Reading for Rewriting Chinese Urban Form: The Dual Typo-Morphology of Nanshijie Block in Ganzhou

Abstract Reading urban form is essential for establishing a cultural relationship with the site’s history, memory and future writings. As Chinese historic sites are generally considered the loci of a despatialised textual memory lacking physical substance, the condition of latency and disappearance together with an overestimation of intangible values too often open the path to unjustified erasures, substitutions and re-historicisation through replicas. Yet, by understanding the place not only through what is today detectable by the eye but rather as a historically layered and culturally defined context, we can inaugurate a methodology to decode the site as an “already-written” text that requires interpretation and guides future writing. The Nanshijie site in Ganzhou Historic City is a paradigmatic urban text that has become unreadable. Through the reading of morphology and building types combined with the hermeneutic work of decoding traces and absences, the research revealed the latent urban form in three structuring components and “Latent Structures” that still inform the site’s readability and potential rewritability. The cognition and interaction between these essential components should be the starting point for defining the “city part” and its conservation boundaries, that is, integrating preservation, regeneration and design approaches into one co-evolutionary rewriting of urban form.