Cultural Mapping and Evaluation of Old Urban Open Spaces: A Case Study of Nanjing’s Old City, China

In the era of stock-oriented development, cultural diversity encourages the sustainable revitalization of old urban areas, which have accumulated rich cultural resources, reflecting complex human–environment relationships. To transform these resources and relationships into planning information, this empirical study of open spaces in the old city of Nanjing, China, designs a cultural map based on the relationship between culture and urban residents, using cultural categories, cultural value scores and land-use types as coordinates for cultural sites. It evaluates the current state and effective use of cultural resources to reveal their presence and operation in old urban open spaces. The current state of cultural resources was evaluated by key indicators—cultural density, cultural resource aggregation patterns, and matching degree between cultural maps and related planning. The results show that the spatial structure derived from cultural density analysis, the aggregation patterns obtained through kernel density analysis, and the matching degree between the cultural mapping and relevant plans provide a reference for adjustments to the development plans in Nanjing’s old city, demonstrating the potential of cultural mapping as a tool for planning and research. The proposed methodology can be applied and evaluated in broader contexts.