The locality of Beijing historic areas from a dynamic perspective based on geo-tagged photos

Abstract

Purpose

Due to rapid development, historic city areas are faced with urbanization damage to their characteristic urban identity besides physical deterioration and economic decay. The purpose of this paper is to address the following questions: What are the constituent elements of locality for historic areas? How does one classify historic areas according to locality elements? What are the characteristics of each kind of historic area? How does one identify to-be-protected locality elements according to different historic areas to realize sustainable development?

Design/methodology/approach

As a historic cultural city with a building history of over 3,000 years, Beijing has a myriad of distinctive historic areas, of which 367 were selected as the research samples. This paper classifies historic areas into the following four categories: distinctive areas, permanent areas, adaptive areas and inherited areas by analyzing the locality elements of 8,905 geo-tagged photos related to Beijing historic areas. The correlation among locality elements – the basis for joint protection – is also examined by Pearson’s correlation analysis.

Findings

The results are as follows: the reaction degree of carrier elements is generally higher than that of information elements, of which the representative architecture is the main constituent element of locality; folk customs, traditional activities and other intangible cultural heritage in historic areas receive only slight attention and need to be further stressed; controlled by non-human factors, permanent elements bear a high degree of autocorrelation; and emerging tourism and business activities have, to some extent, grown into constituent parts of the locality elements in historic areas.

Originality/value

This paper seeks to strike a dynamic balance between city renewal and historic area protection, providing a reference for understanding the dynamics of locality.

Citation

Wang, F., Hu, W., Zhu, Y. and Jiang, C. (2019), "The locality of Beijing historic areas from a dynamic perspective based on geo-tagged photos", International Journal of Tourism Cities, Vol. 5 No. 1, pp. 75-89. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJTC-12-2017-0089