Abstract
With the swift development of metropolises, the focus of China's urbanization has shifted from rapid expansion to urban regeneration. Facing the even deeper social crises and environmental challenges, historical blocks which have a high population density and poor physical environment, are supposed to achieve sustainable development in the contemporary era. Though the concept of resilience derives from the analysis of disaster prevention and recovery, literature reveals that resilience provides an innovative perspective for the urban revitalizing and has been applied to the scale of community globally. However, there is a limitation in understanding the definition of "disturbance" that the emphasis is still attached on the changes of physical space rather than the society and ignore the complex connections and relationships among different individuals, agencies and space in the historical blocks. Regarded as complex socio-ecosystems, historical blocks are faced with the involvement of capital and population, as well as environmental transformations during the process. Therefore, this research attempted to use survey data and demographic factors from Baita Temple historical block in Beijing to explore the potential contribution of resilience to analyse the ability of these socio-ecosystems to reorganize. Result shows that, in the process of constructing the "new steady state" at the community scale, new contradictions and imbalances have emerged due to the evolution of space. Some of the renovated space has lost its vitality again and the contradiction between human living and ecological environment has not yet been resolved. Furthermore, the rapid gentrification caused by inappropriate urban policies has destroyed traditional social structures and caused new conflicts of different stakeholders. Base on this conclusion, the paper proposes that the transformations in urban regeneration cannot be simply judged by linear causality, and it should go beyond the traditional framework to dynamically update strategies in order to construct more resilient communities.
