Jiangnan Water Towns and Its Potential Development in the Modern Time

Crisscrossed with countless canals, the Jiangnan or Yangtze Delta region in southeast China is dotted with water towns which are among China’s richest cities. Its remarkable hydrography makes the area’s traditional life pattern closely tight to the omnipresent water environment. During a time when waterway was the major transportation, the canals in Jiangnan provides the water towns more access to business. The built of the Grand Canal in Sui Dynasty (581-618 AD), which connects the capital Beijing to the Jiangnan water town Hangzhou, further pushed the economic trade and cultural exchange of the north and south China. Ever since the Sui Dynasty, the word “Jiangnan” has been closely associated with the word “prosperous”. Dwellings in Jiangnan water towns are usually two stories high, and are built right by the canals. The first floor is usually for residence shops, while the upper floor is for private residences. The architectural style of the buildings in Jiangnan water towns is very similar to that of the Huizhou area, with black tile roofs, white plaster walls and central skywells. However Jiangnan residences don’t have the high perimeter walls that envelope the whole building. Instead, they open the buildings right to the waterborne environment around.The scale of the buildings in Jiangnan is also smaller compared with that of Huizhou, since the landscape in Jiangnan is largely confined by the canals. Various elegant waterfront structures, such as stone docks, waterside pavilions, teahouses and stone bridges are the hubs of the daily activities of the Jiangnan water towns.


Jiangnan watertowns, in some ways, are very similar to the world’s famous water town Venice, Italy. Stretches across 118 small islands in the Venetian Lagoon, Venice’s daily life if largely depend on water-traffics. The city has 117 canals and 401 bridges, with the major canal, Grand Canal running through the center of the city as the major traffic corridor. Jiangnan water towns are similar to Venice in that they are also run through by a central canal, the Grand Canal of China, and crisscrossed by hundreds of small canal branches. Similar to Venice, Jiangnan water towns’ major traffic is also water way. What’s more interesting, Jiangnan water towns even have a counterpart of the Gondola, which is called black-awning boat. The architecture of Venice and Jiangnan water towns is slightly different. Although both used the form of stilt houses, Venice’s houses are often in direct contact with water. Also strikingly similar are the economies of Jiangnan water towns and Venice. They were both the leading commerce centers of their local area in about a thousand years ago. Given the similarity in their waterborne environment and prosperous economy, Jiangnan water towns were often called as “Venice in the East”.


Venice and Gondola vs. Jiangnan water towns and black-awning boat

However, with the rapid development of highways, automobiles, railways and other landway traffics, the role of water traffic played in trade and commerce is weakening. In recent decades, in a rush to modernize and industrialize, far too many traditional water towns hastily sacrificed their past forms in the process of building new houses and factories, filling in canals and the constructing roads. As a result, the formerly vibrant Jiangnan canal network is in very bad conservation, may tributaries of the Grand Canal faced the problems of clogging, water pollution, and may parts of the Grand Canal is even no longer navigable. How to conserve, redevelop and rediscover the potential use of waterfronts became a great challenge to Jiangnan water towns.

The Grand Canal and Jiangnan watertown

Here we are going to look closer at Hangzhou, one of the prosperous Jiangnan water towns and its strategy of water channel conservation. The city of Hangzhou is the terminal of the Grand Canal. The canal runs through the northern part of the city. Starting from 1996, the government of Hangzhou carried out a Grand Canal Redevelopment Project, and its first phase was completed in 2006 with rather remarkable effects. The master plan centered on the spatial and functional redevelopment of the waterfronts, with is main goal as making the Grand Canal better serve for people’s modern life. In the project master plan, the new waterfront of the Great Canal is going to have multiple functions; it will not only keep its traditional water traffic function, but also incorporate functions such as ecological center for species, public parks and convene space, historical and cultural center, and tourism spot. These goals were achieved by the government’s effort in cleaning the watercourse to facilitate the barges, building public parks, opening public water transportation such as waterbus, and establishing a Grand Canal Museum which records the history and cultural relics of the canal.

