Not to Act: Are Natural Landscapes a Key Force in the Resilience of Historic Urban Landscapes?

Abstract

Ignoring the function of natural landscapes in the rapid development of urbanization, and especially in the conservation of historic urban landscapes, is still obvious today, and this has caused a large decrease in natural space, loss of habitats, and an increase in disasters. The resilience of a whole city and parts of it, such as historic urban areas where the historical process of man and nature have been recorded, as well as the interaction between nature, economy, and culture, is not strong enough to maintain the stability of urban ecosystems. It is misleading to think that the resilience can be built in a historic urban area without a natural landscape. We question whether this is true. Using a semantic differential analysis method from a historical perspective, this paper aims to answer this question through research on the correlation between resilience and man and nature through a case study of Yudai Trench historic urban landscape in Guangzhou, a historic urban area with 1000 years of history. A total of 212 pieces of evidence were extracted from 59 historical sources. The results showed that the cultural and economic conditions were in the same step and cycles as nature, which were influenced strongly by climate change, and that the natural landscape has a correlation on and is a dominant force in the resilience of historic urban landscapes.