Canal-orientated urban waterfront regeneration based on the concept of everyday heritage: a case study in Suzhou, China

Transformation of canal-orientated urban waterfronts around the world

The categorisation of urban waterfronts is complicated in respect of the formation of the water bodies themselves. These can be divided into bays, lakes, ponds, rivers, ports and artificial canals.⁷ As an important supplement to natural water networks, the canal system can be defined as a human-engineered waterway and an integral component of linear and complex transport routes.⁸ However, canal zones around the world lost their economic and transport advantages as a result of competition from rail transport and deindustrialisation from the 1900s to the 1960s, resulting in the deterioration of the areas alongside canals. The canal districts thus provided opportunities for economic restructuring and large-scale redevelopment. Such results positively facilitated the transition in the function of canals from irrigation, navigation, flood mitigation, land drainage, defence, water supply and shipping towards the construction of urban ecological corridors, development of the tourism industry, conservation of canal heritage and adaptive reuse as a catalyst for regeneration.⁹ Various documents and principles exist for the transformation of heritage canal areas, and are discussed below.

The 1994 Heritage Canal Document points out heritage canals’ outstanding universal value and can be applied to recognise the multiple values of the Grand Canal in terms of technology, economy, society and landscape.¹⁰ These values play a vital role in canal-orientated redevelopment. In 1996, the International Committee for the Conservation of the Industrial Heritage implemented the International Canal Monuments List. This list aims to identify a considerable number of representative canal sites and their structures, such as locks, earthworks, water pumps, aqueducts, accommodation bridges, boat lifts, tunnels, outlet sluices, inclined planes, weirs, cargo-handling areas, warehouses, rafting timber and dams.¹¹ A detailed grading method was used to rank each structure, based on its heritage values. The International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) used the results of this evaluation project as a basis for determining whether canal heritage sites should be included on the World Heritage List managed by UNESCO.¹² In the twenty-first century, inspired by the concept of greenways and urban ecological corridors, heritage canals can be viewed as heritage corridors to enhance the relationship between the conservation of urban heritage and the natural environment by providing integrated functions of ecology, recreation, aesthetics, history and culture.¹³ In the 2010s, Ellin proposed the concept of the ‘canalscape’¹⁴ based on integral urbanism as a live theory by engaging communities to pinpoint associated heritage assets and how to reuse them. The concept identifies five initiatives where canals provide a sense of place, cultural identity and community participation: (1) identifying the integral parts and DNA of canals through community participation and participant observation; (2) enhancing mixed use along canals by integrating them into nature and local identity, ecology and communities; (3) engaging in ‘urban acupuncture’, rather than imposing master plans to improve urban and community health; (4) learning from the past by building upon all previous contributions to canal-orientated development (COD), from ancient times to recent efforts; and (5) cooperating with community groups and experts in envisioning, inspiring, demonstrating and advocating, because great cities are built by communities over time.¹⁵ In 2016, Buckman proposed the notion of COD¹⁶ as waterfront place-making, which is characterised by embracing heritage canals as part of wider urban design and urban planning, integrating them into the broader urban fabric as a distinctive spatial layout and combining comfort, mobility, a mix of uses and social inclusion to be a success.¹⁷ As Buckman explained, COD follows design principles that include creating linear connections along regional transit systems; offering commercial, recreational and public amenities; establishing visual corridors; encouraging public participation; and considering the relationship of the canal to other physical spaces.¹⁸

Consequently, the interconnection of adaptive reuse of cultural heritage resources with built heritage conservation and community participation has underpinned the primary trend of canal-orientated urban waterfront regeneration.¹⁹ Owing to the functional transformation of urban waterfronts from shipping and transport to recreation, leisure and world-class tourist attractions, this creates an authentic way of living inspired by local heritage and crucially, is embedded in everyday life.

