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I N T R O D U C T I O N The Paradox of Urban Preservation The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand. —ITALO CALVINO, Invisible Cities In the summer of 2005, two large preservation projects were taking place in Beijing. The first one was the restoration of Yongdingmen, the central gate of the Outer City located at the southern end of the Central Axis. Originally built in 1553,Yongdingmen was demolished in the 1950s, along with the city walls and thirteen other city gates, in the construction of the socialist capital. The restoration began in 2003 after Beijing was selected as the Host City of the 2008 Olympics Games, and the project was part of the city’s “Cultural Heritage Preservation Plan for an Olympiad of Humanity .” Experts involved in the project did a thorough examination of the archives to ensure that the new Yongdingmen looked exactly like the old one. The project took two years to complete and cost more than 19 million RMB (3 million USD). The restored Yongdingmen was celebrated by local officials and the news media. They believed it enhanced the cultural significance of Beijing by completing the configuration of the Central Axis, the longest in the world. And because the Olympic Park was located at the northern extension of the Central Axis, the restored Yongdingmen was considered especially meaningful for the status of Beijing as the host city of the Olympics. A local newspaper wrote, “The restored city gate provides a new starting point for Old Beijing to embrace the future.” Further north on the Central Axis, not far from the restored city gate, another preservation project was carried out in a historic district named Qianmen, which was the downtown of imperial Beijing. Qianmen Street, xiv I N T R O D U CT I O N the main thoroughfare of the area, occupies a prominent position in the city, with a large number of established shops and restaurants catering to the demands of a diverse group of customers. Although some of the shops and restaurants were more than a century old and nationally known, the district remained affordable for working-class customers. Using the old photos of Qianmen Street in the early twentieth century as a blueprint, the preservation project remodeled the façade of the buildings along the street, integrating late Qing and early Republican style motifs into the final design. Many old shops and restaurants left Qianmen Street after the preservation project because of the rise in rent. But local officials were not concerned by this loss of tenants, because their goal was to attract outlets of world-renowned luxury brands and “turn Qianmen Street into another Champs-Élysées,”to use the words of a local official.A dense residential area made up of centuries-old courtyard houses and surrounding Qianmen Street was demolished in the preservation project. Developers replaced the one-story historic courtyard houses with two- to six-story buildings in antique style for high-end residential and commercial uses. The original residents who lived in the area before were not allowed to move back after the preservation project was completed. These stories of Beijing provide us a complicated vision of urban preservation at the beginning of the new millennium. Facing the rebuilt city gate, the remodeled shopping street, and the brand new housing stock with historical appearance, all created through preservation projects, we cannot help but wonder, What is preservation? In any book on the history or theory of urban preservation, the very word preservation carries a strict meaning. It is defined as the act or process of applying measures to sustain the existing form, integrity, and material of a building or a site (Murtagh 2006). The basic dictum of the professional preservationist is to keep as much of the original fabric as possible. Furthermore, history shows that urban preservation is by nature a humanistic endeavor. The earliest preservation efforts date back to the days of the Roman Empire, when historic monuments were carefully maintained for future generations, in order to provide them a tangible form of connection to the past (Riegl 1982 [1903]). In the age of industrialization, when the existence of historic cities was threatened by urban renewal, the subject of preservation expanded from individual monuments to urban residences and entire city blocks, the so-called urban fabric. This development in preservation practice protects residents from dislocation and thus mediates the devastating social impact...

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