Journal of Civil Engineering and Architecture 12 (2018) 629-643 doi: 10.17265/1934-7359/2018.09.003 Ju Er Hutong Project: A Rehabilitation Model or an Unsuccessful Attempt? Giuseppe Cinà and Qi Mu Interuniversity Department of Regional and Urban Studies and Planning (DIST), Polytechnic and University of Turin, Turin 10129, Italy Abstract: What will be the future of Chinese urban heritage in the context of globalisation and a socialist market? Ju Er Hutong, as one of the first rehabilitation projects to take place during China’s late-1980s housing reforms, is generally considered a successful initiative in terms of urban regeneration and historic area conservation. To what extent does this success demonstrate a capacity to develop new policies and a new planning approach in the current Chinese urban regeneration process? To answer this question, and to summarize its achievements and its remaining unsolved problems, this paper provides the following insights: (1) an analysis of the evolution of Ju Er Hutong to its current form; (2) a literature review concerning the background and the outcome of the rehabilitation process; and (3) a critical assessment of the overall process, so as to summarize its constitutive advantages and problems. Key words: Urban heritage, old city preservation, Ju Er Hutong, urban restructuring, conservation. 1. Introduction Widely documented Hutong is an important carrier of the urban culture of Beijing, and is the basic unit of spatial structure within the ancient city, through which the principles of its organization take shape. In order to offer a description of the Ju Er Hutong (Chrysanthemum Lane) preservation policies and to provide a critical assessment of their implementation, it is worth examining its historical and morphological evolution. In order to better understand the original formation of Ju Er Hutong and its correspondence to the symbolic hierarchy of housing patterns in ancient Beijing, a set of important spatial characters and spatial evolutions will be presented. The formation of the Chinese urban morphology, with its rigid symmetry and formalized symbolism, was based on the guidelines in Rites of Zhou, a fundamental work on State bureaucracy and organizational theory. Its chapter Kao Gong Ji, a set of Corresponding author: Giuseppe Cinà, M.Sc. architecture, Ph.D. urban planning, Associate professor. Research fields: urban heritage preservation, urban project, and peri-urban agriculture. assignments and guidelines compiled by realm officials, acted as an official technical regulation. The basic architectural housing typology in China was the courtyard house, whose dimensions were all predefined by urban schemes. The most common housing unit corresponding to an administrative unit within the residential spatial organization of Beijing, generally called Li Fang, was shaped before the 9th century. At the end of Song dynasty (960-1279), there were 62 Li Fang in Beijing. Each Li Fang corresponds to a rectangle of land of about 0.2 km 2 [1]. The word “Fang” means “square”, which indicates the original geometric units. Walls enclose every Li Fang and the gates were closed and guarded every night. Outside the walls, the main roads are symmetrically aligned, while residential buildings were built along the small internal alleys and form the sub-zones [2]. With the development of commercial activities, the frontier between the commercial and residential areas was removed, but the function of Li Fang was redefined in an administrative unity, now called “Fang Xiang” (meaning “block and lane”), abbreviated as Fang and maintaining the same surface area. Ju Er Hutong D DAVID PUBLISHING