XUE Peng

Keywords： Historical District; Ontological Turn; Difference in Itself; Actor-Network Theory; Beijing Dashilar

Abstract：

The homogeneous development of historical districts has become a critical problem. Scholars have widely recognized the danger of capitalization and pointed out the theory lagging behind practice. This paper indicates an easily overlooked but more fundamental reason that lies in insufficient reflection on “how historical district exists.” “Historical district”, as a notion, was put forward due to conservation practice. By reducing the physical forms into a representation of a specific historical culture, such a notion cannot fully reveal the inherent uniqueness and constant adaptability of historical urban forms. This paper thus returns to the ontology of historical urban forms and looks into their existential orders. This paper extends theorizations from Bruno Latour and Gills Deleuze and provides an alternative ontology of historical urban forms. It suggests understanding a historical district as being constructed by assemblages of human and non-human entities; the uniqueness of a historical district is thus akin to “difference in itself”, generating heterogeneities in the multiple processes of assemblage. Based on this ontological hypothesis, this paper develops the notion of “everyday thing” to probe into the productive heterogeneities of historical urban forms and further elaborates on this theorization based on the reality of Beijing Dashilar.

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