Inclusiveness and Empowerment in Old Community Renovation Design

Old Community Renovation is one of the national strategies of contemporary China. The old communities were built as staff quarter by government in the last century and therefore the earliest residents’ portraits were quite similar and had little involvement in the community design. As a result, the old community can hardly meet the demand of current all-aged population with various backgrounds poured into the city in urbanization with its single functional localization, inadequate residential facilities and overcrowding space layout. The studies on old community renovation are more common in China and other developing countries, and soon may become a popular issue around the world. JT Wan (2017) studied on neighborhood renewal strategies in Malaysia via literature review, questionnaire survey and site visit. The paper highlighted more local engagement in neighborhood renewal, i.e., to be kick-started by local communities whenever is necessary. Song Fengxuan(2020) focused on old community renovation under the background of the aging population, and suggested to improve the living environment of the elderly population from three degrees: community greening degree, suitable aging degree and residents’ benefit degree. WANG Zhenpo(2020) focused on the relationship between government, society and market in old community renovation in China. He suggested to make a change from "residential planning" to "community planning" and realize cooperative governance in old community renovation. Previous studies in China mainly focused on government policies and a top-down renovation with specific requirements, while studies in other developing countries concerned more about a bottom-up renewal with more community empowerment. These practical experiences may have some limitations when used in west countries or worldwide. In our research, we try to combine these concepts together to propose an inclusiveness planning with ample community empowerment. This paper focusses on a practice case of old community renovation in Anhui Province, in central China, and hopes to provide practical and reproducible experience for old community renovation. We took full consideration of all-aged residents with an inclusive design and laid much emphasis on community empowerment. We used multiple methods such as questionnaire investigation, interview, requirement cards and vision imitation in order to gain a detailed conclusion on daily actions and activity space of the major in the community. We summarized ten sore points in community life with 4 charts: Analysis diagram of residents’ spatial behavior; Map of requirement for spatial facilities; Mimic diagram of community daily life scenes; Table of residents’ requirements gathering. This paper presents some targeted optimization approaches based on these sore points and raises up the planning concept of “the stage for all ages”. We set 4 types of spatial facilities in our renovation plan to promote community inclusiveness: Centralized facilities, pocket convenience, intelligent interaction facilities and feature quality facilities. The scenario-based design approach enables us to grasp residents’ living condition in old communities and find sore points accurately, which plays the supportive role in the old community renovation and helps to boost community happiness. The achievement of this case is widely approved by the academic and public. This case is promoted to many other areas in Anhui Province and can provide some referential value for world community renovation. References: 1. Wan J T, Lee S H. Development of neighborhood renewal in Malaysia for middle income households through case study in New Village Jinjang, Kuala Lumpur [J]. Sustainable Cities and Society, 2017: 32-34 2. SONG Fengxuan, KANG Shiyu, The Difficult Position and Path of the Reformation of old community under the background of the Aging Population [J]. Hebei Academic Journal, 2020, 40(05): 191-197