Interpreting Chinese cities through maps and travel accounts. Treaty Ports and their foreign enclaves as a testing ground

With a focus on planning, urban management, and heritage enhancement, we propose to discuss the importance of maps, particularly interpretative maps, as a tool to manage heritage as part of a wider process of spatial planning. Our point is that urban heritage depends not only on literary myths, nor even on great archaeological remains and fine buildings, but rather because the city’s structure has preserved the stamp of its foundation, of its roots planted in a strategic position, of its complex urban landscape made by individually anonymous buildings. Some parts (or elements) of the city have undergone successive reinterpretation over time, showing the complementary efforts of communities that have followed one another throughout the centuries, giving life to those complex layered settlements that seem to enrich naturally-distinguished locations. To test our “interpretative-maps approach” we shall consider the case-studies of Shanghai and Hankou, all Treaty Ports still possessing a rich “colonial heritage” and set as linking points between different cultural worlds.