Objective  Historic urban public parks are important functional units in urban area, and are public spaces used and constructed by urban citizens jointly. Compared with the privacy of the space of historic gardens, historic urban public parks are significantly featured by the publicness of their garden space. Since being established and used, historic urban public parks have been serving as an important functional space and public cultural place in the city. In terms of functional relevance, spatial openness and social influence, historic urban public parks are more closely correlated with the overall city and surrounding areas than other site heritage such as industrial heritage, campus heritage and historic block. Therefore, the identification and preservation of the heritage value of historic urban public parks need to be considered in a coordinated path through urban park connections. In 2017, the International Council on Monuments and Sites-International Federation of Landscape Architects (ICOMOS-IFLA) put forward the concept of “historic urban public parks” in the Document on Historic Urban Public Parks . In this context, the research on the identification and preservation of the value of existing historic gardens is showing a trend of integrating elite culture and public culture, and integrating garden-based perspective and city-garden correlation perspective, shifting from the analysis of historic and aesthetic characteristics of historic gardens to the analysis of multicultural issues and wide spatial scales.

Methods  For the reasons above, this research puts forward four heritage values (public history witness value, public relation construction value, public life carrying value, and public aesthetic cultivation value) and four spatial scales (regional scale, district scale, layout scale, and architecture scale) for identification and preservation of the heritage values of historical parks from the perspectives of public culture and city-garden correlation. On this basis, the research develops a method for multi-scale identification and coordinated preservation of heritage values of historic urban public parks, which takes city construction context combing, unit synergy analysis, site stratification interpretation, and style and feature research as value identification means, and value association heritage connection, public space reorganization, memory scene activation and aesthetic logic presentation as preservation measures.

Results  Taking Beibei Park in Chongqing as an example, the research identifies and analyzes the multi-scale character of landscape and values of Beibei Park in the evolution process thereof during the four historical stages of gorge area defense and self-governance period, Three Gorges township construction period, early stage of socialist construction, and the period after reform and opening-up, reveals the internal correlation logic between park construction and urban economic, social and cultural background in the above stages, and formulates corresponding preservation strategies.

Conclusion  Historic urban public parks are featured by the publicness of garden space (as a public recreational and gathering place in the city) and the publicness of heritage value (such as the value in construction and recording of urban public life, public aesthetics, and collective memory). The multi-scale identification and coordinated preservation of the heritage values of historic urban public parks from the perspective of public culture can help break through the limitations of traditional identification and preservation methods that focus on the spatial ontology and horticultural value of parks, thus expanding the understanding and preservation of parks from the perspective of overall park-city connection.