Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

Existing residential areas built in the 80-90’s account for a big proportion in China. Outdoor environment is facing a severe recession, and is hard to meet the increasing needs of residents. At the same time, the current design and practices of existing residential renovation always appeared to be stereotyped, partialized, or low-standard. The reason is a lack of adequate studies on the actual condition of existing community, and lack of scientific theory to guide the practice. Based on scholars’ research results from related fields in recent years, this paper summarizes that the main research objectives are fulfilling the residents’ social need and improving the ecological effects in the field of existing residential areas. The paper considers key research characteristics and limits of current research, and puts forward an optimization approaches to improve them. The paper promotes research development of existing residential environments, in order to accelerate the quality improvement of outdoor environments. The paper is divided into three parts. The first part is the summary, reconstruction characteristics, research significance of existing residences. The second part is current research directions and focuses on quality improvement in outdoor environments in existing residential areas, including improvement of use satisfaction and eco-efficiency, evaluation elements, and index system, also includes the theory, standards and practices of quality improvement. The third part is current research progress and reviews on the improvement of outdoor environmental quality in existing residential areas.