Figure 1

The spatial evolution of the Suzhou Canal 

Historical development and regeneration of the Suzhou Canal District

In the Chinese context, the Suzhou Canal was the most convenient and effective transport route that connected the interior of the ancient city to rural areas for the exchange of goods, thereby increasing the prosperity of local commercial and trade activities in pre-industrial areas. Nowadays, the Suzhou Canal District can be divided into two areas, the Suzhou section of the Beijing–Hangzhou Grand Canal area and the canal system in the ancient Suzhou City area. The development of the Suzhou Canal system in pre-industrial societies went through four key periods (Figure 1): the formation of the double grid system from 506 BCE to CE 1229; a stable consolidation period from 1229 to 1639; the decline of branch canals from 1639 to 1745; and the decline of main canals from 1745 to 1949.²⁰

Since the 1950s, with the development of heavy industries and the discharge of domestic wastewater, the water quality of the Suzhou Canal has declined significantly. However, residents have still used the canalside as a backdrop to everyday activities, such as playing chess, chatting and doing laundry. After the canal’s reform and opening in 1978, the traditional water–city spatial form has been broken by rapid urbanisation. In the 1980s, the Suzhou City Master Plan (1986–2000) was introduced, emphasising the goal of protecting the ancient city and developing new districts along the Suzhou section of the Grand Canal that would be transformed from traditional industries and the manufacturing sector towards service-based and tourism industries.²¹ From the 1990s to the 2000s, ecological restoration became a fundamental prerequisite within China’s rapid urbanisation. Furthermore, the Suzhou government tends to adopt a physical restoration approach by refurbishing the façades of buildings in heritage canal areas to improve their overall built landscape and make them tourist attractions to boost consumption.²² This approach overemphasised the significance of restoring the façades of traditional buildings along the Suzhou Canal in the Jiangnan region of China, which consists of ‘three primary colours: black, white, and grey’.²³ Nevertheless, it failed to update their functionally obsolete facilities and internal materials, resulting in a monotonous purpose of the urban landscape and a homogeneous appearance among the buildings.²⁴ The underlying risk is that the heritage of these places will lose its ability to respond to changes in everyday contemporary life and become alienated from it. At the beginning of the 2000s, the sustainability of heritage conservation and tourism became popular. It was achieved by establishing an urban ecological corridor combined with ecological, cultural, recreational and economic functions.²⁵ The adaptive reuse of urban heritage for the tourism industry and the use of cultural branding as a key economic commodity became the main trend in Suzhou’s canal-orientated regeneration at that time. By the end of 2010, to pursue the designation of the Grand Canal as a World Heritage Site, the concept of ‘Suitable for living, travelling and businesses’ was proposed in the Third Development Strategy Forum of Chinese Canal City for the canal redevelopment strategy in Suzhou.²⁶ This aimed to reuse the Suzhou Heritage Canal to balance the tourism industry and conservation of heritage canal resources by emphasising authenticity and sustainable tourism beyond commercialisation. In 2014, Suzhou was selected by UNESCO as a pilot study to implement the historic urban landscape (HUL) approach for conservation and heritage management.²⁷ The HUL approach has three key characteristics: (1) highlighting the importance of tangible and intangible heritage and allowing for their appropriate update and change over time;²⁸ (2) identifying multiple layers of heritage by using mapping, documentation and inventorying;²⁹ and (3) encouraging the cooperation of different stakeholders such as government, private enterprises, social organisations and communities.³⁰ Since 2014, with the success of the World Heritage Site application, the Suzhou government has been building the Grand Canal Cultural Belt and the Grand Canal National Cultural Park to enhance local tourism development.³¹

During this time, some challenges have arisen, such as concentrating more efforts on heritage canals within the ancient city while neglecting the overall conservation of the Suzhou Canal. It seems that the traditional urban form of the ancient Suzhou Canal with its public realm has not been further utilised and extended to built-up areas outside the ancient city of Suzhou. Moreover, policymakers have been dominated by state institutions and government officials, while residents and communities have limited opportunities to participate in the policymaking processes. Community participation is integral to shaping place identity. The community’s local experiences and public perceptions of the meanings of urban heritage could reshape the contemporary intangible elements of urban heritage. Thus, this article conceptualises the Suzhou Canal as an everyday landscape, highlighting its emotional and social value in the context of daily life, as reflected in the historic public courtyards developed around the canal. By examining these dynamics from both temporal and spatial perspectives, the study addresses how changes in socio-cultural contexts influence the interpretation of everyday heritage.

