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Introduction
Over the past three decades, Chinese cities have been experiencing rapid urbanisation and modernisation on an enormous scale, which has caused various urban problems and has drawn attention from scholars in multiple disciplines worldwide. A vital problem is that Chinese cities are becoming 'placeless' - congested with 'international-style' architecture and characterless urban spaces. The remarkably long, rich and complex Chinese cultural history is gradually excluded from its architectural representation. The current architectural language does not express local social relations, collective memory and aesthetic achievements. Therefore, the identity of Chinese cities is facing a great challenge of survival in rapid development. It is important to maintain unique Chinese characteristics of urban forms in order to facilitate cultural expression, inhabitants' sense of place, harmonious physical environment and tourism. Moreover, there is a large amount of historical remains fragmentally distributed in contemporary Chinese cities. Therefore, it is vital to match the new with the old in order to create coherent city entities and legible city images.
This paper applies ideas from western typology and morphology theories to the Chinese context to generate an appropriate methodology for the analysis of Chinese cities, and, accordingly, to further provide design suggestions for urban designers and policy-makers to produce culturally sustainable urban forms. The Chinese city Suzhou is selected as a case study for the above purposes due to its splendid tradition and presence of strong historical urban fabric.
The identity of a place, which is closely linked to the personal and social identity of inhabitants, is recorded and embodied in the traditional built forms, and reflects the choices of specific culture (Watson and Bentley, 2007). Therefore, social and cultural value can be revealed through the examination of long-lasting traditional urban artefacts and their transformation over time. Some commonly studied urban elements that are considered to be important and constitute an urban form in the literature are streets (see, for example, McCluskey, 1979; Jacobs, 1993; Dumbaugh and Gattis, 2005; Marshall, 2005), public squares (see, for example, Sitte, 1965; Hegemann and Peets, 1988; Whyte, 1988; Gehl, 2001; Carmona et al , 2003), urban blocks (see, for example, Paneral et al , 2004), skylines (see, for example, Attoe, 1981; Kostof, 1991; Stamps III et al , 2005) and landmarks (see, for example,...