Urban Pins: Modern Intervention as a Method for Urban Conservation and Urban Regeneration in the Changmen Historical District of Suzhou, China

This paper discusses modern intervention as an innovative planning methodology to address the problem of urban conservation in rapidly expanding cities in China. In contrast to traditional master planning, the ‘urban pins’ conservation method currently in development by Professor Croset and his team at Xi’an Jiaotong Liverpool University in Suzhou enhances updates and upgrades existing city spaces through a combination of urban conservation and modern intervention. ‘Urban pins’ is a strategy for urban regeneration that involves the participation of architects, academics and students to regenerate the historical city through multiple strategic interventions at the architectural or the micro scale. This is an ad-hoc strategy where any existing building, independently from its historical and architectural value, could be the base for specific interventions, without the necessity to define a global planning for all the area. Incremental development, bottom-up initiatives adaptive reuse, artistic installations, upgrading of public space become the new keywords. Conservation and innovation are considered together, and architecture is defended as a practice of “making urban transformation”, and not only of design.