A Study of Chinese Traditional Wetland Island Settlement Combining Morphological and Narrative Analyses

Abstract

[EN] The Lixiahe region, a low-lying wetland located to the eastern side of the Huaiyang section of the Grand Canal, is characterized by a complex hydrological environment and has changed slowly in the urbanization process. The historical town of Shagou, a representative case of island settlements in this region, has a recorded history of continuous morphological change over six hundred years. Regarding Shagou as a cultural-geographical entity, this article aims at combining morphological analysis and narrative-based cognitive mapping to reveal the characteristic townscape that strongly depends on cultural-geographic complexity. Based on survey work, this article will first define distinguishable plan elements that underpin the spatial form of Shagou: 1) natural context; 2) streets system, and then investigate diachronically different phases of the formation of its spatial structure. On the other hand, based on archiving and data analysis of the oral history study, this article will generate a narrative cognitive map, in terms of paths, nodes, landmarks and areas. In conjunction with fieldwork and documentary records, this study testifies that the method derived from the plan analysis developed by Conzen is applicable to the study of wetland island settlement form in China and that narrative spatial analysis provides important supplemental spatial information. A careful combination of these methods might be used for understanding culturally embedded settlement forms in China