The concept of ‘everyday heritage’

The concept of ‘everyday heritage’ was initially proposed by Saruhan Mosler³² in 2019 and further developed by Lisa Giombini³³ in 2020, with the ultimate goals of unlocking the potential of urban landscape heritage resources in their everyday context and improving the spatial and temporal connectivity of the urban landscape. The concept is based on the notion of ‘everydayness’³⁴ and the ‘everyday landscape’.³⁵ On the one hand, everydayness can be seen as a human experience shaped by an essential continuum of mundane activities and people’s everyday routines in their neighbourhoods.³⁶ Although these regular activities lack special meanings over time, owing to daily redundancy and repetition, the essence of value lies in the everyday spatiality and everyday rhythms that could form a sense of reality and the ‘lived space’ identified by Henri Lefebvre.³⁷ Furthermore, Giombini and Kvokačka explore the relationship between philosophy and everydayness, emphasising that the latter constitutes both ‘material reality and subjective consciousness’, which also nourishes our culture and society.³⁸ They also imply the importance of incorporating aesthetic quality into the ordinary fabric of everyday life while respecting its intrinsic nature to distinguish the extraordinary from the ordinary.³⁹ Thus, everydayness can be understood by all the different social groups as part of a broader focus on the quality of lived experience.

On the other hand, during the 1960s to 1970s, many human geographers and sociologists regarded landscape as a human construction and analysed the relationship between landscape place-making and the quality of public life and between sensorial quality and place identity.⁴⁰ In this context, everyday landscape can be understood as nature, human habitat and a metaphor from a temporal and spatial perspective, which combines with the contents of past and future activities and people’s interaction to express memory, emotion and morality.⁴¹ The uniqueness of everyday landscapes could manifest itself as lived experiences and daily life, rather than iconic landscapes as a focal point and the unique value of urban landscapes.⁴² This is because iconic landscapes can be perceived through visual experience, while everyday landscapes can be perceived through relational experiences. Furthermore, the meaning of everyday landscapes depends on the ‘emotional relationship between everyday life and surrounding spaces’.⁴³ In other words, both residents and visitors can have the opportunity to express the meaning of the landscapes surrounding them.

Inspired by these two concepts, Mosler emphasises that everyday heritage is the sum of the practices, activities and meanings that communities use to strengthen their connection to places and to each other.⁴⁴ It is characterised by shaping new meanings through the creation of the daily routine in time and space and the integration of old and new components into a city.⁴⁵ He suggests that heritage tourism can be integrated into the contemporary city’s everyday values and social demands to prevent over-commercialised development.⁴⁶ Based on Mosler’s concept of everyday heritage, Giombini further suggests that urban heritage acts can be incorporated into the present-day urban fabric, allowing heritage to evolve organically by changing its original functions, forms or meanings and activating spontaneous interventions.⁴⁷ He states that everyday practices generated at the local level as part of the bottom-up process of heritage creation have become a symbol of the place-making process.⁴⁸ Importantly, these symbols are not only shaped by official values but also generated through the everyday interaction between place and people.

The role of the Suzhou Canal in shaping everyday life based on the concept of everyday heritage

Figure 2

The double grid of the water–street spatial layout in 1229, engraved in the Pingjiang Tu map (Source: adapted from Xu, Chinese City) 

As a specific double grid in its water–street spatial layout (Figure 2), the Suzhou Canal system became an essential public social space that also boosts everyday interactions between place and people. Based on the concept of everyday heritage, this section discusses two crucial types of formal public courtyards and informal marketplaces derived from the Suzhou Canal, followed by an evaluation of how they constructed everyday landscapes and social meanings in the ancient urban context. The history of architectural heritage related to the Suzhou Canal carries the collective memory and daily life of the past, which can also bring it to life in the present.⁴⁹

The influence of formal public courtyards along the Suzhou Canal on shaping everyday life

The formal public courtyards along the Suzhou Canal can frame everyday life and social meanings by promoting place interaction and meaningful activities. First, the native-place association hall public courtyards along the Suzhou Canal can be viewed as a form of social-cultural public courtyard supported by social urban organisations below the level of local government. During the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912), Suzhou was a hybrid place where outsiders and merchants from all over China intermingled.⁵⁰ Owing to the significance of the Suzhou Canal in commercial and transport development during this period, many native-place association hall courtyards were built by merchants from each locality along the canal, such as the Lingnan and Quanjin native-place association halls.⁵¹ Their original functions included gathering merchants from the same locality to live and communicate, protecting the common interests of commercial and social networks in the city, providing a sense of belonging and improving the local identity. They were always situated in Suzhou’s western suburbs, near the city walls, especially on Shantang Street and Xu Gate.⁵² The increase in native-place association hall courtyards along the Suzhou Canal, as a larger native-place community, actively facilitated more trade activities beyond the city gates, thereby forming the commercial zones along the Shantang Canal (Figure 3), which were spatially and socially interconnected with the everyday urban context. Furthermore, these canal areas outside the city centre, concentrated on native-place association halls and public courtyards, became more ‘vital’ and ‘urban’ than other commercial streets in Suzhou’s inner city.⁵³ This is because both everyday life (walking, eating, chatting and trading) and sentimental bonds play a vital role in shaping spatiality and people–place experiences. Consequently, native-place association halls and public courtyards establish everyday landscapes that can provide a sense of belonging, correspond to native-place sentiment and shape people–place experiences.

