· · · Institutional Repository

This graduation project focuses on the city center as a place for people to walk. Everyone knows that walking is the most primary form of mobility in the city. And the most of us do it every day. It is the most essential way for us to move around. It gives us the opportunity to explore and experience the surrounding environment. But, most certainly, everyone have experienced that some urban environments are less attractive or more difficult to travel through by walking compared with others. Did we ever made the decision not to walk, because of the urban environment? Maybe you felt unsafe or it was just too far to walk or any other reason? At that moment the urban environment could not provide the conditions for you to walk. To be able to walk safely, conveniently, directly and comfortably, you will need an urban environment that corresponds to your needs, as a pedestrian. This graduation project researches the required conditions for the urban environment to facilitate and encourage people to walk, especially for city centers.

This paper discusses the Transit-Oriented Development used in the process of regenerating the historical center, based on the research of the development and the achievements in TOD of different cities in the past twenty years. The TOD has already showed the potential in regenerating historical centers. But considering the facts of Chinese cities that under high-speed expanding, it is anticipated to promote some integrated thinking of the TOD in regenerating a historical city center, which is suitable to the scale and form of the old urban fabric in this paper. Transit Oriented Development (TOD) is a mode mixed-use residential or commercial area designed to maximize access to the public transport, and often incorporates features to encourage transit ridership. Transit-oriented development based on transit system, help improve efficiency of land use and transit operations in neighborhood in different areas of city and make them work together. While over the past decade, in most of the developing countries, the cities are facing huge problems on regeneration in the historical city center. The confliction between the worth of historical city center and the demanding of rapidly urbanization arise in many aspects.

New city center does not developed as well as it was planned because of an ideal planning model from government planner. In my project, I try to recogonize the real princeples about how the center system grows according to historical center, then apply these principles to reconstruct the new city center in order to revitalise new town.