Introduction

The exhibition "Twenty-two Cities Planning for Historic City 1946-2000" organized by WHITRAP at Tongji University Museum,and supported by Shanghai Tongji Urban Planning Design Institute (TJUPDI), opened on March 14th,2018.

This exhibition is based on a previous one organized in Italy within Milano Triennale Architettura conceived by Professor Benno Albrecht and Professor Anna Magrin. The exhibition presents 22 Master Plans of prestigious historical cities across the world, from Bologna to Chester, from Baghdad to Cusco, and from Pingyao to Rome detailing the evolution of the field of urban conservation. 

Background

Safeguard, conservation and regeneration of historic urban areas were the driving principles sustaining the long and multifaceted collective research that transformed the approach tothe city on a global scale. It was an unprecedented vision, which recognized the need for conservation of certain parts of the city as an essential condition to maintain the cultural coherence of the territory and of society. 

Operational planning schemes for extant cities proposed in Italy from the 1950s and 1960s served as model for Europe and the rest of world and were adopted and developed by international institutions from the 1970s to the 1990s.

The effort to conserve historic centers highlights a global and exceptionally topical aspect, which concerns the value of the entire inhabited setting: the conservation of the physical past can still act as a workshop for environmental reconstruction.