Building and redeveloping a great waterfront to serve for a better urban public space is not just a problem faced by old water towns like Hangzhou, but is also the shared questions of many waterside cities in the world. Having looked into several successful cases of waterfront redevelopment in the world, I summarized several major points of how to build a successful waterfront.
1) The planning of the redevelopment of water front should start with looking at the big picture of the city—what role is the waterfront going to play in the city? Do we want it to be the central artery of the city where the city unfolds and radiates from, or we want it to be only a center of a part of the city? The answer to this question largely depends on the natural location of the waterway. For example, the Seine River runs through the center of Paris, so the central location of the river enables the waterfront to become the focal point of the city. In contrast, the Brooklyn Bridge Park, which lies in the east side of Brooklyn, would be better planned as a local community gathering space. The Grand Canal runs through the north part of Hangzhou city, where used to be the industrial region of the city, and ends at the downtown district of Hangzhou. This location may let us plan the waterfront as have dual roles: in the northern industrial district it may serve as the public green space for local communities, while in the downtown part it may serve as the cultural and commercial center of the city.
2) Public goals should be set as the primary goal. Avoiding the waterfront from becoming seclude to a small community is the key of keeping the dynamic and liveliness of the waterfront. A negative lesson can be draw from the planning of the Brooklyn Bridge Park. Several high residential towers inside the park and at the entrance of the park made the Brooklyn Bridge Park unfriendly to the larger community, because people tend to think the park is only open to the upscale residents of adjacent Brooklyn Heights. Therefore, a great waterfront should not be dominated by residential development, because a high concentration of residential development undermines the diversity of waterfront use by creating pressure to prevent nighttime activity from flourishing.
3) Integrate the waterfront to the city’s overall transportation system. Although the status of water traffic is supplanted by railways, automobiles and metros, it is still a good alternative of the often over-crowded landway. Therefore, Hangzhou’s step in opening up waterbus lines is a really good idea to revitalize the water traffic. Meanwhile, it is also helpful to build other public transportation lines and stops cross the waterway or at the waterfront. For example, the Paris metro system goes along and across the Seine, which brings people to the waterfront from all over the city.
4) Avoid building a uniform waterfront; different parts of the waterfront should have its own characteristics. The characteristic of different waterfront parts should relate to its existing assets and the context of neighborhood. This means that the waterfront in a certain region should strive to showcase the local identity. How to revitalize the waterfront relationship with the northern industrial district of Hangzhou can draw a lesson from the design and planning of Granville Island, Vancouver, Canada. Originally shaped for industrial use in 1913, the buildings on Granville Island deteriorated until a planning process for the island's redevelopment in the 1970s, where many vestiges of the industrial past were still retained, but transformed into an inviting public activity space by welcoming the move in of art community. Actually the idea of transforming former industrial buildings into art community is no longer novel, and Hangzhou is already taking this step. The former factory building of Hangzhou Silk Company now becomes the studio space for artists and musicians. All that we need to do is to further increase the popularity of the place to create a bigger influence in the city of Hangzhou.
5) Creating destinations or point of attractions. The linear shape of canals and rivers is very likely to make the waterfront become a prosaic pathway to a destination somewhere else. In order to avoid this, the waterfront itself should become a destination, a centerpiece for programming and activities. PPS (Project for Public Spaces), a New York based nonprofit organization dedicated to creating successful public places for communities calls the process of creating ten (or several) great destinations along a waterfront the "Power of Ten." This focus on destinations, rather than "open space" or parks, enables genuine community-led stakeholders such as business, residences and institutions to take root.
6) Balance Environmental Benefits with Human Needs. While a wide variety of social uses can flourish on a waterfront, successful destinations usually embrace their natural surroundings by creating a close connection between human and natural needs. This requires a tight work with marine biologists and environmentalists in planning of what to plant along shorelines, devising a method to improve water quality and revive fish and wildlife habitat. Boardwalks, waterside playgrounds and picnic areas can be incorporated into the shoreline design without sacrificing environmental and social benefits.
7) Last but not least, a good preservation by both the government and the public.

To sum up, we can see that the problem of how to build a better waterfront is confined by the existing landscape and urban layout, but a successful planning of waterfront can also shape the existing environment. Although the traditional waterborne life pattern is no longer applicable to the change in technology and modern lifestyle, there’s still potential to maximize the use of traditional waterways, and I believe this everlasting changing and adaptation just shows what we mean by sustainability.