Locality Pattern Systems as Design Tools for Water-Related Open Spaces

In the course of globalization, current urbanization projects all over the world are looking more and more alike. This lack of character or sense of locality has a negative impact on the quality of life and sustainable development in cities, as outlined in the 2016 Flagship Report “Humanity on the move: Unlocking the transformative power of cities” by the German Advisory Council on Global Change. The chapter addresses this challenge and presents a locality pattern system developed in the joint research project “Urbanization and Locality: Preserving and developing identity in large-scale urbanization processes with urban landscapes along canals as case studies” (Partners: Peking University and Leibniz University Hannover; Funded by the Sino-German Center for Research Promotion). The introduction summarizes theories on locality and patterns and argues that locality is essential, hybrid and dynamic. Furthermore, patterns that are organized in a system can offer a transferable orientation knowledge. On this theoretical basis, a method for analyzing locality is presented which is based on case studies in Chinese and German urban landscapes along canals in Wuxi, Tianjin, Hamburg and Berlin. These results were transformed into abstract, transferable locality patterns for use in future planning and design processes with the aim of producing urban transformations that respect locality. For the two German case studies, examples from interdisciplinary master studio projects show how the locality pattern system is applied to the design of future urban landscapes. As a conclusion, the potentials and limitations of the locality pattern system are discussed.