Figure 3

The distribution of native-place association hall public courtyards in the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912), according to Suzhou historical mapping 

Second, the Xuanmiao Guan Temple public courtyard, which was built in the early eighth century and is located north of Suzhou’s central district,⁵⁴ played a crucial role in promoting the interwoven experiences of human activities and social practice. For instance, during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644), it was not only a place for religious activities and worship but also a social space and landmark where textile and silk workers gathered in the morning to seek employment opportunities.⁵⁵ This phenomenon tended to create a daily route and a series of repetitive activities, and it thus affected the development of a family-based textile industry (Figure 4). Local inhabitants could find themselves living, experiencing and finding meaning in common. Consequently, the temple public courtyard established an everyday landscape and is perceived as a landmark and a reference point. It tends to shape certain social groups’ (textile workers’) ways of working, living, making sense and everyday experiences, and to promote place interactions between these mundane activities and mundane–sacred places, aligning with the integration of community life and everyday environmental encounters.

Figure 4

The distribution of the temple public courtyard in the Ming and Qing dynasties (1368–1912), according to Suzhou historical mapping 

In summary, the traditional public courtyard along the Suzhou Canal is not only considered to be an individual building but also an interconnected narrative public place and cultural landscape. The continuation of past forms and functions, as tangible and intangible values, can shape the rhythms of community life and collective memories of the Suzhou Canal District in time and space.

Conclusion

Owing to the rapid pace of urban living, people’s interactions with everyday landscapes and appreciation of the essence of everyday life have become more important in urban waterfront regeneration. In this context, this article views the Suzhou Canal as an everyday landscape. It identifies how the formal public courtyards and informal marketplaces originating from the Suzhou Canal helped shape everyday life patterns and social meanings. Although the rapid expansion of the Suzhou Canal District has brought about changes in different ways of living, and the functions of public courtyards along the Suzhou Canal have disappeared over time, they still potentially play a role in promoting people’s social interactions and communal activities. When implementing the HUL approach to balance heritage conservation and urban development, the social groups and residents have a limited role in determining decision-making processes. It is acknowledged that the residents’ connection to urban heritage could improve place attachment and a sense of pride. It is necessary to establish a platform to give local residents an opportunity to express what the Suzhou Canal and its related urban heritage means and how to reuse them to adapt to new, popular demands. Therefore, the current canal-orientated urban waterfront regeneration policies and urban design principles should develop multiple layers of everyday-based pedestrian routes to encourage social encounters and public participation and avoid overly commercialised and privatised spaces.

To achieve these goals, the Suzhou Heritage Canal elements, such as ancient city walls, moats, canal-orientated water gates and towpaths, can be embedded into the urban fabric to connect existing public social service facilities, local communities and waterfront promenade routes and adapt them to various social, cultural, physical and economic uses. In addition, the historic public courtyards along the Suzhou Canal can add another ground-floor point of access to the canal, through which people can interact closely with the water. Suzhou’s Grand Canal National Cultural Park system can also present an excellent spatial, visual and symbolic connection with existing historic public courtyards along the Suzhou Canal. Such linked public spaces have the potential to create a sense of spatial order and continuity as one moves through an urban ecological corridor. Furthermore, some shared marketplaces and flexible spaces incorporating micro-design for spontaneous social interactions should be considered along the Suzhou Canal. The public can use these shared marketplaces along the Suzhou Canal as a daily route for trading, commercial activities and travelling in other urban districts, thereby improving the vitality of the public realm.

All in all, the Suzhou Canal’s different historical periods carry different patterns of living and urban forms. Although perfect policies and design principles may not be found, the current canal-orientated urban waterfront regeneration can help us explore a sustainable way to highlight the importance of active community participation and the everyday heritage that carries everyday life patterns. This approach needs to form an integrated and systematic network to resolve the current incongruity between the ancient city and other districts along the Suzhou Canal.

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Conflicts of interest statement

The authors declare no conflicts of interest with this work. All efforts to sufficiently blind the authors during peer review of this article have been made. The authors declare no further conflicts with this article.