This book introduces a ten-year-long design research project in the Yangtze River Delta (YRD), China, based on international cooperation studios, design workshops, a Ph.D. thesis, and concrete practice in China, Germany, and the Netherlands. This research adapts the existing methods of Landscape Character Assessment (UK), Historic Cultural Landscape Elements (Germany), and Dutch Polder Typology to mapping, describing, and classifying landscape character areas and types at the three scales of regional, municipal, and local. Furthermore, to connect research with design, we developed a typological approach of generating specific measures for the networked polder landscape. This research bridges the gap of a missing landscape characterization method for the conservation, transformation, and critical reconstruction of historic cultural landscapes in a metropolitan context. The book is intended for graduate students, researchers, and practitioners interested in the topics of cultural landscape in transition, methods for landscape characterization and typology, and a research-by-design approach in interdisciplinary projects of landscape architecture, urbanism, and regional planning.
Dr. Yuting Xie received her M.Sc. degree in Landscape Architecture from Peking University, China, in 2011, and the Doctor of Engineering degree in Landscape Architecture from Technical University of Munich, Germany, in 2017. Since March 2018, she has been in the Institute of Landscape Architecture, Zhejiang University as a lecturer. She is currently the director of China Urban Landscape Lab at TU Munich, which dedicates to managing landscape changes and to developing historical landscape structures as a qualitative framework for China’s rapidly transforming urban environment. In 2019, she co-founded a collaborative research platform-Jiangnan Lab, using regional design as a tool for bringing cross-sector spatial planning, landscape architecture and urban design and multi-level governance together in the Yangtze River Delta megacity region in China.
Since 2012, she has published 11 peer-reviewed technical papers in books, international journals and conferences. Since 2011, she has been the principal investigator of six international research projects both in China and in Europe. She was a recipient of Best Innovation Award at the 2020 Suzhou International Design Week for the exhibition of her Jiangnan Park project and two Excellent Paper Awards at the 2020 China Landscape Architecture Education Conference. She was also awarded the Excellent Instructor for several competitions such as the "Yuanye Cup" International Competition for College Students in 2020 and the "Xiaoxiang Cup" Landscape Architecture Design Competition in 2018.
