Tourism-boosting rebuilding of historic buildings and urban form: the case study of Yanghe Tower and its urban morphology in Zhengding, China

Tourism has recently been viewed as an economic growth engine for Chinese small historic cities, including Zhengding in Northern China. However, the intensive tourism-boosting projects have far more impacts on these cities than merely economic development. Yanghe Tower was first built in Zhengding in the Tang Dynasty, renovated many times, and demolished in the 1960s, although it had been included in Liang- Sicheng’s surveys in 1933. The local government rebuilt the Tower in 2017 to make it a tourist attraction through an uncritical rebuilding that formed an urban unit with a texture and meaning that never existed in the city. The result is a standalone monument disjointed from its historic and morphological layering, which is crucial for the Tower’s urban role and memory narrative. This paper instead reads the primary element of Yanghe Tower in its historical evolution and its relationship with the overall urban form. By reading the mutual relationship between the Tower and the urban development in both permanence and modification, the paper brings evidence of the deep structure and meanings of urban form that should guide any strategy of intervention and reconstruction beyond musealization and commodification.