Courtyard Housing and Cultural Sustainability: Theory, Practice, and Product (Design and the Built Environment)
Author: Donia Zhang
Publisher: Routledge
Edition: 1st edition
Publication Date: 2013-05-03
Language: English
Paperback: 396 pages
ISBN-10: 1409405036
ISBN-13: 9781409405030
Book Description
Cultural sustainability is a very important aspect of the overall sustainability framework and is regarded as the fourth pillar alongside the other three: environmental, economic, and social sustainability. However, the concept is neither fully explored, nor widely accepted or recognized. This book elicits the interplay of nature-culture-architecture and theorizes the concept of cultural sustainability and culturally sustainable architecture. It identifies four key themes in Chinese philosophy: Harmony with Heaven, Harmony with Earth, Harmony with Humans, and Harmony with Self , along with Greek philosopher Aristotle’s physics: form, space, matter, and time, it sets them as criteria to evaluate the renewed and new courtyard housing projects constructed in China since the 1990s.
Using an innovative architectural and social science approach, this book examines the political, economic, social, and spatial factors that affect cultural sustainability. Supported by a multiplicity of data including: field surveys, interviews with residents, architects, and planners, time diaries, drawings, photos, planning documents, observation notes, and real estate brochures, the book proposes new courtyard garden house design strategies that promote healthy communities and human care for one another, a concept that is universally applicable. The volume is a first opportunity to take a holistic view, to encompass eastern and western, tangible and intangible, cultures in the theorization of cultural sustainability and culturally sustainable architecture. It is a comprehensive contribution to architectural theory.
Review
About the Author
She has authored four scholarly books: Courtyard Houses of Beijing: Past, Present, and Future (2009/2010/2011), Schoolyard Gardening as Multinaturalism: Theory, Practice, and Product (2009), Courtyard Housing and Cultural Sustainability: Theory, Practice, and Product (2013/2016), and Courtyard Housing for Health and Happiness: Architectural Multiculturalism in North America (2015/2017).
Moreover, she contributed three chapters in two eBooks, Dialogues of Sustainable Urbanisation: Social Science Research and Transitions to Urban Contexts (2015), and New Approaches in Contemporary Architecture and Urbanism (2020). She has also published 20 articles in peer-reviewed academic journals. WorldCat has listed most of these publications.
Donia is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University (BArch, MA, PhD) in the UK and Brock University (MEd) in Canada. She has also obtained a Verified Certificate of Achievement in The Architectural Imagination from Harvard University | edX, and a Verified Certificate of Achievement in Interpreting Vernacular Architecture in Asia from the University of Hong Kong | edX. She is a former associate at the City Institute at York University, and a visiting scholar/occasional co-instructor at McMaster University, Canada.
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