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The rapid economic development and urbanization in Pearl River Delta of China, have changed the physical environment dramatically but also led to a crisis of the short life span of contemporary housing. When the green building concept cannot help provide the appropriate answer, many scholars turn to traditional buildings. Unlike in rural cases, traditional buildings in urban area obviously exhibit diversity and long-term usage. However, most of current studies focus on the preservation of historical features but do not analyze why and how such buildings can last a such long time. Historical cases in both two areas might have a certain number of common sustainable factors because they evolved from a similar prototype in history. For a better understanding of their common features and why they have different performances, theories closely related to the longevity and the “level” strategy will be introduced. These theories aimed to increase the life span of buildings and pay more attention to the interrelation between people and built environment in the temporal dimension. Within this framework, several historical cases from the urban area and a traditional village will be compared and studied by using the “level” division method, and abundant longevity evidence will be revealed and analyzed. As part of a complex and consistent research aimed at constructing an evaluation system, the results of this investigation will initially evaluate their long-lasting performances qualitatively under the two different contexts.
Wáng et al. (Tue,) studied this question.