Abstract:

Against the background of the construction of the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area, the development of ancient towns is faced with new challenges, such as the expansion of urban scale, the weakening of traditional cultural values, the lack of continuity between new and old urban areas, and the inconsistent pattern of old urban areas. This research takes the Shawan Ancient Town, Panyu District, Guangzhou City, as its research object and conducts a spatial syntactic analysis of urban morphology in 2002, 2008, and 2017, based on the axis model. The research shows that: 1) Shawan Ancient Town has experienced three stages of development in terms of overall shape, from "single nucleus cohesion" to "axis growth" and then to "divergence and spread." The town's core has been expanding and its shape has been perfected. 2) The direction of expansion of the ancient town's spatial form is consistent with expansion in the direction of the integrated nuclear center, with which the town's new business is in line. The central transfer is synchronized with the evolution of the spatial form. 3) The phenomenon that the integration core of ancient towns and the development of commercial centers are out of sync is related to modern cities' orthogonal grid form and traditional ancient towns' relatively dense and complex spatial texture. This study reveals the law of development of the traditional village spatial form in the process of rapid urbanization and provides a useful reference for the traditional village's new spatial design and the inheritance and reconstruction of the spatial development structure and order. Finally, the research proposes the following suggestions for the spatial protection of ancient towns: 1) The development of ancient towns should extract the spatial rhythm from the traditional space and follow similar rules to update and develop the town, so as to protect the sense of scale and the traditional daily living space. 2) Good traffic planning can ensure that the original space is only minimally affected. At the same time, the use of transit rail to connect the ancient towns old and new districts can improve continuity between the spaces and ensure efficient operation. 3) Demonstrating the need for the rational control of tourism development., Shawan Ancient Town is in the stage of high tourism development, which makes residents' living space overlap with tourists' visiting space, often resulting in the occupation and destruction of the original settlement space to meet the needs of "others." As a characteristic element of traditional ancient towns, their protection and continuation need to be respected during tourism development. Planning should fully analyze ancient towns' spatial rules and development needs to avoid excessive transformation of the space due to commercial development and the timely restoration of some places worth preserving" if applicable..

Key words: Spatial syntax, spatio-temporal evolution, spatial morphology, urban texture, the Shawan Ancient Town